Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo opens with the one last wish of a very old birthday boy Henrik Vanger, a retired industrialist. Every year he receives a new exotic flower as a birthday gift and it is a constant reminder of the decades old unsolved disappearance of his brother’s daughter that continues to haunt him. As a final attempt he hires famous journalist Mikael Blomkvist who has just been sentenced for libel against a large corporation. Larsson appears to have based Blomkvist on himself – the crusading journalist with leftist views struggling to keep a financially threatened magazine. Despite the now famous Lisbeth Salander, the first novel of the Millennium trilogy is primarily Blomkvist’s adventure and Salander is still the strong supporting character.
For a person who seems barely capable of human interaction, Salander, the diminutive gothic apathetic genius is rightly more famous. Not because of her super-hacker stature, nor because of her occasional psychopathic behavior that would make Hannibal Lecter proud, but because she is at the core a broken girl whose wounds could never completely heal. Whenever she appears on the book she magically absorbs all attention and concern from the readers. Even though we get to know very little about her in the first book.
Larsson has a wonderful, sometimes cruel, sense of interlacing the stories of Blomkvist and Lisbeth and I hope to get (without trying) a grip on it by the time I finish the trilogy. A glaring evidence I can immediately recall: two lovemaking scenes of Blomkvist are both followed by sexual assaults involving Salander.
Blomkvist and Lisbeth don’t meet until half the novel. In the scene of their first meeting, Blomkvist visits Salander’s apartment and takes her by shock. Until then no one had ever visited her apartment without her knowledge. I took great pleasure in Salander’s obedience to Blomkvist’s assertiveness. It is my favorite scene in the book and I hope that it is not a shallow reflection on a repressed preference for male dominance.
What begins as an unofficial lukewarm investigation of a cold case turns into a threat to the lives of the protagonists followed by a manhunt spanning continents. Did I mention a helpful genealogical tree which I looked at a hundred times? The last hundred pages during which the focus shifts to the corporation which won the libel case against Blomkvist, however, slightly disappointed me. In a way that part didn’t belong to the novel, though as a trilogy weaved around the Millennium magazine its presence is very much justified.
Being a fat book it gets ample space to flesh out the story’s large set of characters, has a fairly paced very unpredictable plot, and touches on numerous themes from Nazism in Sweden to Christianity to the stock market sentiment to the (universal) failure of government authorities in helping its people. Underlying all themes runs Larsson’s favorite theme of oppression of women that is today still very present though it may be more secretive than it used to be.
Throughout, Larsson’s experience as a journalist shows in his balanced narration the only goal of which is to tell a story. The narration is simple, straight-forward, and vivid. As someone who prefers the first person and frowns at omniscient narratives, I found this book eye-opening. For large epic-scale works where the author’s duty is beyond conveyance of the story or the innermost thoughts of the main characters, where the author’s duty is towards building a more complete picture of the world, omniscient narrative is possibly the most appropriate.
This is the first Swedish novel that I read. This may also be the least Swedish novel I will ever read, in terms of popular contexts like the Nobels or Bergman or ABBA that an outsider attributes with everything Swedish, notwithstanding Larsson’s predilection towards using original places and old stories (including a mention of Bofors). That is because Larsson was himself slightly unswedish, devouring American and British crime novels and living on junk food and rock’n'roll. I am not complaining. I just wish they had used the title Men who hate women (English for the original title Män som hatar kvinnor).
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