Millennium trilogy sequel. Stieg Larsson Millennium Series. Should You Read the Millennium Sequels?

For forty years, the mystery of the disappearance of a young relative haunts the aging industrial magnate, and now he makes the last attempt in his life - he entrusts the search to journalist Mikael Blomkvist. He takes on a hopeless case more in order to distract himself from his own troubles, but soon realizes that the problem is even more complicated than it seems at first glance. How is the long-standing incident on the island related to several murders of women that happened in different years in different parts of Sweden? What does it have to do with quotes from the Third Book of Moses

2 Stieg Larsson

The girl who played with fire

Late in the evening, a journalist and his girlfriend were shot dead in their apartment - people who studied the channels for supplying sex slaves from Eastern Europe to Sweden. Representatives of power structures have been noticed among the clients of an unrespectable business. It seems obvious what circles benefited from the death of these two. Mikael Blomkvist begins his own investigation into the death of his colleagues and friends and suddenly finds out that his old acquaintance Lisbeth Salander, the strangest girl in the world, who is inclined to play with fire - for example, pour it with gasoline, is suspected of murder

3 Stieg Larsson

The girl who blew up castles in the air

Lisbeth Salander decides to take revenge on her enemies. Not only to the criminal elements who want her dead, but also to the government that almost ruined her life a few years ago. And you also need to break out of the hospital, where she is being held under guard, considered a dangerous psychopath, and ensure that her name disappears from the list of suspects in the murder.

The continuation of the Millennium trilogy was expected by the reading public and doomed to success. They were published posthumously.

4 Stieg Larsson,David Lagercrantz

The girl who got stuck in the web

In The Girl Who Stuck in the Web, new times have come in the lives of Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist. Each of the characters is busy with their own problems. Lisbeth has declared war on her father's criminal empire, seeking to destroy even the smallest remnants of it. Mikael has a difficult period - critics and colleagues have persecuted him, reproaching him for the loss of professionalism, and his Millennium magazine is threatened with a "hostile takeover" by a large media concern

Stieg Larsson and his legacy

Stieg Larsson began the Millennium trilogy in the summer of 2002. He was 48, and before that he had not written a single line of prose. A well-known Swedish journalist, Larsson spent his whole life researching right-wing ideologies and extremist organizations, and writing novels fit his figure so badly that even his friends treated the idea of writing as a joke. Mikael Ekman, a colleague of Larsson, recalled how in 2001 they drank whiskey after work and fantasized about what they would do in retirement. "I'll write a couple of books and be a millionaire," Larsson said. Ekman made fun of him. Larsson's former boss, Kurdo Baxi, reacted in much the same way when Larsson admitted to writing a novel and asked to see the manuscript: "I thought he was joking."

But Larsson was not joking. In two years, he composed a whole trilogy and was already preparing it for publication, but on the morning of November 9, 2004, he suddenly died of a heart attack while climbing the stairs to the seventh floor to his office. Six months later, the first novel appeared in bookstores and immediately became a bestseller in Sweden, and five years later - all over the world.

It was this unusual trajectory of the life (and death) of the writer at first that ensured the success of the books. It's no joke - from scratch he wrote three excellent detective stories and died at the door of fame: a marketer's dream. But the main reason for the popularity of the Millennium trilogy is, of course, the characters.

Mikael Blomkvist

Mikael Nykvist (villain from the first John Wick) played the central male role in the Swedish adaptation of Millennium.

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In the American version - agent 007 Daniel Craig

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Creating his heroes, Larsson deliberately went against the canons. Noir is a well-established genre: at the center of the story is the invariably gloomy, depressive misanthropic alcoholic-type Harry Hole from, who solves crimes in between trips to his favorite bar and retreats after drinking bouts. Mikael Blomkvist, the founder of the Millennium magazine (hence the name of the cycle), in this sense, the character is the opposite: an absolutely healthy, moderately drinking truth-seeker journalist with a crystal clear reputation; even its outward appeal is played up by Larsson as a mockery of the genre's toxic masculinity. Blomkvist is a hit with women, but within the framework of the books, his flings always look like he's being seduced and dragged to bed, which is pretty witty against the backdrop of ossified notions of irresistible heroes from noir novels.

