Culture Watch - What We Aren't Told and That Salandar Woman

THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE
by Stieg Larsson: English Translation © 2009 by Reg Keeland – Originally published in Sweden in 2006

Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy Deluxe Boxed Set: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, Plus On Stieg Larsson

Review by Julia Sneden

This hugely popular series has been a best-seller in Europe ever since it hit the market, and once it was translated into English (from the original Swedish), it leapt to the top of just about every American listing as well. I am probably the last reviewer to tackle these books, and I have no good excuse for my prolonged avoidance. I suppose I am just suspicious of any book that arrives on the scene with so much hype, or climbs to the top of The New York Times Book Review rankings so quickly, and stays there so long.

A part of me is, I fear, suspicious and too stubborn to believe that anything so popular could be so good. I‘m not a big fan of the genre I can only call block-buster thrillers. I tend to prefer quiet little books that are just well-written, suggested to me by friends whose taste I admire. So it took a long time for me to cave in and read Larsson’s opus (opuses), and now I have to take my serving of crow with as much good grace as I can muster, since I have enjoyed these reads a great deal.

It is difficult to write reviews of mysteries and thrillers without giving away too much of the plot. That said, one can give a general feeling for Larsson’s books without exposing too much. This is partly because his settings and characters are interesting in and of themselves. Their focus concerns what can go wrong in both government and industry, along with the effects of those excesses on innocent people. The villains and the good guys are complex creations, with interesting foibles and solid strengths, and the girl of the title is both victim and heroine.

Larsson describes her thus: Lisbeth Salander "was the star researcher" at a firm called Milton Security, which was run by a man named Dragan Armansky. She "was a pale, anorexic young woman who had hair as short as a fuse, and a pierced nose and eyebrows. She had a wasp tattoo about an inch long on her neck, a tattooed loop around the biceps of her left arm and another around her left ankle. On those occasions when she had been wearing a tank top, Armansky also saw that she had a dragon tattoo on her left shoulder blade. She was a natural redhead, but she had dyed her hair black. She looked as though she had just emerged from a week-long orgy with a gang of hard rockers …. She did not in fact have an eating disorder … she seemed to consume every kind of junk food. She had simply been born thin, with slender bones that made her look girlish and fine-limbed with small hands, narrow wrists, and childlike breasts. She was 24, but she sometimes looked fourteen …. Sometimes she wore black lipstick, and in spite of the tattoos and the pierced nose and eyebrows she was … well … attractive. It was inexplicable."

Salander, as a child, had been declared mentally incompetent, and was forced into a brutal juvenile facility where she spent weeks and months strapped down to a bed. When she tried to explain the event that had brought her there, she was called a liar. It becomes obvious to the reader that she is being detained, hidden from the world, for some reason we can’t yet understand.

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Culture Watch - What We Aren't Told and That Salandar Woman

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