The curious thing about Millennium is that there is no way to remember the criminal case or cases that dot its 2,000 pages. The strength of the character of Lisbeth Salander and the less interesting –for some, frankly vomitive– of her antagonist Kalle Blonkvist, the author's alter ego (alter magnus ego, we could say), as well as the success of the film based on the first part of the trilogy have achieved that the only case of Millenium is, in fact, that of its author, the Larsson Case. Not because such an unexpected success is rare in the lyrics, on the contrary; It is not really a heinous crime either, but perhaps it is a point of difficult return in the vogue of the noir genre throughout the world. The evolution of the Larsson Case is no less curious. I read the three novels – or, better, the three novelized volumes – in the same week they came out. It has not, therefore, occupied my summer or any season and since I have neither seen the film nor do I intend to see it except perhaps when it comes out on DVD, the tremendous media hubbub with which I first progressed it and the herd later, has had little influence on my reading. have prostrated themselves before the phenomenon. I do observe a subtle but evident process of devaluation of Larsson's literary merits after his overwhelming commercial success –except in the USA–. That this happens among critics and devotees of novelties is normal, even due to the classic prevention of the habitual reader against the taste of those who only once read something. Nobody trusts the unlearned and clueless popular herd, usually orphaned by the control that the liberal bureaucracy imposes on its own herd and, therefore, unreliable. their likes. And perhaps that is the greatest curiosity of the Larsson case. The commercial area of cultural products – literary supplements, reports or book fairs such as the one in Madrid, which has made Larsson an icon of the 2009 edition – is so terrified by the crisis that it has gladly accepted the plebiscite genuflection before a genre never fully accepted, for being too plebeian. But Larsson –as Santiago Navajas already explained very well in LD– came with all the stamps, policies, winks and alibis that make the company of the masses digestible for a liberal. The invoice of souls and the free expansion of taste do not usually overlap. The leaders of the cultural industry cannot accept that people, taking advantage of the smooth glide of that sled they call the market, go it alone. So I have the impression that Larsson has just succeeded, but he is already ceasing to be really important. The worst thing that can be said about Larsson is that he brings to a close, cheapening it, an extraordinary era of Swedish fiction, whether crime fiction or any other genre, and that it begins not with Mankell but with the excellent novels of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö in the 1960s. , which are more innovative then or closer to the sensibility of now than what we assume was the case back then. Actually, these Scandinavian Dashiell and Lillian, very red Martini, even had their chance in Hollywood and were released in many countries, including Spain (Noguer). The best of the Martin Beck detective series is, for me, The Laughing Policeman, which has just been republished very neatly and which seems to me to be a small gem of the genre. I've seen a photo of Maj and Per on Alohacriticon and I find them to be charmingly Woodstockian, although they couldn't be because of their age (they have twenty years to spare) or because of their ideology (they were communists, but I don't know how much). However, there is in his gaze a movement of love, alcohol and tobacco that I find endearing, viso-eternal. Martin Beck's ten novels are excellent and, for writers in agraz who want to be future living larssons, very useful to study. The detail in the desperate patience of the police investigator is the key to Per and Maj that Henning Mankell collects, modernizes and improves a quarter century later. But, technically speaking, almost all of Wallander is in his "parent" Beck. The offspring surpasses him in the explicitness of his political reflection on the crisis of the Swedish "welfare state", which is collapsing, violently and suddenly, due to the avalanche of immigrants and exotic cruelty that floods the once paradisiacal and wide Scandinavian social democracy. I have written more than once about Mankell's personal sincerity and ideological limitations in dealing with such social and political change, so I won't dwell on it. Now, let it be clear that Larsson only superficially assumes a certain continuity with Mankell. In the first place, it is very far from his literary talent, exchanging a complex and complete story developed in each title for a kind of adventure TV series with a lot of Tarantino, not a little video game and a frightening superficiality in the analysis of the characters, which they only appear to us as action because