My quest to finally read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson is finally complete. I bought the book over six months ago while on vacation and could not for the life of me get past the first long-winded chapter about journalist Mikael Blomkvist's investigation of financier Hans-Erik Wennerstrom and how the subsequent article got Blomkvist a libel suit and a jail sentence. (I have to be honest and say that I was a bit turned off by all the Swedish names and places in this book, but you get used to them pretty quickly. But let me just add that the Swedes can't seem to name a person or place with out stringing a whole mess of vowels and consonants and topping them off with umlauts. If the translator Anglicized the names, the book would be a 100 pages shorter, I swear to god.) A few weeks ago I blogged about my problems with the book and a friend e-mailed me and urged me to continue reading. So I downloaded Dragon and the second book, The Girl Who Played with Fire, onto my iPad and started off anew...
And boy, am I glad I did. I have the rare opportunity--for once due to great timing--to read all 3 books of "The Millennium Trilogy" back-to-back-to-back, since the third book was just released here in the US in late May. I have been living with the characters of Blomkvist and his anti-social associate/love/savior Lisbeth Salaner for over a week now, with the third book--The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest--awaiting me when I finish the second. In addition, I also saw the Swedish movie version of Dragon (more on that in a later post), so yes...I'm a fan.
Dragon sets off the fuse in these three books by introducing the characters. Blomkvist is a crusading journalist and co-owner/publisher of a Swedish magazine called Millennium. Lisbeth Salander is an anti-social Goth who has incredible computer hacking skills, a photographic memory, a strange look and body that "inspires" lustful thoughts from men--and women--of all walks of life, and is severely damaged. The extent of that damage--known as "All the evil"--doesn't really start to appear to the second book of the trilogy. But let's just say Salander takes "anti-social behavior" to new heights and in politically correct Sweden that wins her a guardian of the state and a whole new set of problems.
Blomkvist, after being convicted of libel in the Wennerstrom affair, is offered a job by retired industrialist Henrik Vanger. Vanger's niece, Harriet went missing--presumed dead--in 1966 when she was just 16 years old. Each year since them Vanger receives a gift of pressed flowers, sent from--he presumes--the girl's killer. Now in his eighties, Vanger decides to hire Blomkvist to investigate his niece's murder. His attorney approaches Milton Security, an investigative company, that employs Lisbeth Salander as a freelance researcher. After vetting Blomkvist's otherwise squeaky-clean record, Salander hires on as Blomkvist's researcher on the Harriet Vanger affair. And that's when the book really gets going. It becomes, in my opinion, the Swedish equivalent of Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs, just as kinky and fraught with terror.
Salander is a fascinating character, an almost idiot-savant, except for the fact that she's just incredibly damaged and wary of people. Blomkvist is interesting, too, but not near as much. Larsson paints an enticing and evocative picture of his home country, from the bitter cold desolation of the imaginary "Hedestad" to the big-city life of Stockholm. Dragon is very different from the second book in the series, and also--I'm presuming--the third. The first book introduces the characters and uses them to solve a mystery featuring people outside their lives. The second book brings Salander and Blomkvist again into a deadly mystery, but this one relates directly to one of them. The third book--from what I've read in reviews and such--is a direct continuation of the second. Sadly Larsson died after writing the trilogy of books, although there are rumors of a fourth book that also exists, either in outline or almost complete form.
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