Stieg Larsson - Millenium trilogy

[cimorene]

Throughout my parents' and sister's visit the last month, I've been reading the Millenium trilogy by Stieg Larsson (Män som hatar kvinnor, Flickan som lekte med elden, & Luftslottet som sprängdes, aka The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, & The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest) in the background.

Millenium has a couple of my mystery plot pet peeves: first, the preponderance of what my dad calls Bestseller Style (for books) and what I call Victim/Villain/Random Bystander Cam (in tv/movies): that is, a sprinkling of individual scenes from the point of view of non-protagonists who are antagonists, victims, or peripheral characters; and second, plot points, particularly dramatic irony, contingent entirely on the POV characters making difficult-to-justify foolish decisions while the audience is privy, through Villain Cam, to the exact reasons why said decisions suck. Both of these features are storytelling tricks designed solely to increase suspense, which is why I consider them gimmicks.

But these are easily outweighed by two things:

1. It's so extraordinarily well-written for a crime/mystery story, combining a smooth and impressive narrative voice with Un-Put-Downableness,
and


2. it contains a diverse array of strong, awesome, kick-ass, utterly unique, well-rounded women characters. These pass the Bechdel test on a number of occasions and in different ways, and meanwhile, their lives are independent and mostly not focused on men even when they're not interacting with each other. This in spite of the whole Well-Meaning Womanizer element in the main male protagonist which sees him go through ~affairs with at least five of them over the course of the trilogy.

Unsurprisingly, I'm a little depressed about having run out of them.

Of course, Stieg Larsson is dead, and somewhat ironically, if you've read the books, his father and brother have recently finished shutting his life partner out of any control over or profit from his posthumous megabestsellers after she refused the settlements they first offered. (Sweden doesn't give her the kinds of common law protections she'd have had if they'd been married.) It's too late for us since we already paid money for the books, but I hope anyone else intending to read/watch them will make sure to borrow them or buy them secondhand or (cough) whatever to avoid giving them money.

Comments

[l_elfie]

tigerbeatdown just had a post about this series, with comments on both sides (though mostly on the side of "it's not feminist!/there's a lot of rape!"). it's very interesting to read your review, as i have a much better idea of your taste than any of the people on tiger beatdown, haha.

[cimorene]

Well, there is a lot of rape, but it's not voyeuristic/kinky/meant-to-be-arousing rape. (In fact, even the happy and slightly romantic sex is never even slightly bowchickawow, let alone graphic.) And it most definitely is feminist, although I can see that it reflects the worldview of a politically liberal feminist heterosexual man - which isn't to say that his female characters are unrealistic at all. This mostly comes out in the viewpoints of the sympathetic/heroic male characters, just a kind of unintended shimmer of privilege goggles.

That aside, the whole thing is a passionate and angry examination of the sex industry and the politico-big business-crime complex that keeps the patriarchy and the oppression of women in general going. Larsson actually was a passionately political investigative journalist, and rumor is that all the scandalous enterprises and coverups in the books actually happened (the source of the rumour is mentioned in one of the articles linked as source for the Wiki article). Like, one of the VF articles enraged me and had me going "WRONG WRONG WRONG" on everything from the conclusions about Swedish society and Larsson personally to the columnist's comments on the text, one of which was something about how he seemed to think the political aspects of the thriller plots were just pasted on to cover up a voyeuristic interest in motorcycle gangs and human traffic. I get the impression that's probably the same sort of argument being made at Tiger Beatdown, but an intelligent reader can clearly see that the books are wish-fulfillment, and all the 'dear-author-your-id-is-showing' is focused on the gang of plucky underdogs successfully carrying out their plans to take down (frequently violently, or humiliatingly) the misogynists, rapists, and human traffickers. In other words, it's not a rape fantasy, it's a revenge fantasy. There's a lot of revenge in the text, some of it unavoidable, but some of it definitely a bit overly-lovingly belabored.

Also, for what it's worth, part of Larsson's partner Eva Gabrielsson's grudge re:the estranged father and brother milking his work for money was that The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the English translation of Män som hatar kvinnor (lit. Men Who Hate Women), was "badly rewritten". I don't know anyone who's read both, myself.

[marshtide]

I will probably be reading the original in the near future, having reached a fairly high level of reading comprehension now. I read the English translation last year and I think I still have it around somewhere. So I'll get back to you on that one...

I keep being really annoyed by the way the books are talked about the in English-language media - most of all US media stuff that I've seen, but I think UK media as well (lost track a bit at this stage). The Tiger Beatdown article was no exception at all, and I'm moderately fond of them a lot of the time. It felt as though about a dozen points had been missed by a wide margin...

[cimorene]

I keep being really annoyed by the way the books are talked about the in English-language media

I was blissfully unaware of there being anything to be irritated about, having only heard by word-of-mouth about how mega-bestselling they were until I read the articles linked in the Wikipedia article. They were mostly very annoying, with the Daily Fail's being the least annoying, astonishingly enough. Vanity Fair's article was also wrong in almost everything it said even though it didn't seem especially hostile to the series, even. But the Tiger Beatdown article just had me frothy with rage, really. Oh, joy, it's the "he who smelt it dealt it" approach to violence against women! True feminism doesn't mention crime against women when it writes about crime, apparently. That would just be too prurient! I lost a few days to fuming and Wax got to audience several rants on the subject.

[marshtide]

Yeah! Exactly. Argh. I'm also really annoyed by the idea that a dude having sex with several women is somehow inherently unfeminist omg, which I keep running across! What the hell! Amongst so many, many other things I could rant about.

[cimorene]

Ugh, YES. A character who has something in common with him (and thus instantly gets labeled a self-insert Sue) is an attractive middle-aged man who dates around, so it's automatically some sweaty and disgusting objectifying wish fulfillment fantasy? Yes, because it's so perverse to fantasize about having five healthy, consensual, mutually-satisfying sexual relationships in the space of a few years. (The dude isn't even that promiscuous!)