Lisbeth Salander

The role of a girl with a dragon tattoo and on a motorcycle launched Numi Rapace's Hollywood career (Prometheus, Obshchak)

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Lisbeth Salander, like Blomkvist, is a shapeshifting character. With her, Larsson acted even more radically: he took all the known stereotypes about female heroines and turned them inside out. The result is an aggressive hacker girl with a heightened sense of justice and an extremely high IQ, dressed as a punk and slicing through the city on a motorcycle.

Larsson tried to achieve maximum contrast between the characters, and he succeeded: if Blomkvist is an opponent of violence who is always looking for a way to comply with protocols, then Lisbeth, on the contrary, behaves like an avenger from comics - personally punishes those who the law does not reach. In addition, Larsson's protagonists are equal: the author here also abandoned the standard detective trope, not dividing them into Holmes and Watson - the brain and his assistant. It is this novelty - an attempt to play with worn out clichés - as well as the chemistry between the characters that made the books such a success all over the world.

Family thought

The family is perhaps the main unit of measurement in Scandinavian literature. All sagas begin with long enumerations of family ties - who gave birth to whom and from whom. And secrets in Swedish thrillers also most often revolve around skeletons peeking out of closets. According to this formula, for example, many novels by Hokan Nesser or Anna Janson are written: the tragedies and crimes in them are the result of the disorder of life and hidden resentment rather than malicious intent. Recall at least "The Man Without a Dog", where the plot is centered on a family celebration.

Larsson is no exception: the theme of the family is very important to him, but he also plays with it in his own way. If you cut off the excess, then "Millennium" is one big journey of Lisbeth Salander in search of a real family, that is, people who will accept and love her for who she is. Architecturally, all the plots in the trilogy are built so that towards the end the heroine is freed from all tyrants and finds peace. And the main paradox is that Lisbeth's oppressors in this family saga are her blood relatives, her father and half-brother, as well as her court-appointed guardian. Larsson's novels are so well thought out that even if the reader does not see this semantic inversion, he still subconsciously feels the message: the family is not at all an entry in the birth certificate, blood ties are a fiction, and a branch can be broken off from the family tree at any moment and find a new family. This is exactly what Lisbeth does, and therefore the very last scene, when she opens the door for Blomkvist, that is, finally lets him into her life, is perhaps the perfect conclusion to her story.

Who is Eva Gabrielsson

Larsson himself, like Salander, also, in a sense, had two families - relatives and a wife. Until the age of eight, he lived with his grandmother in the village, then he nevertheless moved to Stockholm, to his father and brother, but at sixteen he left home. And at eighteen he found a second family - he met the architect Eva Gabrielsson. They worked and traveled together, and in 1981 they went to Grenada altogether, where they studied the revolutionary experience of the newly liberated republic. Gabrielsson played such an important role in Larsson's life that when the Millennium trilogy conquered the world and journalists began to dig into the author's biography, there was a theory that Eve had a hand in the books. This is understandable - even his colleagues doubted Larsson's literary talents to the last, while Gabrielsson, on the contrary, was always known not only as an architect: in her youth she translated Philip K. Dick into Swedish.

What happened after Larsson's death?

Unfortunately, Larsson did not leave a will, and his marriage with Gabrielsson was not officially registered. The writer was afraid that if they had common property, his social activities could endanger her life. Therefore, after his death, all rights to the books, according to the law, went to his father and brother.

Gabrielsson tried to sue, she had the unfinished fourth novel about Salander - Blomkvist in her hands, and she was ready to finish it, but the court sided with the heirs and forbade her to use the names of the characters. And already in December 2013, Larsson's father announced that biographer David Lagercrantz would continue the series.

