Kurdo baksi biography of william

The infiltrator. The sleepless warrior. The feminist compromise. The antiracist as crime novelist.

Kurdo baksi biography of william

The telephone connection to Stockholm from Toronto is bad, with the static akin to the sound of potato chips being crunched in a bag. Abetting the communication breakdown is the interviewee himself, a year-old Turkish-born Kurd who's called Sweden home for the last 30 years and who this morning is pluckily answering, in fractured, accented English, the questions posed by a Canadian journalist.

Kurdo Baksi is his name. And if that sounds familiar, it's because it's also the moniker of a character, a publisher, in fact, in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, the third crime novel from Sweden's Stieg Larsson. The coincidence in names is entirely intentional. Beginning inBaksi and Larsson were real-life comrades-in-arms in the occasionally murderous struggle against racism, xenophobia and fascism in Europe.

It was Baksi who saved Larsson's struggling anti-racist journal Expo from extinction in late by agreeing to publish it as a supplement to his own political periodical, Svartvitt Black and White. It was Baksi who, on the evening of Nov. The memoir is decidedly slight, less than pages. It's also curious and controversial in part because Baksi, the author of several books on human rights and a lecturer on immigration and integration, claims a bond with Larsson "He called me his kid brother and I called him my big brother" barely conveyed by the text.

While the reader gets the now-obligatory references to Larsson's fondness for coffee and cigarettes 20 cups a day, 60 to 80 smokes a dayhis insomnia and "the fantastic energy" he expended on myriad political causes, there's precious little of the textures or confidences that usually constitute a memoir, let alone a friendship. Did Larsson, for instance, have a sense of humour?

When they shared a bottle of whisky, did they talk about women and sex? Yes and yes, answered Baksi. Who was Lisbeth Salander? Stieg Larsson, My Friendis an eloquent and troubling insight into the life of a man who has rapidly become one of the world's bestselling authors. Stieg Larsson My Friend. Svenska Dagbladet in Swedish. ISSN Stieg Larsson: Our Days in Stockholm.

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