The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson

My posting history for the past month has been absymal. I'll chock it up to all of the craziness that decided to settle into my life for now, but enough about that. Back to books.

Truth be told, my reading has severely decreased because of my internships but I've managed to squeeze in some gems here and there. I'm going to keep these next few posts brief, partly because I read the books a bit ago and partly because I simply want to.

Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Played With Fire, is, for those of you who live under a rock, his follow-up to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

I admittedly had a lot of qualms with Dragon Tattoo, mainly with its rattling on and on about the economic scandal, which I frankly did not care about. A chapter or so would have been enough, but nevertheless I still enjoyed it greatly.

The Girl Who Played With Fire (thankfully) does not delve into economics and rather explores more deeply the fascinating character of Lisbeth Salander. Her background is (almost) fully divulged in the course of a murder investigation.

The parts that I did love about Dragon Tattoo stayed around for Played With Fire, but not in the boring way that Carlos Ruiz Zafon did with The Angel's Game. Lisbeth Salander, Mikael Blomkvist, and all the other main players stuck around for round 2. At the center of the novel was still an expose executed by Millenium magazine and a book counterpart to boot (which a publishing nut like myself has got to love).

Instead of the mystery taking Blomkvist & Co. to the depths of snowy Sweden, this murder investigation takes place in Stockholm itself with only a brief (but powerful) hiatus to the familiar countryside we came to know in the first installment. Also, instead of the mystery centering on one psychopath, it concentrates on the rather large exploitation of human trafficking which does share one thing with original mystery: Eastern European immigrant girls as victims.

But of course, despite any differences, there were still men who hate women and the woman who hates men who hate women. Larsson's chilling look into how the sexes have yet to become equal and how women still have much to overcome is like a blast of frigid cold into our cozy ideas of Sweden as a socialist safe haven for all. (Don't worry, there are plenty of men who love/respect women to ensure that it isn't just a man-bashing mystery.)

While The Girl Who Played With Fire is hardly polemical and not likely to change much in the way of how things are, it still is worth reading not only for the entertainment value of an SVU episode on steroids but also for its (disturbingly) deep questions it raises.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson

I bet that if you are in a social circle that even looks askance at books, you’ve heard a thousand times over that you must, must, must read Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

This (deserved) international success is somewhat bittersweet for on Larsson's Millenium trilogy, of which this is the first. Larsson, a sci-fi fanatic, wrote just these three crime thrillers before he died in 2004 at the age of 50. The entire trilogy was published posthumously to a flurry of legal battles stemming from his will. But thank goodness most of the bitterness is gone... The last in the trilogy is arriving on American shores on Halloween.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First, we’ve got to tackle The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The “heroine” is unlike any other. In fact, the illicit drug homonym of heroine would probably describe Lisbeth Salander a bit better. She is all sorts of screwy but has just enough humanity to make the reader love her.

Before Lisbeth is introduced, the reader is drawn into a web of financial intrigue, which I could have done without. In fact, the first 100 pages and the last 100 pages could have been deleted, but I suppose some people like finance.

The real meat of the novel takes place in the (ice cold) heart of Sweden. It follows Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist reeling from a disgraced image from that whole financial problem. He takes on a freelance mission to write a biography of a corporate powerhouse of a family. Surreptitiously, at one member’s behest, he investigates the disappearance and presume murder of the patriarch's niece. Naturally, he encounters a whole bunch of crazies in that family.

What ensues is a perfect mixture of detective work, illicit romance, and violent intrigue with a perfect amount of Criminal Minds and Law and Order: SVU tossed in. And it doesn't deliver a solution that comes out of left field. If you pay close attention, you can probably fit most of the pieces together as Blomkvist simultaneously does so. The full truth, however, is absolutely startling when revealed.

Is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo great literature? Nope, definitely not. But it’s smart, it’s original, and it’s one hell of a read. I’ll be getting my hands on the sequel pretty quickly.