Should I read the Millennium sequels?

David Lagercrantz

Developing a successful franchise after the death of an author is a fairly common practice. For example, Sebastian Faulks among others, and Anthony Horowitz revived Sherlock Holmes. But there are two nuances here.

Firstly, Faulks and Horowitz are experienced writers, they at least know the basics of the craft, while Lagercrantz is a journalist whose summaries include semi-biographical novels about Alan Turing, the conquest of Everest and memoirs compiled from a 100-hour recording of an interview with a football player.

Secondly, the continuation of "Millennium" has nothing to do with Larsson's original idea. Eva Gabrielsson never gave the unfinished draft to the heirs, and Lagercrantz had to write a new story from scratch, which is a big problem, because he obviously has no idea how the plot of a good thriller works.

What Afisha wrote about Millennium and its sequels

"The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"

"The Girl Who Played with Fire"

"The Girl Who Blowed Up Castles in the Air"

"The Girl Who Got Stuck in the Web"

Lev Danilkin: “We can do without hallelujah, but if your quota for detectives is one per year, then let it be Larsson”

Lev Danilkin: “And the first book was very exciting, but the second one is much more exciting: like Follett's Pillars of the Earth, like Smilla, like The Count of Monte Cristo; to the point where you can go into read-only mode for a couple of days and do everything else on autopilot.”

Lev Danilkin: “This, of course, is no longer a detective story, and not even a political conspiracy thriller, and not even an office series about relationships; something much more significant. A fictionalized guide to the Swedish constitution. Essay on the model of interaction between private individuals and government agencies”

Lev Danilkin: “The novel is teeming with Yuris, Ivans and Vladimirs - State Duma deputies, pimps, killers, hackers; Nikita Mikhalkov is even mentioned here. One can only guess how Larsson himself would have reacted to the fact that his books turned into weapons of the Cold War.

To be fair, Larsson was also a journalist and also started from scratch. His books have a lot of flaws - they're redundant, wordy, they have problems with rhythm - but the thing is that Larsson at least knew how to create charismatic characters and build up atmosphere. Lagerkrantz is incapable of doing this: while working on the sequel, he simply pulled plot moves from the original trilogy. Remember how in the second book of Millennium, Blomkvist figured out that Lisbeth had hacked into his laptop and communicated with her via a text file on the desktop? The same thing happens with Lagercrantz.

“The girl who got stuck in the web” is no continuation of the series: it is the plots of the first three books crushed and ground in a blender, sterilized and diluted with water. Almost all the scenes in Lagercrantz's novels are conversations between two people in a room or on the phone, and over the phone they usually retell to each other what happened in the previous chapter. Not a single attempt to build a spectacular scene: the whole book looks like a collection of interviews - one long dialogue is replaced by another.

The original trilogy, among other things, was also distinguished by extreme cruelty: in three novels, Lisbeth managed to douse her father with gasoline, set him on fire and hit him with an ax, sit in an isolation ward in a psychiatric hospital for 381 days and nail her brother to the floor; she was raped, beaten, shot in the head and once even buried alive; she chased a maniac-killer on a motorcycle, tattooed the word “pig” on the rapist’s chest and single-handedly swept away a crowd of bikers. Larsson's books in this sense are an example of a Scandinavian detective story, mutilation and cruelty in them are part of everyday life: in one scene the heroine is having breakfast, and in the next she already has a concussion and a couple of penetrating wounds - and this is normal.

Not the Lagercrantz. In the new novel, one broken jaw at the beginning, an overdose of a frail old man in the middle, and then incoherent fuss around the "mysterious secret experiment on orphans", which is presented without irony and is similar to the plot of the film stolen from Uwe Boll. Lagerkrantz simply lacks neither the spirit, nor the imagination, nor the instincts to give heat - and against the backdrop of the madness that was happening on the pages of the original author, this is simply ridiculous.

