Title: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Author: Stieg Larsson
Original title: Men Who Hate Women
Translation: Reg Keeland
Year Published: 2009
Length: 600 pages
Author Background: Journalist
Genre: crime fiction, Scandinavian crime fiction, amateur sleuth
Standalone or series: series (completed)
Order in series: 1 out of 3 of the Millennium Trilogy
Characters: Lisbeth Salander, Mikael Blomkvist, Henrik Vanger
POV: 3rd person
Available in Digital, Print or both? Both
Note: This is a re-post of my original thoughts on the book when I first read it about a year ago. It’s Sunday. I thought why the hell not.
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Plot: The story is broken down into four parts. The first part of the story shows journalist/publisher 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 referred to as “The Wennerström Affair.”
Instead of fighting the indictment, Blomkvist folds. He accepts his sentence and steps down as publisher in order to save his magazine, The Millennium. 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.
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 rather quickly that the Vanger family are quite…dysfunctional. Henrik is labeled as being obsessed by his famly 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 and thus begins his investigation.
My thoughts: I read this book before all the fuss. Let’s just cut to the chase: the story didn’t start to really take off for me until I finally met the girl with the dragon tattoo, Lisbeth Salander. She is the star. She’s an asocial, anorexically thin 25 year old woman with piercings on her face and a lot of tattoos that cover 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 Salander is a ward of the state. 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 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?
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 afterwards. 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 Stieg Larsson dropped in here (Val McDermid, among others).
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. I will admit to skim/reading those.
I still have the sequels to read. 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.
The mystery solution has a cheat element, at least in the version (proof) I read – the family tree omitted quite a few people on a certain ground, who turned out to be crucial to the solution.
I did not realize that. I had the digital version and probably skipped right over it.
Even without the tree to view, I think from memory (read it ages ago now) Mikael’s investigations of the Vanger family history simply miss out a certain subset of people – hence because we did not know about them, we could not work out that aspect of the mystery (unless we are good at guessing).
I really liked this one, and I don’t always like mysteries. I’ll be reading the next one, but maybe in the summer. This is my version of a beach read. I actually bought this for my father a year ago on your rec, and he zipped right through them.
Glad to hear it! My mother zipped right through them as well.
You know how there is always speculation who is the next Stieg etc etc? Well I would vote for Liza Marklund, because (a) she is the only reporter character (that I know of, anyway, among the Scand. mystery writers except for Anders Roslund who doesn’t count because he’s an author not a character) and (b) she fills her books (or at least she filled Red Wolf) with a bunch of Swedish socioeconomic “stuff” that got equal attention with the crime – maybe even more attention. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have a Lisbeth going for her, so I will probably not delve more deeply into her series…. But anyway, it would have been great to somehow have a control group that read the series with the Lisbeth character, and to have seen what the reaction would have been!
Yes, I’ve read Liza Marklund. I didn’t take to her protagonist but I did like the socioeconomic background stuff and will continue to read her. As for my vote on who would appeal to Stieg Larsson fans but with a different focus: Jo Nesbo and if you want something more atmospheric, Johan Theorin.
I would recommend Arne Dahl to Stieg fans — the most intellectual of the current crop, IMHO, though the series starting in the 1990s is just now being translated. The first by the inimitable Tiina Nunnally, MISTERIOSO. The title has to do with Thelonious Monk’s tune.
I completely agree and have read MISTERIOSO and thought it excellent.