The Girl Who Played with Fire
by Stieg Larsson
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Book Reviews of The Girl Who Played with Fire
Book Review: Punk Meets Pedophile
Summary: 4 Stars
In Larsson's first book, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, we're introduced to one kickass heroine in the form of the petite and punked-out Lisbeth Salander. She returns in the second book sans one tattoo and her nose ring, but with breast implants.
Larsson underlined her boyish appearance in the first book, and the sadistic pedophiles she attracted because of it, so the new boobs are a dramatic departure. On the other hand, they may just be another couple of piercings for her. We are meant to see a softer side of Salander, but don't let her new toys fool you. Once she takes them for a test run with a new guy and an old girlfriend, she's still the same feisty-cum-deadly adversary we've grown to love.
Her bisexuality fits right in with the popular freewheeling stereotype of Sweden, but homophobic cops do not, nor do the unequal treatment, sexual harassment, and brutalization of women, especially the psychiatric professionals who have "a state-endorsed mandate to tie down disobedient little girls with leather straps."
In addition, while Blomkvist, the other central character in both books, is fine with his primary lover, Erica Berger, being married, and she admits to enjoying the occasional ménage, even he would never consider a three-way with she and her husband. That just doesn't seem Swedish, if you know what I mean.
In Larsson's first book, each chapter was introduced with a statistic of the abuse women suffer in Sweden at the hands of men. Indeed, the original title of that book was "Men Who Hate Women." In The Girl Who Played With Fire, big money criminals, petty thugs and a corrupt SAPO (Swedish National Police Board), collide with a thriving sex trade. If sex is so freely available in Sweden, how do prostitutes and their pimps thrive?
Larsson gives us a birds-eye view of ordinary middle class people living conventional lives. The other lesson is that purchased sex comes with permission to be brutal, and therefore attracts a certain brand of customer. With the former, we indulge in one of the primary pleasures of foreign fiction - a glimpse at how other people live their lives, but with the latter we get the author's point-of-view through both Salander and Blomkvist.
"What's right," is something both characters contemplate. Loyalty is at the top of the list for each of them, and Salander is learning about friendship. A major turn for Lisbeth is her growing ability to trust men. Frequent coincidence is an all too convenient authorial device to move the plot forward. Both the police and a private detective agency are a bunch of inept bunglers, but I ignored them because I wanted to find out what happened next.
I was hoping that Salander would mete out her particular form of punishment to the bad guys with a full charge of her taser. I was not disappointed. Even without that charming bit of modern technology, Lisbeth is a quick thinker, lithe, and she fights with everything she's got. The girl has suffered plenty in her life, and it's payback time moderfokker!*
*contrived reviewer Swedish slang
[...]
Book Review: Lisbeth Salander as the hunted this time (4.5*s)
Summary: 4 Stars
This book continues with the story of twenty-six-year-old Lisbeth Salander, first introduced in "The Girl with the Dragoon Tatto." She is surely one of most interesting and strange characters introduced in crime fiction in recent years with her reclusive, punk, misfit motif but with computer and survival skills off the chart, especially for someone officially declared as incompetent and in need of state-mandated guardianship. She has changed some from her days of working as a researcher for journalist Carl Blomkist in his search for a woman missing some forty years. Secondarily in the first book, she parlayed her computer skills to rake off a small fortune from the ill-gotten gains of Swedish industrialist Hans Wennestrom before his exposure and has thereby bettered her living circumstances with no less care being given to anonymity.
But life takes a dramatic turn for the worse for Salander when she is identified as the prime suspect in the murder of three individuals: her guardian, a freelance journalist Dag Svensson, and his roommate Mia Johansson, a sex researcher, which conveniently fits with her diagnosis of being capable of psychotic, violent behavior. Svensson was on the verge of publishing an expose of sex-trafficking in Blomkist's magazine Millennium with many leading Swedish citizens on the list. But what was the connection of Salander to the journalist and/or the sex-business and how was her guardian involved with all of this?