Larsson, as an Old Testament god, forced his heroes to go through the most terrible trials - Lagercrantz, on the other hand, seems to be afraid of harming them and, if he punishes the character, it’s as if for fun: Lisbeth is always wounded not seriously - in order to jump through the fjords with an antelope in twenty minutes and shoot from a pistol with one hundred percent accuracy. In The Girl Who Was Looking for Someone Else's Shadow, the reader meets Salander in prison - and here one could exaggerate and unwind the legal line, make all the heroes fight for their lives, but no: Lisbeth is released from prison two months later without a single scratch. Yes, and this prison is more like a pleasant Swedish hotel with a garden in the yard, a circle of ceramics and cheesecakes with lingonberry sauce for lunch. If it goes on like this, then in the third book, Lagercrantz will put Lisbeth in a corner and forbid her to watch TV - he is obviously not capable of greater cruelty to the characters.

Writing a sequel to a well-known series is, in principle, a very risky undertaking; one way or another, the successor must compete with the original source, try to get out of his shadow, say something of his own. Lagercrantz has no such goal: both of his "Girls" are novels screaming about their secondary nature. Their author does not even try to flirt with the genre and somehow prove himself: on the contrary, he is constantly looking for a way to write “under Larsson”, to hide behind him - and even in this he fails. Millennium's sequels don't even reach the level of fanfiction: the latter can be awkward and wry, but at least they are always written with love - for the idol writer, the characters, the atmosphere of the original. Lagercrantz's books are written with love for money.

Trilogy Millennium gained worldwide fame. The author of popular detective novels is a Swedish writer Stieg Larsson. The books begin with a detective story. It is the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo that becomes the main character of the Millennium detective cycle.

The name of the main character of the works of Lisbeth Salander. This is an extraordinary personality of difficult fate, outwardly asocial, with a mass of innate abilities. The successful choice of the main character predetermined the success of the first novel, which was written by Stieg Larsson. The continuation books of the Millennium trilogy were expected by the reading public and doomed to success. They were published posthumously. First book The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in 2005. Second - The girl who played with fire comes out after the first in 2006. Third - The girl who blew up castles in the air also a year later in 2007. The novels were written and completed personally by the writer. But, there was an unfinished manuscript. Based on its materials, journalist David Lagerkrantz wrote a book-the continuation of the Millennium trilogy - The girl who got stuck in the web. The novel was published in 2015, once again raising a wave of reader interest in the works of Stieg Larsson. Perhaps the return of popularity will encourage Lagercrantz to continue the story of Lisbeth with new works.

Trilogy Millennium quickly gained worldwide fame, gained millions of fans around the world. The growing popularity of the works of Stieg Larsson did not go unnoticed by filmmakers. Lisbeth Salander became the heroine of Swedish and American adaptations. For my taste, the films turned out to be weaker than the works that Stieg Larsson wrote. The books are interesting, as mentioned above, for the unusual, complex, expressive main character Lisbeth Salander. The directors chose for this role the weak shadows of the character conceived by the author. In terms of energy and image, the vocalist of the Russian group Slot, Daria Stavrovich, is much closer to the image of Lisbet. I think that filmmakers should invite the filmmakers for the role of Salander in the next film adaptation of stories about the heroine of the cycle.

Stieg Larsson was a public figure. This is reflected in the author's coverage of social problems in Sweden, mostly related to women. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a title given by publishers to boost box office revenue. The author titled the first novel Män som hatar kvinnor, literally translated from Swedish as Men who hate women. The title is the leitmotif to all works of the cycle. You read about the cruel, perverted violence of women, the lack of rights of people who are recognized as asocial and you think that this is the situation in a socially oriented prosperous Sweden. What to say about other countries. It involuntarily comes to mind Ken Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. More than 40 years have passed, but the situation with the rights or lack of rights of the individual has changed little. A person who has fallen out of the system automatically becomes its enemy.

