"There Are Things I Want You to Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me Read Online Free

“Welcome!” It was Stieg. He was barely eighteen, while I was almost nineteen. He asked Britt and me lots of questions, and when he learned that we lived in Haga, a neighborhood in Umeå, he immediately recruited us for the team he himself would be leading. Later he told me that he’d seen his chance and pounced on it!
    And that’s how I became a political activist with him. We put up posters, sold newsletters, and raised funds door-to-door. We debated things, argued a lot:
I mean
, how
could an imperialist war like that have happened?
That was Stieg, a talker, curious about everything, generous, a very moral person. A bit casual for an intellectual, but absolutely irresistible. He fascinated me. There was nothing theoretical about the way he spoke from the heart, from his gut, and yet he was entertaining, too. Politics with him was not a chore or a duty, the way I’d thought it would be, but a real pleasure—which was something of a rare experience in our austere milieu. Stieg and I often thought along the same lines, while most other FNL supporters were Maoists spouting rather unrealistic, authoritarian dogma. Not us.
    I found Stieg’s ideas so interesting that I began encouraging him to write about them. In Sweden, even small newspapers have a spot in their Arts & Leisure pages for opinion pieces. My father was a journalist and could have helped him, but Stieg, unsure of himself, wouldn’t hear of it. I kept pushing him, though, so he finally took the plunge, and when he saw his first published article, he was so thrilled that I think he decided to become a journalist on the spot. He took the entrance exam for a journalismschool, failed it (which wasn’t surprising, given how young he was), and like most of the other students, could have taken it again, but he refused. His self-confidence was at a low ebb again.
    As for me, intrigued at first by the Maoist doctrine, I was going to meetings and even to introductory courses on the subject, which at the time was quite the thing to do. A rational person, I was looking for answers to my questions—but in the wrong places, as it turned out: the Maoist arguments were a bit fuzzy, lightweight, even childish, as if we were going to solve economic problems by simply walking on water! When the Trotskyites showed up and joined forces for a while with the Maoists, they shared the same bank account to raise funds for Vietnam, which I thought was a great idea: at last we were struggling together toward the same goal. Unfortunately, since all revolutionaries want to make their own revolutions, internal power struggles soon broke out. One day we were asked to drum up some money for the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and since we had to support their politics, I wanted to know what they were. The answer arrived from on high: “Don’t ask questions, do as you’re told!” Well, Stieg and I abandoned that fund-raising effort and left the Vietnamese solidarity movement.
    I then gravitated toward “the traitors”: that’s what the Maoists called the Trotskyites, whose system authorized multi-partyism (which I found more democratic), whereas the Maoists were a dictatorship. Stieg decided to stick with the latter, and throughout the year that followed, before we’dmoved in together, we fought violently over the best way to bring happiness to the world proletariat. It was awful. And often ended in tears. I thought Stieg was a stupid dreamer with his head in the clouds. At the time, I was living in a student room; I’d been accepted at the Chalmers University of Technology at Gothenburg but decided to register instead at the department of mathematics and economic history at Umeå University, because that way I could stay with Stieg, who had a small studio apartment in Umeå. When we first met, Stieg had been finishing up a two-year program that would allow him to enter the working world but not to attend college. Perhaps he was influenced by my example, who knows, but he then returned