The book is a fast-paced, though lengthy, unraveling of these complications. A lot of missteps are taken by Swedish police, some more well-intentioned than others. There is a contradiction from the start for the authorities: Blomkist and others familiar with Salander speak of her extraordinary intelligence and sense of morality, which hardly squares with the psychiatric evaluations. Salander has to walk the tightrope of avoiding capture or arrest while being proactive in proving her innocence. It turns out that much of her past, both recent and early, pertains. The enigmatic Lisbeth is slowly revealed adding credibility to her bizarre personality, as well as moving towards a conclusion.
A reading of the first book is not totally necessary to fully appreciate this book, though it would be helpful. The cautious attraction of Blomkist and Salander that got sidetracked by the end of the first book is in a deep freeze, but this case has the potential for changing all of that. Salander needs allies, and Blomkist is at the top of the list.
Perhaps the Swedish names can be a distraction, but the real story is about human interactions, not names of places. This second book of a three-part series is as good as the first - perhaps better. The writing is sharp - not just of the characters but of the scenarios in which Blomkist and Salander find themselves. One could nitpick the plot with its coincidences, implausibilities, loose ends, and the like. But the reason to read the book is to watch Lisbeth Salander in action. And there are remaining issues for book three.
Book Review: The dynamic return of Solander and Calle Bloody Blomquist
Summary: 5 Stars
This is the extraodinary second novel in the Millenium series by Larsson. To really understand what is going on and why you need to read the Girl who Played with Fire. This second novel is just as explosive as the first, and I am really hanging out for the final book in the series. While this book is not without one minor flaw (in my opiion) in the plot, it is so well written and with such a powerful theme that it flows easily to a stunning conclusion.
Mikhail Blomquist, journalist and publisher has hired an independent writer who has an explosive story he is going to sell to the magazine, but suddenly he and his girlfriend are found shot to death in their apartment. There is a gun on the stairs with fingerprints on it. These belong to Lisbeth Solander - one time lover and partner of Blomquist, and a singular child like woman. She had been committed to children's homes in the past for her anti-social behaviour and violence, and had been committed by the court to be permanantly monitered. When the gun is found to belong to her appointed guardian and he is found dead - shot as well in his apartment. All evidence points to Solander.
However Solander has gone to ground, as only she can. She is the master of computers, hacking, and of disguise. She has other identities to live under, and has been. She is also able to hack into various computers to find out what the investigation against her is up to and what leads they have.
Blomquist has been unable to contact Solander for 2 years, and he doesn't understand why. She suddenly cut off contact, however knowing her from the past he knows that she is not capable of the crimes, the one thing that Solander really hates is Men who hate women. She wouldn't shoot the journalist who was writing to expose that crime.
Independently Blomquist sets off to investigate the crimes, to find Solander and to help her.
It turns out that Solander has made a number of friends in the past as well as some enemies and it seems everyone is determined to find her. One of the most hilarious scenes in this is when the two members of the motorcycle gang do find her, alone, in an isolated cabin.
The only minor flaws I found in the book is the fact that in the past Solander has been touted as the person who can find out all kinds of information on the internet, including a lot of other stuff that isn't there. Yet she never found the link between her guardian and the people in this book? Also, she vows revenge on the men who were responsible for her incarceration, or at least says she will kill them - so why didn't she? Why didn't she wreck their lives like she could easily do? Like I said, these were minor flaws which didn't really affect the reading of the novel. I am interested if there are any comments from others on this.
I still give this book a 5 because it is such a fabulous read and so well written. I am definitely going to be buying the last book in the trilogy as soon as it comes out.
Book Review: A Psychotherapist Point of View on Steig Larsson
Summary: 5 Stars
Psychology uses the words symptoms, defenses or resistance to describe the kooky things we all do. Too often what gets overlooked is how kooky things make sense. So a woman who has the caretaker role in a family becomes depressed and distant because she is drowning in other people's needs and has lost track of herself. A man flirts with someone at work because he is in a nonsexual marriage (10 times or less a year is considered nonsexual). A salesman begins to have panic attacks because a new manager has assigned unrealistic quotas. A pre-teen is struck by stammering every time the boy she secretly likes is nearby. Someone begins to drink too much because they feel invisible in their marriage.