A little about the features of the works written by Stieg Larsson. Books belong to the detective genre. In the course of the story, the second hero of the cycle, economic journalist Mikael Blomkvist, conducts his own investigations, not related to the official actions of the police. The intrigues conceived by the author are quite interesting, but the format of presentation of events chosen by him is somewhat heavy for the detective genre. The writer abuses excessive attention to detail, voluminous digressions and repetitions of what was previously said. The detective line is blurred by an abundant influx of words, loses the reader's interest, complicates the perception of the narrative. The novels are read more by inertia, following the fate of the main character. But, you don’t feel much pleasure from reading. It's more like working and fulfilling reading duties. Nevertheless, something catches the multi-million readership and binds to the works of Stieg Larsson. I'm not an exception. Otherwise, there would be no exceptional popularity of this detective cycle and prestigious literary awards.

Stieg Larsson's books were published in chronological order of events. Below are my reviews of each.

Stieg Larson Books in order. Trilogy Millennium

2005 - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Man som hatar kvinnor - Men who hate women);
2006 - The girl who played with fire (Flickan som lekte med elden);
2007 - The girl who blew up castles in the air (Luftslottet som sprangdes - The castle in the air that was blown up).

David Lagercrantz. Continuation of the Millennium

2015 - The girl who was stuck in the web (Det som inte dodar oss).

A sequel to Swedish writer Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy could be published, Larsson's friend and colleague journalist Kurdo Baksi said during the Edinburgh Book Festival. Baxi is confident that the manuscript is 70% complete and could also become the basis for a "beautiful Hollywood movie." True, he believes that it is not worth completing the book - the hired "literary blacks" will not be able to repeat Larsson's style.

The 260-page draft tells the story of Camille - the twin sister, the protagonist of the trilogy.

This character is mentioned in passing in the first three books, and in the fourth book Larsson decided to bring her to the fore. According to Baksi, Larsson planned to write a total of ten novels in this series, and the unfinished chronological volume is to be the fifth.

With his speech, Kurdo Baksi refuted the statements made in early August by Larsson's common-law wife Eva Gabrielsson, who believes that the manuscript is unsuitable for publication, since it is only 30% ready and represents a set of unrelated scenes. “Stig wrote spontaneously, in separate pieces, which he later collected together. You can’t call what happened a novel, ”she said.

According to Gabrielsson, the draft is about 200 pages long, which is just the beginning of the novel.

According to Larsson's heirs, there are at least three more unfinished drafts: the fourth (or fifth) book, about which Gabrielsson and Baksi are arguing, and either two synopses or two small manuscripts of two more novels in the series. Now Larsson's legacy is managed by the writer's brother and father, who - it seems - are not going to release the continuation of "Millennium" in any form.

As for Kurdo Baxi and Eva Gabrielsson, both of them knew Larsson well, but it is not clear which of them was more familiar with the writer's latest works.

The writer lived with Gabrielsson for more than 30 years, they were engaged in research and social work together. She wrote a book of memoirs "Millennium, Stig and Me" (published in Russian in the summer of 2011), in which she expresses her point of view on the possibility of publishing the fourth volume. In addition, she has been trying to defend her right to the legacy of the writer for a long time; she was even offered to join the board of the Larsson Foundation, but she refused. In January of this year, she expressed her readiness to complete the fourth book, although she had previously stated that she did not want to see it printed.

Baksi and Larsson had known each other for 12 years, worked together in journalism, merged their two publications in the late 90s and saw each other - according to Baksi - almost every day. Baksi also published a memoir of a writer called "Stieg Larsson", but unlike Gabrielsson, he does not claim copyright on Millennium.

The trilogy itself proved to be very popular. In 2009, all three books were filmed in the writer's homeland in Sweden; the leading actors Mikael Nykvist and Numi Rapace received a ticket to Hollywood as a result (Rapace is now filming in the sequel "Guy Ritchie" and in "Prometheus", and Nykvist - the fourth "Mission Impossible"). In addition, another "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" with and Rooney Mara is released in December of this year.