The Girl Who Loaned Her Book to Strangers...

Let’s start out with a confession about how much I resist following the madding crowd, often irrationally. A lifetime rebel without a cause.

When a book (or a restaurant or a museum exhibit or whatever) is very popular before I personally discover it, I develop a resistance to whatever is being blessed by the majority—this means that, for example, I never saw E.T. or read The DaVinci Code or saw the King Tut’s tomb exhibit or ate at Postrio or The French Laundry.

So it’s a really good thing that the P-Town Library book group read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo more than a year ago, right after it was released in the US. At that time, I knew nothing about Stieg Larsson or the Millenium Trilogy. That allowed me to read Volume I without feeling like I was a lemming, following the crowd. Because in this instance--and probably in many others--the madding crowd was right. Stieg Larsson, with no prior fiction-writing experience at all, created a set of characters in situations that are more compelling than almost anything I’ve ever read in my long life as a compulsive reader!

I can’t separate this book from the two that followed and, according to our Research Director, Ms. Brenda, who heard a lecture from the guy who translated all 3 books from Swedish into English, they really were for the most part intended to be 3 parts of a single story, except that no one would publish a 1500-page novel. That being said, to me, the first book was the most conventional of the 3, with a structure similar to a traditional mystery novel: establish characters, establish antagonists and protagonists, get main character(s) somehow involved in the mystery, unravel the mystery, tie up issues, end book. That fact didn’t make me dislike the book in any way, by the way. On its own, it was one of the most gripping mysteries I’ve ever read, but by the 2nd book, Larsson seemed to find his footing, and removed the need for an external mystery to set events in motion. His main cast of characters is interesting enough that they can carry an entire book simply by interacting with each other, in both good and very bad ways. The protagonists are Mikael, Lisbeth, Erika, the staff at Millenium, Annika, the few political characters with some integrity. The antagonists are the Swedish government and financial operatives, kingpins and worker bees in the sex trade, and Lisbeth’s father and brother, whom she first meets (and then kills) during the course of the 3 books.

In the first book, Lisbeth and Mikael interact personally, work together to solve the Vanger mystery, and have a brief affair. By the second book, their characters are so established and distinct that the need for them to interact directly is gone. They can contact and assist each other by communicating almost entirely through email and, when necessary, by hacking into each other’s hard-drives or by sending coded messages to each other through a world-wide band of above-the-law techno-outlaws.

Mikael is a character we can instantly like and identify with. He is a left-winger whose radicalism hasn’t softened over time. I think for the 4 of us, his causes make sense to us and we mostly land firmly on his side in any pressing social or political issues. What I’m most curious about is why so many people, including all of us, LOVE Lisbeth. On paper, she is antisocial, mentally unstable, capable of shocking acts of violence in order to right what she personally sees as a wrong. She can’t sustain relationships. She sometimes acts with remarkable kindness, mostly toward other lost souls like herself, but for the most part, she’s a confirmed loner who trusts nearly no one. She commits acts of horrible cruelty toward those who have been cruel to her or cruel to people to with whom she’s had some kind of positive connection. When she can, she steals from the rich to help the underdogs but also allows herself to benefit personally from her thefts. She is completely unapologetic about any of her actions.

So what makes us identify with her and love her?

I turn this question over to you, my beloved little band of bitter kittens!

And on the question of buy it, borrow it or skip it: I am firmly on the side of: BUY IT AND DON’T LOAN IT OUT! These are books I can see re-reading regularly. Now, my Volume 1 is in the hands of a friend of a friend, Book 2 is on my Kindle, and the librarian who runs the P-Town book group loaned all of us, in sequence, the copy of Book 3 her husband got her from Amazon.com.UK, before it was available in the US. So I will have to buy another copy of Volume 1 and grab Volume 3 off the Ethernet.

Buy, baby, buy is my advice!