Lisbeth Salander is my hero

I read Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy in June, but have failed up until this point to write about it for the blog.

If you have not read or heard of these books or their movies go do a google search and come back.  Starring Lisbeth Salander, a petite, introverted, formerly-abused, do-not-fuck-with-her computer hacker, and Mikael Blomkvist, a take-no-prisoners investigative journalist and magazine editor, this is a gritty, violent, dark, occasionally rambling, noir triology set in Larsson’s Sweden.  

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

In Sweden it is called Men Who Hate Women.  I’m not crazy about the “girl” motif — Salander is an intelligent and amazingly resourceful adult — but I do like the choice in the U.S. titles to make her the focus of the story.  Larsson once said in an interview (before his untimely death from a heart attack) that he wondered what Pippi Longstocking would be like when she grew up.  Lisbeth is a product of that imagination.  

I wasn’t very enthusiastic about reading the book in the first place, since I resist bandwagons.  I started and quit this book once, struggling to get through the slow, wordy, relatively uninteresting first forty pages.  I found the story oppressive and irritating.  At the urging of several trusted fellow readers, I gave it another shot, determined to get through this first book, just to see what all the hype was about.  I plouged through the beginning again, pleased, as I broke through the fifty page barrier, that I was already completely taken with the character of Lisbeth Salander.  Apparently it was Blomkvist that was boring me. 

Salander’s story is extraordinary. Implausible in the extreme.  Yet we believe in her.  Broken, untrusting, antisocial, but she is the character we support against all others.  We want her to beat the bastards who have damaged her.  It’s a long list.  

Blomkvist gives me a lot of trouble.  He is smart, intellectually resourceful, and sleeps with a lot of different women.  Women seem drawn to him, but he tends to let women control the course of relationships — to a point.  He respects them all, is a dedicated friend, but doesn’t seem to love any of them.  I’m uncertain that he can love any of them.  Perhaps, like Salander, he is damaged in some way.  He troubles me, but he’s a saint compared to most men in the stories.  He fights to reveal truth and injustice, especially in the financial world.  An investigative journalist who makes no compromises and is driven to reveal corruption, even to his detriment. He doesn’t rape, torture, abuse—verbally or physically—kill, traffic, or maim anyone.  The other men in the stories take care of all of that.  

Larsson highlights both personal, institutional, and social injustices against women.  Epigraphs that open each section of the books are themed. In the first, the epigraphs are all rape and abuse statistics for women in Sweden.

I really loved the excitement of the story.  There are some incredibly dark moments, gruesome and horrifying details.  Go back to that Swedish title, Men Who Hate Women, and let your imagination run where you think that might lead.  Then let it go a little darker and you might be somewhere in the neighborhood.  The labyrinthine plot, subplot, and subsubplots twist around each other.  The story is really gripping. 

I can’t help but feel that this book—as good as it is—might have been even better with some judicious editing.  A sure-handed trim throughout.  

The Girl Who Played With Fire

The epigraphs in this book are all mathematical problems, as we get a peek at the enormous power of Salander’s mind.  She takes up Fermat’s last theorem as light-reading on the beach.  I had many favorite lines from these books, but this was among the best: “There were not so many physical threats that could not be countered with a decent hammer.”  That would be the hammer Salander carried in her bag.  

Questions for me in this book centered more around Blomkvist (no, I still didn’t like him, but not because he sleeps with everyone).  Can someone be a feminist male and be promiscuous? As opposed to single and celibate or partnered and monogamous?  Is he really a philanderer?  Do women in the books throw themselves at him? He does have sex with several women in the books.  The women he connects with are all smart, independent, and powerful in different ways.  He is smart, but not physically or intellectually threatening to them.  He lets the women around him set the rules for engagement.  

Strangely I haven’t seen anyone take up the question of Salander’s sexual engagment, which is just as extensive and more varied than Mikael’s.

