Review of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Stieg Larsson wrote exceptional characterizations, which shattered the glass ceiling of my understanding of what a female heroine can take. In essence, he took a couple of pre-existing Swedish fictional characters, Kalle Blomkvist and Pippi Longstocking (both by the author Astrid Lindgren), and brutally modernized them. He made Lisbeth Salander, his heroine, a gritty, super-intelligent, firecracker of a lead. She dominated the series even though the story started with Mikhael Blomkvist, an investigator reporter caught in a series of intrigues. Rather than Mikhael remain the book's main star, he becomes Lisbeth's partner and then eventually her sidekick. While he is sensuous, calm, and by-the-book, she has a knife-edge fragility and outsized personal strength honed by years of trauma, rejection, loss, and victimization. Lisbeth absorbed the worst of misogyny before turning the tables to become what misogynists fear most: a strong, brilliant, independent, fierce woman.

While Lisbeth's fictional back story is terrible enough, the author’s inspiration for her may be even more tragic. Though the author is not alive to confirm it, Lisbeth apparently formed in part out of three women, a blend of real and fictional. Although there is some dispute, Stieg Larsson witnessed the rape of a woman named Lisbeth by three of his so-called friends; then the author may have borrowed traits from a niece who battled anorexia and practiced martial arts; and finally, the author had been inspired by the fictional Pippi Longstocking. Pippi (which I don't know well) is described as an unconventional girl who is the world's physically strongest woman. She is a character who also makes her own rules and has independence, which fits well with Lisbeth, a social misfit herself. It’s not too much of a stretch to see how he blended the strongest woman with her own demons into a misogyny lightning rod that first absorbed abuse before unleashing it back on the guilty. I can only imagine the author surprised himself as to how far his characterization could go. But that can sometimes happen. When a character's voice rings clear, sometimes it's better for the author to set up a situation and then let the character take over. It's a strange experience to know that the story will unfold without the author's control. It's exhilarating, humbling, and an out of your body experience where the author becomes a passive witness to a character taking over the story. I can't say this is what Stieg experienced, and I wish I could sit down with him and ask, but, as mentioned, he has passed.

My copy of his debut is dog-eared and torn from rereading. I devoured it to understand better how to make a character come alive. I am sure I will reread it again this year. His two sequels don't seem as polished, but he had died before he could re-edit them (as most writers would so early in the process). It's a shame. I would have loved to share a beer with him.

If you haven't yet, check this book out. Of course, the movies are good too, especially the original Swedish one (and David Fincher's version), but I'm a writer at heart.