Book Review: THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, by Stieg Larsson, translated from the Swedish by Reg Keeland. NY: Knopf, 2008

This is the first of Larsson’s trilogy starring Mikael Blomqvist and Lisbeth Salander. All three books were best-sellers in Sweden and several other European countries in 2007. No signed first editions will be available. Read through to the end of this post to discover why.

A mysterious prologue, which I leaked earlier in this site: on his 82nd birthday, a man receives an anonymous gift, a framed, pressed flower. He has received such gifts for 30 years.

Next: a five-generation family tree. I always skip over these when they are presented at the beginnings of novels, figuring that I'll either work it out as I go along or get bored and not finish the book. This book I finished.

First chapter: Unusual. The story proper begins after, not before, the trial that has brought Mikael Blomqvist professional and financial ruin, and we are given only a few background details after learning that he was found guilty of libel. There is a flashback to a meeting with another journalist, a colleague who put him on the trail of the man who has now bested him in the courtroom. International business intrigue. Dirty dealings or not?

Next: The scene shifts to the office of a private investigator and founder of a security business, Dragan Armansky, employer of Lisbeth Salander, so that we first meet the latter through the eyes of the former. “Everyone has secrets,” Salander says in answer to a lawyer interviewing her for an investigative assignment. “It’s just a matter of finding out what they are.” The man she whose secrets she is being asked to discover is Mikael Blomqvist. Not until much, much later in the story do Blomqvist and Salander meet.

For a long while, the individual stories of Salander and Blomqvist run parallel. There are the antisocial behaviors of the young woman that led to her being considered mentally deficient and assigned a state guardian, despite her obvious brilliance with computers and in other areas, alongside the male protagonist’s uncertainties over a year-long, cold-case investigative assignment, which he accepts with great skepticism, in a small village in the north of Sweden. The paths of each, their intersection, what together they discover and the relationship that develops between them form the heart of the story.

The character of the Swedish journalist Blomqvist and the many campaigns his magazine (another thread in the story) conducted against neofascism movements are based in the reality of the author’s life. What little I have read about Larsson leads me to suspect that other aspects of his personality (e.g., the photographic memory) are given to the female character, Lisbeth Salander. Both, however, are very fully realized characters, and neither is one we have met before.

Violence, especially violence against women and the danger of violence presented by neofascist groups, was a big issue for Stieg Larsson, as it is for Mikael Blomqvist. There are episodes of graphic violence in this novel. Compared to other contemporary fictional and film treatments, however, Larsson’s is restrained, and none of it feels gratuitous. There is pulp fiction, as there are pulp films, where violent action is the only real character, the people with names included only as vehicles for mayhem. Such is not the case here. Blomqvist and Salander are both living on the edge, threatened by very real, physical danger, but they are trying as hard to hold onto their souls as to their lives, and the inner struggles are as central to the story as the search for the killer.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO is due out this month, and Knopf will bring out Larsson’s two sequels in the future. Sadly, Larsson died in 2004, before publication, never knowing he was destined to be an international best-selling author. The good news is that he enjoyed creating his characters and his story, and this satisfaction comes through on every page.