I was irritated by Salander’s boob job and wasn’t sure what to make of it.  Is it like her piercings and tattoos? Another way to disguise herself?  Or is it a way of illustrating the discomfort she has with her own body and the often clumsy way she  understands and interacts with social norms?  Salander is very small, to the point that most people think she is far younger and less powerful.  The boob job is also weird considering what we later learn about her experience with hospitals and doctors (or at least psychiatrists).   

Salander reminds me of Batman.  She suffered grievous harm (repeatedly). She survived amid persistent gross negligence, rape, and torture. Then she used her skills to achieve her own freedom and acquire the resources to help others, but not in conventional ways.  She is not — lest we forget — normal.  She is physically very small, but repeatedly resists much larger foes and dominates others through the quickness of her mind and body and a certain fearlessness. 

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

The final book helps to unravel many of the personal mysteries of Salander’s past.  The epigraphs of the final book are all about historical women warriors and soldiers.  Not victimization as in the first book, or mathematical proofs as in the second, but women with power, rising up to fight their own battles.  

I find it difficult to say anything about the third book without spilling big spoilers.   I’ll just say that I found the ending very satisfying, and I can see how Larsson could have serialized Salander and Blomkvist in interesting ways if he had survived.  

My problems with the stories

— There is so much gruesome violence against women in these books.  How does one call attention to a horror without repeating the horror?  

—Words. So. Many. Words. Editor?  

—Locational specificity.  Several scenes have very specific descriptions of neighborhoods and streets in Sweden.  My idea of the geography of Sweden is very very limited, so I just blithely zoomed through this description.  How would my experience of the books be different if I understood where the events were taking place?  Why did Larsson take such care to be so specific about real locations sometimes, but invent entire towns at other times?  Should I have used a map while I read?  

—Political figures and real people.  I know even less about Swedish politics than I do about Swedish geography.  The brief notes in book three help a bit, but I wonder how a better understanding of Swedish politics would change my understanding of the book.  For instance, all of those political coffee cups in the Millennium offices—what was the significance of giving a particular logo to someone? Is Paolo Roberto a good boxer?  

—Coffee!!  How much freakin coffee do they drink in Sweden?  Will someone please count the number of cups of coffee Blomkvist consumes in his various interviews and stakeouts?  I feel like Larsson must be making a statement about the personal preferences or perhaps mental state of characters when he is so specific about what they are eating and drinking — whether reheating a Billy’s Pan Pizza or making an open-faced sandwich versus a closed one — I just don’t know what that statement is.  Do we need to know exactly how Salander puts away her groceries? Or is the act of putting them away, of planning for the future, what is significant? 

Things I’d love to think about more 

— Salander’s tattoos! Some are big and some are small.  They each commemorate an event in Salander’s life.  Note: Bjurman’s rape results in a very small tattoo for Salander, especially compared to the dragon. Bjurman’s is bigger though.  Oooh, also the notorious boob job happens at the same time she erases the wasp.  Oh tattoos!  There is something in all of the body changes that speaks to Salander’s imperfect struggle to change herself. 

— Salander’s relationship to other women.  She seems to have just as much, if not more, trouble trusting women as she does men, though she’s never directly betrayed by a woman.  

— Salander’s notion of debt and balance.  When we help someone, what do we expect in return?  When someone helps us, what do we feel we owe, what are we expected to do?  Salander seems to have an easier time understanding her relationship to other people in terms of debt, so a map of her connections to other people and the exchanges they make would be very interesting. 

—Millennium.  What role does the magazine play in the stories?  Why did publicists (?) choose to name the trilogy according to the magazine rather than one of the characters or events?

—Hacker nation.  So much I wonder about Salander’s role, comfort, and ability in the hacker organization versus her “real world” interactions.  

—Larsson’s biography, the role of investigative journalism, his life experience, his notion of feminism… so much.

So glad I tried the first book a second time.  

Oh, and the first Swedish movie is very good too.  I love Noomi Rapace.