There is a trilogy of Swedish crime novels by Steig Larsson that really captures this theme in the central character of Lisbeth Salander. His international bestseller The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo gives hints that Salander is untrusting, hypervigilant and a hermit because of childhood trauma. It is easy for others to misjudge her as simply weird, her psychiatric records label her as mentally challenged while we know without a shadow of a doubt that she is brilliant with a fierce moral courage. His second book The Girl Who Played With Fire (not available in the U.S. until July 28) adds many more layers to her character by revealing her past trauma which has defined her strengths. So often we are quick to judge and think we know who people are.
In my office there is the opportunity for people to be fearlessly honest about their pain and take ownership of their strengths, to acknowledge mistakes and what was learned and to face choices with greater self-awareness. Where else in the culture at large is there a place to explore terrible things? Everything Salander does makes sense. When a beautiful young girl becomes obese it makes sense whether we understand it or not. When an adolescent is ANGRY, ANGRY, ANGRY it makes sense. When a cancer patient wants to flaunt their baldness to remind all those non-sick people it could happen to you it makes sense. When a kid at school becomes a bully something bad is happening to them and they want to make somebody else feel as bad as they do. We all make sense even when we're kooky. We don't learn how to make pain and disappointment bearable in school, so we reach our own survival conclusions. Whether you nibble on your fingers or toes have enough respect to consider it may be a way to comfort yourself. You can't change until you honor how kooky things work in your favor.
Read about Salander in Steig Larsson's thrilling novels. Larsson was a heavy smoker who died at 50 of a heart attack just after he completed the three novels. He has created a remarkable character who will stay in your memory for years to come. In understanding Salander the extreme introvert it is possible to gain greater understanding of yourself. What more can we ask of a novel?
Book Review: An intense roller-coaster ride (patience required!)
Summary: 4 Stars
The Girl Who Played With Fire is a brilliant yet often maddening sequel to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. If you haven't read the first book yet, stop right now and order Dragon Tattoo, which introduces the key characters Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist. Since author Stieg Larsson died, sadly, after writing three books in this series, you should allow yourself the whole experience.
As I did with Dragon Tattoo, I picked up The Girl Who Played With Fire without reading the cover blurbs. I didn't want a road map; I just wanted to jump in. My critique will not contain many plot details but I do have a definite opinion about what worked well and what dragged the story down.
At his kinetic best, Larsson's writing can come across like Agatha Christie meets The Silence of the Lambs. I don't read too many thrillers, but when Salander and Blomkvist get on a tear, Larsson propels his readers into a dark underworld that lies just below the surface of a corrupted civil society.
However, Larsson's own journalistic background is on display, to a fault. I appreciate his penchant for social expose, but his style gets in the way of his storytelling. He populates his story with dense exposition. No character walks on stage without a thorough background check. The Girl Who Played With Fire explores sex trafficking, so it's expected that Larsson will tell us a lot about the trade and its many tentacles. But as the central crime story unfolds, in addition to journalist-hero Blomkvist, we are saddled with a huge cast of investigating detectives and journalists we don't care about that much, and whose Swedish names are hard to keep track of.
The long setup almost lost my interest. By page 120 I was frustrated and thought about putting the book back on the shelf for a while. The key incident that propels the story occurs almost 200 pages into this 550+ page book.
After that, things take off like a rocket, and I read the rest of the book in three long sittings. Lisbeth Salander is a truly original, complex and ambiguous character. She's society's wronged outcast come to life with turbo-charged vengeance. The central mystery of this story seems at first to hinge on too much coincidence, but the tangled web eventually coalesces in a satisfying way. In Dragon Tattoo, Salander seemed like a stock character, the damaged super-genius, and the sequel both humanizes her and deepens her mystique.
Patience is required, but if you can get into it, The Girl Who Played With Fire is an original, intense, and satisfying ride.