Are you the only one in your book club who didn’t go gaga over The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo? I wasn’t keen either, until I read the second book—and Stieg Larsson’s emails to his editor.
When I bought a copy of Dragon, the first book in Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, the cashier offered that she’d read all three—burned through them, she said. I had the new book in hand when I went to rent a DVD and the woman behind the counter advised me to arrange a whole weekend free: “You won’t be able to stop!” I took about ten days and while I didn’t have to force myself to get through it, I had no trouble at all putting Dragon down. The main female character, Lisbeth Salander, didn’t seem believable to me. The novel’s lack of proper editing (information we already know is often repeated and redundancies abound, such as when a character is “surprised and astonished”) annoyed me even more. Or was I being unfair?
When I shared my views with one of Millenium‘s ubiquitous fans, she argued the inadequate editing may be due to the author not having been around to approve changes. Fair enough. I feel so damn bad for Larsson for missing his fame that I’m willing to back down a little on the editing issue. And now that a couple of Larsson’s emails to his editor, Eva Gedin, have been made available, we know he had no problem with constructive criticism: “My texts are usually better after an editor has hacked away at them, and I am used to both editing and being edited. Which is to say that I am not oversensitive in such matters.”
Regarding his characters, Larsson never wanted them to appear stock:
I have tried to create main characters who are drastically different from the types who generally appear in crime novels. Mikael Blomkvist, for instance, doesn’t have ulcers, or booze problems or an anxiety complex. He doesn’t listen to operas, nor does he have an oddball hobby such as making model airplanes. He doesn’t have any real problems, and his main characteristic is that he acts like a stereotypical “slut,” as he himself admits. I have also deliberately changed the sex roles: In many ways Blomkvist acts like a typical “bimbo,” while Lisbeth Salander has stereotypical “male” characteristics and values.
I decided to take the second novel out of the library. Like Dragon, The Girl Who Played with Fire is one fat book. And having read the whole thing, I can say I wouldn’t miss about a hundred pages of it; the first section regarding Salander’s stay in the tropics is unnecessary and delays the beginning of the real story. But Larsson may have eventually recognized this. After all, he saw a similar problem in book three:
I think the first few chapters are a bit long-winded, and it’s a while before the plot gets under way. The idea was really to build up a substantial gallery of characters and set the scene before the story got going. Etc.
Aspects of Salander’s character that stretched my credulity in Dragon are cleared up in Fire. I found the latter two-thirds of Fire more “unputtdownable” than anything else I’ve read in the past couple of years and have now added The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest to my to-read list. I won’t be warning anyone to book off a whole weekend, but I will recommend it. And I especially recommend it to anyone who writes, or wants to: When it comes to raising the stakes and ratcheting up the tension, Larsson was brilliant. There is much to learn from him. Like a gazillion others, I long for more.
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