they lack the slightest psychological depth. They are all archetypes, no one is unpredictable, least of all the crazy sane, the stupid list, the clumsy genius, the eloquent mute, the coherent contradiction, that ideology fertilized by perpetual adolescence and nurtured by the infantile omnipotence of every immature spirit. It is not surprising, therefore, that "Millenium" triumphs in a society without clear values, without intellectual depth and with an uncontrolled appetite for strong but fleeting sensations. Salander is the wise old girl who hesitates between the convent and botox. And even further away is the intellectual reflection of yesterday's social democracy, which is Mankell's, of today's radical leftism, which is Larsson's. Wallander is, like Beck, a policeman who represents the State in the permanent fight against crime. Blomvkist, Larsson's hero is no longer a policeman –and this is an absolutely essential change– but a liberal journalist who has only the respect for the law and for socially accepted moral values that suits him at all times. His principle is not his principle, it is simply his. And his has more gas than a Goodyear blimp. But I return to what I said before, which is essential to understand what is novel and unfortunate about the Larsson model with respect to that of Mankell and Per and Maj: it is not the same to verify the ethical limits of respect for legality, which is what it has always done the crime novel through characters who seek to do justice, or at least to do good against evil, who skip any legality to avoid any limitation to an ego that is confused with Good, Justice and even the reforestation of the Amazon. The other day I found on the net a remarkable interview on Radio Nacional –whose author, with a great voice from before, I was unable to identify– with Larsson's best friend, a rogue who had passed through Cuba who had flirted at Woodstock and at the Marbella by Jesus Gil. I liked the humor with which he approached his change of fortune, but he made it clear that Larsson never thought of enjoying it. Mileurista to the end, he did not marry his usual wife, it seems that something is gone, and the family has aired his inheritance. This is modern social democracy, stepdaughter of interventionist archaism. As it has taken me a month to write this thing, it has given me time to dabble on the Net and find surprising things in the literary media and Spanish trivia. Only in LD has the brazen – and great, commercially speaking – change of titles with respect to those that Larsson had put on been remembered. If we see a cover that says –or cries– Men who hate women, we tend to consider it the umpteenth taxonomization of machismo and leave it on the way to another novelty. But if we read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, even if the statistical ejaculation of battered women in Sweden is loaded (if that is the result of half a century of leftism, it is to vote liberal, if there is one, or flee) that heads or underline each portion of the thick volume I, we begin to skim through it. Because it is known that not all men hate all women, and that both men and women know enough about the subject not to swallow Bibian pamphlets. But, of course, we all want to know more and we end up buying the obese novel with the beautiful Argentine on the cover that we don't know who recommended it to us and that, it's only fair to admit, is very well readable. Within the subtle leftist devaluation of Larsson that I referred to at the beginning, Dona Leon lashed out this summer against the cult of Larsson for the bad feelings and hateful characters in Men Who Hate Women, horrendous obstacles that led her to leave the book. A plausible criticism if it wasn't made by the author of a novel that should be called Las progres who hated the military, and whose title, what things are, I don't want to remember. I would recommend Dickens's A Christmas Carol, but the evil Mr Scrooge would make him burn the book in half. , the trilogy is the first character that in the novel and in the cinema redeems a female entity (and young, mind you) from the macho treatment that they usually suffer. On the contrary, I think that Lisbeth Salander is Lara Croft without Angelina Jolie; and a superwoman more typical of Marvel than of Hollywood. A comic, come on. Very respectable genre, of course, more than this flap, tiquitaca and tocomocho literary criticism that we normally suffer. But it is all so implausible in its institutional vicissitudes and in its intellectual reach that one cannot take it seriously next to Kay Scarpetta, Kinsey Millhone and even Miss Marple. To whom, incidentally, I am surprised that they have not yet been resurrected to guess criminals in the company of Father Brown, Poe has already three novels in three years. Summary of the summary: Larsson, much ado about nothing. But the noise has not been without interest and the walnuts are perfect for salads at the end of August.
