The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson [Millennium Trilogy]

The Girl With the Dragon Tat­too (Vin­tage 2009) by Stieg Larrson (author) and Reg Kee­land (trans­la­tor) is the first book in the Mil­len­nium Tril­ogy, set in Sweden.

The Girl With the Dragon Tat­too was the biggest best­seller last year. The orig­i­nal, Swedish title was “Män som hatar kvin­nor” which trans­lates to “Men That Hate Women.” Apt and sad to say that it’s a pre­vail­ing theme in this story (or series).

The main pro­tag­o­nist in the story is a finan­cial reporter who gets fined and sen­tenced to jail for writ­ing libelous con­tent about a cor­rupt busi­ness­man. He steps down as pub­lisher of the mag­a­zine that he co-founded,The Mil­len­nium and reluc­tantly takes up as an ama­teur investigator.

The story is bro­ken down into four parts. The first part of the story shows one of the prin­ci­pal char­ac­ters, Mikael Blomkvist’s fall into dis­grace as he is indicted and sen­tenced to six months in prison for pub­lish­ing fraud­u­lent infor­ma­tion in his mag­a­zine about Swedish busi­ness­man, Hans-Erik Wen­ner­ström. It is also referred to as “The Wen­ner­ström Affair.”

Some­thing went wrong with the story that Mikael wrote about Wen­ner­ström, who every­body knows is cor­rupt. He had a cred­i­ble source, an old col­lege friend but then along the way some­thing hap­pened and Mikael felt that there was noth­ing that he could do about it at this point. So he’s charged with fraud and awaits trial.

Instead of fight­ing the indict­ment, Blomkvist folds. He accepts his sen­tence and steps down as pub­lisher in order to save his mag­a­zine. Adver­tis­ers have fled. The media has torn him and his mag­a­zine to shreds. There’s noth­ing left for him to do but bide his time and fig­ure out his next move.

But into the pic­ture steps Hen­rik Vanger, a wealthy indus­tri­al­ist and leader of the Vanger fam­ily dynasty. He seeks out Blomkvist to ask him to do him a ser­vice. He wants Blomkvist to inves­ti­gate the dis­ap­pear­ance of his great niece, Har­riet Vanger, who dis­ap­peared more than 36 years ago.

Blomkvist learns quickly that the Vanger fam­ily are quite…dysfunctional. There’s a lot of dis­dain and annoy­ance toward Hen­rik because of his obses­sion with find­ing Har­riet. Most of his fam­ily mem­bers refer to his search for Har­riet as his “hobby.” At any rate, Blomkvist moves into a cot­tage on the island where the girl went miss­ing and starts his inves­ti­ga­tion under the guise of writ­ing an auto­bi­og­ra­phy about the Vanger fam­ily. It’s a really old case, what could Blomkvist find at this late date?

The story didn’t start to really take off for me until I finally met the girl with the dragon tat­too, Lis­beth Salan­der. She’s an aso­cial, anorex­i­cally thin 25 year old woman with pierc­ings on her face and a lot of tat­toos on her body. With that image most peo­ple assume she’s a freak or a punk. A self-image that Salan­der her­self per­pet­u­ates. But we learn that she’s a genius with Asperger syn­drome. Her behav­ior at times is tac­i­turn, vio­lent and unpre­dictable. But she’s an out­stand­ing researcher and an excel­lent hacker.

She unex­pect­edly teams up with Blomkvist as his research assis­tant to help him find the miss­ing Har­riet Vanger. The two also become lovers. While the mys­tery itself takes cen­ter stage, it’s the dis­pute between Wen­ner­ström and Mikael Blomkvist that con­cludes the story and what a story it is!

I enjoyed The Girl With the Dragon Tat­too but this isn’t a story for every­body. First of all, the author almost always pref­aced some of his chap­ters with dis­mal sta­tis­tics about abuse towards women or how many women go miss­ing each year in Swe­den. Depress­ing. In the story itself, Salan­der suf­fers from sex­ual abuse at the hands of her guardian. She gets him back of course.

