“Lisbeth Salander was too cool, but she will be like James Bond forever”

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David Lagercrantz bets on a “dark” version of Sherlock Holmes after expanding the saga of Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” with three novels. “In literature you have to surrender to your passion, as in love,” says the Swedish writer and journalist

“In literature, just like in love, you have to surrender to your passion.” This is what David Lagercrantz (Stockholm, aged 60) believes, who, after publishing three novels in the ‘Millennium’ saga and propelling Lisbeth Salander, Stieg Larsson’s character, into eternity, found his first literary love Revives: Sherlock Holmes.

He recreates it in ‘Obscuritas’, (Destiny), the first of a series of five novels starring a depressed, bipolar and opiate-addicted aristocrat who has his Watson in the elemental nothing Micaela Vargas. A young policewoman of Chilean descent who has experienced exclusion and torture, she comes from Husby, one of the most troubled neighborhoods in Stockholm, “a hell in welfare paradise”.

Slim, gesticulating, with a passionate verb, deep voice and dark complexion, Lagercrantz doesn’t behave Swedish and answers everything. He says he got tired of being “Steg Larsson” and a “too cool and complex” Salander. He says he was fascinated by Sherlock Holmes “his intelligence and his privileged ability to deduce”, but that he abhors “his arrogance and arrogance”. Therefore, he turned them into “doubt and weakness.” He assures that they are “the virtues” of Hans Rekke, his Nordic Holmes, psychology professor at Stanford, accomplished pianist, master of interrogation techniques, sunk in the darkness of depression “and desperate for clarity.”

Between genius and madness, he and the ‘rational’ Micaela Vargas have to investigate the murder of an Afghan refugee in Stockholm full of hate. Lagercrantz sets his novel in 2003, a time when the writer and journalist believes ‘the world was broken’. “Before 9/11 we were better off, but after the attack on the American towers, two wars started. The economic crisis and the refugee crisis had arrived, the ‘Brexit’ and the Trump era, because of which we live in a wounded world today and have lost hope,’ the writer summarizes.

He believes the US action after the attacks was “devastating and devastating”. That he returned to the mistakes of the past, “like resorting to torture.” A plague that, along with the benefits of music, is one of the essential themes of a novel that jumps from Stockholm to Taliban Kabul and secret prisons like Guantanamo.

“Torture has proved useless. It’s no use trying to find out the truth. If the tortured person is not guilty, he will say anything to save his life, but never a truth he does not know,” he says. “Torture is sinister, evil and useless, and the state that practices it is terrorist,” summarizes Lagercrantz, who examines his mark on the character of Vargas, of Chilean descent whose father was tortured by the Pinochet regime before emigrating to Sweden. .

“I am fascinated by the beauty that brings happiness and well-being, the way music does, something that the Taliban do not support. That’s why they forbid it and force women to cover their faces,” she laments. “They want to destroy what they can’t have, what inspires and threatens them, such as beauty and music,” he emphasizes.

The novelist acknowledges that “it is very difficult to be optimistic in the times we live in.” “There are very deep problems. An enormous polarization, ideological and class, that generates hatred. “It is part of a disinformation strategy that seeks to divide the West, often from Russia, and sometimes successfully. “I’m from the post-war generation, who thought they inherited a better world than their parents, but the current situation gives me chills because it could get worse,” he warns. “I am swept up in optimism and I think Putin, arrogant, cruel, perverted, sadistic and twisted, may soon fall. But I know it isn’t,” he admits. “We live in a very destructive information war, we are inundated with lies, which is why I dream of clarity, just like my character,” he says.

He came up with his Scandinavian version of Holmes while promoting his “Millennium” novels, about which he has bittersweet feelings. “The situation of Larsson’s material inheritance is sad, with the conflict between the heirs and Stieg’s partner, but I prefer to think of the good and that with the continuation of the saga we all win. When I was told to continue with Salander’s character, I thought I was going to die as the reviews were horrendous. But I accepted and it was good for everyone: for the characters, who are still alive, and for the readers, who will continue to enjoy Salander, who will be forever as James Bond is,” he predicts.

Lagercrantz established himself with the biography of Zlatan Ibrahimovic, the Swedish football star from a ‘tough’ neighborhood like Husby. It became the best-selling book in Swedish history, changed his life and has now been made into a movie. Laughing, Lagercranzt admits he wouldn’t mind repeating and doing something similar with Kylian Mbappe or Lionel Messi, “cracks” similar in origin to Ibrahimovic’s.

Although he has already sold the rights to ‘Obscuritas’, he does not want to hear from the cinema. He says the film made from his first ‘Millennuim’ book and the fourth in the series – ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ – is ‘horrible and unfathomable’. “I’ve learned to distrust people in Hollywood, no matter how ‘cool’ they seem,” he confesses.

Source: La Verdad

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