Deep and rich, complex and compelling…. These words leap to mind about the late Stieg Larsson's bestselling novel, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2008, Vintage International, translated from Swedish by Reg Keeland, 644 pages). Opening this book begins a puzzling adventure.
Middle-aged hero Mikael Blomkvist, a Swedish financial journalist with legal problems, temporarily must distance himself from Millennium, a magazine he helped to launch. Despite facing jail-time for libel, he holds principles.
“The equation was simple. A bank director who blows millions on foolhardy speculations should not keep his job. A managing director who plays shell company games should do time. A slum landlord who forces young people to pay through the nose and under the table for a one-room apartment with shared toilet should be hung out to dry.”
When summoned by aging industrialist Henrik Vanger, the outcast newsman leaves Stockholm for a lucrative assignment to “investigate” a four-decade-old missing-person case. Henrik wants to know what happened to his teenage niece Harriet. Who killed her and why?
“The family history that emerged was a dramatically different version from the one presented as the official image.... Every family had a few skeletons in its cupboards, but the Vanger family had an entire gallimaufry of them.”
Despite troubles for Blomkvist, even greater conflicts beset his eventual ally, Lisbeth Salander. She's 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.”
A computer hacker blessed with photographic memory, Lisbeth juggles emotional debris from a troubled childhood. Will she self-destruct?
Larsson's plot has more layers than most onions do. He sprinkles in violence, sex abuse, Nazism, deceit, corruption, torture, vendettas and revenge. Beyond sight lurks financier Hans-Erik Wennerstrom, an ultimate villain. Apparently, Sweden isn't always the polite, safe and hospitable place its reputation suggests.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo has become a popular movie starring Michael Nyqvist and Noomi Rapace. Telling such a complex story in a single film must have posed a big challenge.
Fifty-year-old Larsson, an outspoken Swedish journalist, died of a heart attack in 2004, but rumors suggested he may have been murdered for consistently exposing racist groups. Before departing, he wrote a trilogy -- three novels. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo appeared in 2005 and an English translation three years later. The Girl Who Played With Fire won a Best Swedish Crime Novel Award in 2006. An English translation of the third book, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, appeared recently.
Although the author's slow to grasp readers’ attention, once he does, they definitely want to turn pages. On the downside, those who prefer short, simple stories that require little thought won't like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
Approval rating: 79 per cent.
For more information: www.vintagebooks.com
(May 10, 2010)
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Author Stieg Larsson's life fills a book too.
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