Salan­der was declared legally incom­pe­tent (due to some child­hood inci­dents) and has always had a guardian who con­trolled her per­sonal finances. Her mother is in a nurs­ing home and I assume she had Alzheimer’s dis­ease. I felt really bad for Salan­der at one point in the story. Her pre­vi­ous guardian gave her a lot more con­trol and encour­aged her inde­pen­dence. After he died, she had to revert all finan­cial con­trol over to a man who was a sex­ual deviant.

The one thing that made me really like Salan­der was the fact that she didn’t tol­er­ate men who hated women. She fought back, kicked ass and took names. It wasn’t as easy as that but yes, she did get her revenge and quite nicely too. Some­times I was exas­per­ated with her lack of social skills even though I know it’s not her fault. But her rela­tion­ship with Blomkvist proves to be good for her. Her rela­tion­ship with him brings about some sub­tle changes in her per­son­al­ity. She even falls in love with him.

Salan­der proves to be a good ally/researcher for Blomkvist and even helps him in his revenge against Wen­ner­ström. But Blomkvist has a rather com­plex rela­tion­ship with his editor-in-chief, Erika Berger, a woman who is mar­ried but she’s Blomkvist best friend and occa­sional lover. Will Salan­der wrest him away from her?

To sum up this book, I will quote from this arti­cle:

At its heart, The Girl with the Dragon Tat­too is not so very dif­fer­ent. It is a book about the fail­ure of Swedish soci­ety to effec­tively respond to social ills at all lev­els. White-collar crim­i­nals are treated like celebri­ties and the press turns a blind eye. Women suf­fer inor­di­nately at the hands of men in power — gov­ern­ment offi­cials, fam­ily mem­bers, even lovers — and have no recourse but to become vig­i­lantes, pro­tect­ing them­selves where the social sys­tem has been utterly impotent.

That’s it in a nut­shell. Over­all, I thought the start of the book was a bit fren­zied and all over the place but it was an ambi­tious start. The pro­logue with the pressed flow­ers had a sin­is­ter feel to it. Har­riet Vanger was known to send her great-uncle pressed flow­ers every year on his birthday.

What’s strange is that a year after her dis­ap­pear­ance, Hen­rik Vanger starts to receive pressed flow­ers every year on his birth­day there­after. Is this the taunt of a killer? The story does move into a more com­fort­able pace after things set­tle down. The nar­ra­tive is told mostly in present tense. I was amused at how many authors (Val McDer­mid) were men­tioned in here since Blomkvist is a reader.

The end­ing had a twist to it that I didn’t see com­ing from maybe lack of atten­tion to details. Savvy read­ers will prob­a­bly have fig­ured some things out on their own. I had my ideas but none of them panned out. There are scenes of vio­lence towards women that may make some read­ers uncom­fort­able (made me nauseous).

I’m now read­ing the sequel, The Girl Who Played With Fire. It’s crim­i­nal that the last book isn’t due out until May. But then I’ve decided I can wait. I’m depressed that three books are all we’ll ever read about these char­ac­ters. I so enjoyed this story despite the vio­lence and other flaws (noth­ing worth men­tion­ing though). My grade, B+. I can see this being a reread as it is a rather com­plex, meaty, char­ac­ter dri­ven mur­der mystery.

For Fur­ther Reading

• The Plague, Joanne Dahme
• Lead Me On, Vic­to­ria Dahl
• Man­hunt­ing, Jen­nifer Crusie
• The Devil’s Star, Jo Nesbø (Harry Hole Series)
• REVIEW: Shadow Lover by Anne Stuart
• REVIEW: ‘Mys­tic River’ by Den­nis Lehane

Tagged as: 2010 Reads, Asperger syndrome, B+ reads, Crime Fiction, dysfunctional family, European crime fiction, Millennium Trilogy, Stieg Larsson