In his 2001 article, \u201cScandinavian Crime Novels: Too Much Angst and Not Enough Entertainment?\u201d author Bo Tao Micha\u00eblis relates an American publisher friend\u2019s understanding of Scandinavian crime novels: <\/p>\n
\nYou [Scandinavians] contrive to express this simultaneously social and existential anxiety in your crime novels in such a way that it . . . is self-critical, self-tormenting even . . . In your world, the typical crime novel detective is . . . not happy, and all the time his job makes him aware of the fact that something is rotten in your Scandinavian welfare societies. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
The publisher (while perhaps simplifying matters a bit) may as well have been referring specifically to Stieg Larsson\u2019s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.<\/i> For although it does not fit the traditional detective novel format\u2014dizzily combining the incisive social commentary of a political thriller and the \u2018whodunit\u2019 hermetic charms of And Then There Were None<\/i>\u2014it is a novel that is deeply and earnestly concerned with identifying social injustice and\u2014if only vicariously\u2014enacting cold and calculated retribution on those found to be at fault. <\/p>\n
Before suffering a fatal heart-attack at the age of 50, Larsson made a name for himself as the journalistic force behind Expo,<\/i> a magazine dedicated to ferreting out racist, anti-democratic, and extreme right-wing tendencies in Swedish society. Some of these concerns work themselves into Dragon Tattoo<\/i>\u2014one of the subplots focuses on a family\u2019s deep involvement in the Swedish Nazi movement\u2014but the narrative sets its sights on two primary evils: white collar corruption and malignant, unredressed sexual abuses suffered by women. <\/p>\n
Each of these issues could easily be the subject of its own book, but Larsson goes to great lengths to illustrate how both are a product of the same well-meaning, but inadequate society. Larsson paints Swedish society as a place where “financial reporters treated mediocre financial whelps like rock stars” and violent crimes against women frequently go almost completely unnoticed and unpunished. One woman is victimized by family members for decades right under the watchful gaze of her guardian. Another\u2014a former psychiatric patient and ward of the state\u2014is repeatedly abused by her government-appointed trustee. (It bears noting that the novel\u2019s original title\u2014Men Who Hate Women<\/i>\u2014was far more pointed about these concerns.)<\/p>\n
Something is, it seems, certainly rotten in the welfare state. And Larsson responds to his dismal view by producing two anti-heroes uniquely equipped to handle and redress the wrongs they witness occurring around them. There\u2019s Mikael Blomkvist, the dashing and dogged financial reporter who finds himself on the losing end of a libel trial against a powerful and corrupt financier. And then there\u2019s Lisbeth Salander, the eponymous tattooed hacker genius whose ability to recover from repeated trauma and resourcefulness make her the novel\u2019s unabashed figure of promise and redemption. <\/p>\n
But while both Blomkvist and Salander play to a reader\u2019s (and perhaps especially an American reader\u2019s) sense of karmic justice\u2014stalking, beating, exposing, and draining the bank accounts of the novel\u2019s multitudinous villains\u2014they, and Salander especially, often reveal themselves to be more caricatures than fully realized characters. Blomkvist remains so fully focused on his original intent to take down his great corporate nemesis, that he seems almost unaffected by the 40-year spree of serial murders that he uncovers and the horrendous ordeal that he goes through at the hands of the killer himself. Salander, one of the novel\u2019s most victimized characters, meets her attackers with one-liners and rejects assistance from the police (“visor-clad brutes”) and women\u2019s crisis centers because they “existed for victims, and she had never regarded herself as a victim.” She\u2019s certainly a powerful character, but her stoicism reads as a lack of emotional depth, and Larsson does her an injustice by not allowing her to experience genuine suffering at any point in the novel. <\/p>\n
A compelling, complicated, and even epic read, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo<\/i> is a remarkable novel, but one which ultimately resigns itself to a society which will always be blind to the evils beneath its surface, and where vigilantism is one\u2019s only hope for justice. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In his 2001 article, \u201cScandinavian Crime Novels: Too Much Angst and Not Enough Entertainment?\u201d author Bo Tao Micha\u00eblis relates an American publisher friend\u2019s understanding of Scandinavian crime novels: You [Scandinavians] contrive to express this simultaneously social and existential anxiety in your crime novels in such a way that it . . . is self-critical, self-tormenting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[1836,14786,14766,14776,14756],"class_list":["post-264506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-cwp","tag-girl-with-the-dragon-tattoo","tag-larissa-kyzer","tag-reg-keeland","tag-stieg-larsson"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264506"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264506\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":356906,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264506\/revisions\/356906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}