Why Do People Love Stieg Larsson's Novels?

A great piece from Joan Acocella, at The New Yorker, "Man of Mystery."

I'm getting up to speed on Stieg Larsson. Moe Tkacik's last essay at WCP cites the Lisbeth Salander novels, "Julian Assange, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and the Swedish Approach to Sex Crimes." She was fired shortly thereafter for breaking from the extreme gender-feminist pack. (My Twitter exchange with her is here.)

Anyway, here's this from the Acocella essay:

It is clear what people like in these movies, but what accounts for the success of the novels, despite their almost comical faults? Larsson may have had a weakness for extraneous detail, but at the same time, paradoxically, he is a very good storyteller. (Mario Vargas Llosa, in an article on the trilogy, compared Larsson to Dumas père.) As for cheap thrills, there’s dirt aplenty and considerable mayhem.

Early in the trilogy, we find out that when Lisbeth was a child her mother was regularly beaten senseless by her mate, Alexander Zalachenko, a Russian spy who had defected to Sweden, where a secret branch of the security police put him on the payroll, thinking that he could tell them useful secrets. Lisbeth told the police about Zalachenko’s assaults on her mother, only to be put away for two years in a sta

te psychiatric hospital. This is the main source of what, in the novel’s present, is Lisbeth’s utter distrust of any government institution, down to the local police. At the end of “The Girl Who Played with Fire,” she has a showdown with Zalachenko. This is a brilliantly orchestrated scene, if you can stand it. Zalachenko shoots Lisbeth in the head. (She runs her fingers over her skull. She finds the hole, feels her wet brain.) Zalachenko and his sidekick, Ronald Niedermann, bury her hastily, failing to notice—they’re in a dark wood—that she is still alive. Once they’re gone, she digs herself out, returns to Zalachenko’s hideout, and sinks an axe in his face.

Near the end of the last book, Niedermann holes up in a brickworks that Zalachenko once owned. When he arrives, he finds two Russian girls, a brunette and a blonde, who have been deposited there by sex traffickers. They are afraid to go outside, and are starving. Niedermann brings them some soup. Then he grabs the brunette and breaks her neck with a single twist. The other watches, and puts up no resistance when it is her turn. You don’t forget such episodes—the truly innocent at the mercy of the truly evil—and they lead directly into the absolutist morals of Larsson’s books, which may also be a powerful selling point. Lisbeth believes that people are responsible for what they do, no matter what was done to them, and plenty was done to her. The trilogy is, to some extent, a revenge story—a popular genre. (Think of “Death Wish” or “True Grit.”) Lisbeth not only cleaves Zalachenko’s skull; she beats up two large bikers simultaneously and, with a Taser, delivers fifty thousand volts to Niedermann’s crotch. The woman warrior has become a beloved feature of the movies, from Nikita to Angelina Jolie’s Lara Croft, and beyond. It is also, reportedly, a sexual fantasy popular with men—something else that may have helped to sell the books.

According to certain researchers, another sexual fantasy common among men is rape. Larsson’s campaign against the abuse of power eventually became focussed on one victimized group: women. A friend of Larsson’s tells the story that, at the age of fifteen, Larsson watched as several boys he knew gang-raped a girl. Later, ashamed, he telephoned the girl and asked her to forgive him. She refused. He is said never to have forgotten this episode. In these three violent novels, no species of assault is more highly featured than the rape of women by men. Furthermore, you can’t go twelve pages without being almost screamed at on the subject of feminism. Larsson’s original title for his trilogy was “Men Who Hate Women.” (This remained the title of the first book in the Swedish edition. Gedin says that he absolutely insisted.) All the sections of the first book are prefaced with statistics on crimes against women. The epigraphs in the third book all have to do with female warriors—the Amazons, and so on.

Yet some critics have accused Larsson of having his feminism and eating it, too. They say that, under cover of condemning violence against women, he has supplied, for the reader’s enjoyment, quite a few riveting scenes of violence against women. There are indeed many such scenes, the most vile being the sex murders in the first book. It should be noted, however, that we never see those crimes. They are in the past—they are told to Mikael and Lisbeth, and hence to us. Other crimes against women get curiously brief coverage. Niedermann’s murder of the two Russian girls takes only four lines.

In terms of the plot, the most important crime in the novel’s present time is the rape of Lisbeth by her state-appointed guardian, Nils Bjurman, but, while we’re told that her clothes are torn off and that something is then rammed up her anus, we don’t hear much more. The episode occupies only one page. By contrast, when Lisbeth returns to Bjurman’s apartment to rape him, in the same way, this is given more than six pages, and the assault acquires significant embellishment. On Bjurman’s torso, from his nipples to just above his crotch, Lisbeth tattoos, in big letters, “I AM A SADISTIC PIG, A PERVERT, AND A RAPIST.” Some of the people who accuse Larsson of double-dealing may be thinking more of the film “Dragon Tattoo,” where the two scenes are more equal in length, and where everything is more horrible just by virtue of being there, on the screen, for us to look at.

Another consideration that would seem to deflect charges of misogyny is simply the character of Lisbeth. She is a complicated person, alienating and poignant at the same time. Many critics have stressed her apparent coldness. In the scene of her revenge against Bjurman, her face never betrays hatred or fear. When the rape is over, she sits in a chair, smokes a cigarette, and stubs it out on his rug. (He is tied up.) Accordingly, some writers have called her a sociopath. Larsson, too, said that once, but elsewhere he described her as a grownup version of Pippi Longstocking, the badly behaved and happy nine-year-old heroine of a series of books, by Astrid Lindgren, beloved of Swedish children. Pippi, Lindgren wrote unsentimentally, “had no mother and no father, and that was of course very nice because there was no one to tell her to go to bed.” Lisbeth wears leather and studs. She has a ring implanted in her left labium. She doesn’t particularly like to be around people. But she is not a sociopath. The primary diagnostic feature of sociopathy is callousness—lack of feeling—toward others. Lisbeth falls in love with Mikael. She brings gifts—cake and perfume—to her mother, who is in a home for the mentally impaired. (Zalachenko’s beatings finally caused brain damage.) She operates outside society but not outside morality. She is an outlaw, or a sprite—a punk fairy.