Entertainment Weekly has shared an exclusive extract from the new novel in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series – The Girl in the Spider’s Web by David Lagercrantz.
The sequel to Larsson’s trilogy – Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest – will hit shelves in September this year. Hacker heroin Lisbeth Salander is back and once again teams up with journalist Mikael Blomkvist to solve the murder of Professor Balder, with the help of his autistic son.
The Economist reports that Lagercrantz was “terrified” of taking over from the Swedish writer and journalist who died in 2004 and whose bestseller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was published posthumously in 2005.
Read the article:
Mr Lagercrantz admitted to feeling the strain: “I’ve been terrified,” he told reporters in Stockholm. “I used to say that I was bipolar, manic depressive all the time, and I think it was kind of a good thing to write in this condition … I’m scared to death that I won’t live up to Stieg.” But for those who do not speak Swedish, the translated versions of the novels—which were also heavily edited in their English editions—have already accustomed the reader to an intermediary.
Lagercrantz also told The New York Times that he is “anxious” about how millions of readers will receive the novel.
However, not everyone is as happy about the publication of the new book. Steven Erlanger writes that Larsson’s long-time partner Eva Gabrielsson has expressed her concern over the ethics of the publication, even likening it to the mystery shrouding Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman.
- See also: Sunday Read: Announcement of Harper Lee’s New Novel Go Set a Watchman Sparks Ethics Debate
Read the article, in which Lagercrantz says, “I’m scared to death that I won’t live up to Stieg”:
“At night my head burns,” he said, explaining that he had tried to get Mr. Larsson’s characters “into my blood system” when writing. Asked about the biggest liberty he took, he laughed a little and said, “Doing it.”
A tall, handsome, slightly twitchy man in a T-shirt and plaid trousers, he acknowledged that “I’m scared to death that I won’t live up to Stieg.” But “I couldn’t resist,” he said. “I would have regretted it my whole life.”
Mr. Larsson’s legacy is certainly formidable, even intimidating. After he died in 2004 of a sudden heart attack at 50, his three books, beginning with “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” went on to sell some 80 million copies in more than 50 languages.
In the extract from Chapter 9 of The Girl in the Spider’s Web, Salander wakes up with a terrible headache and ghost images of a dream about her father, a lanky man with dark sunglasses breaks into Balder’s house and Blomkvist is about to get a scoop that might save his job at Millennium.
Read the excerpt:
NOVEMBER 20–21—NIGHT
Salander woke up lying straight across the king-size bed and realized that she had been dreaming about her father. A feeling of menace swept over her like a cloak. But then she remembered the start of the evening and concluded that it could as easily be a chemical reaction in her body. She had a terrible hangover. She got up on wobbly legs and went into the large bathroom—with the jacuzzi and the marble and all the idiotic luxuries—to be sick. But nothing happened, she just sank to the floor, breathing heavily.
Then she stood up and looked at herself in the mirror, which was not particularly encouraging either. Her eyes were red. On the other hand it was not long after midnight. She must have slept for only a few hours. She took a glass from the bathroom cupboard and filled it with water. But at the same moment the details of her dream came flooding back and she crushed the glass in her hand. Blood dripped to the floor, and she swore and realized that she was unlikely to be going back to sleep.
Should she try to crack the encrypted NSA file she had downloaded? No, that would be pointless, at least for now. Instead she wound a towel around her hand and took from her bookshelves a new study by Princeton physicist Julie Tammet, which described how a big star collapses into a black hole. She lay down on the sofa by the windows overlooking Slussen and Riddarfjärden.
In a two-part interview with EW, Lagercrantz talks about Salander’s strong moral compass, her anger and her urge to avenge all the cruelty she experienced in her childhood. “She’s tougher than all of us,” he says.
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What do the critics think of The Girl in the Spider’s Web? Writing for The Guardian, Mark Lawson calls it a “respectful and affectionate homage”:
Salander, one of the most original inventions in popular fiction, remains a vengeful, homicidal, self-destructive love rat, and yet surprisingly admirable because of Larsson’s careful attribution of her psychological wiring to survival instincts developed during a terrifying early life. Blomkvist is still a shabby amoralist whose professional standing, as the new story starts, has been diminished by two ancient threats to print journalism – drink and sloth – and a modern one: online competition.
A skilled novelist in his own right – his books include Fall of Man in Wilmslow, about the tragic British computer pioneer, Alan Turing – Lagercrantz has constructed an elegant plot around different concepts of intelligence.
Michiko Kakutani writes in The New York Times that Lagercrantz has channelled Larsson’s narrative style rather well:
In “Spider’s Web,” Mr. Lagercrantz demonstrates an instinctive feel for the world Larsson created and for his two unconventional gumshoes: Blomkvist, the dedicated, mensch-y reporter (and unlikely middle-aged girl-magnet); and Salander, the fierce, damaged girl who looks like an angry, punked-out version of Audrey Hepburn (if you can imagine Holly Golightly rocking tattoos and piercings, instead of a tiara) and who fights with the kick-ass video game skills of Lara Croft.
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Book details
- The Girl in the Spider’s Web by David Lagercrantz
EAN: 9780385354288
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Image courtesy of arts