so, I got invited to read the millenium trilogy by a friend at the same time she was, with the idea being that there are rape depictions and that we’d keep each other company during the triggering parts of the tales, in some fashion or another. for my part, this book club thingy was helpful because it gave me an external excuse to listen to audiobooks on my work commutes, thereby making them far less stressful.
posted at sexgenderbody's tumblr
lisbeth salander was hyped up to be some sort of feminist...something or other. I found her to be a cardboard character that was raped and in turn raped. so, I don’t know if she was supposed to be some sort of demonstration of how those who are assaulted become assailants or what. lisbeth salander is basically Clint Eastwood with boobs. she goes around, emotionless and executing violence, breaking laws all in the name of justice and righteousness - or something.
lisbeth gets raped in the first book, and then goes on to rape & torture her rapist and commit statutory rape (she's 27 y/o) of a 16 y/o black male in the caribbean in the second book. she steals billions from a gangster with no thought of whether that money was stolen to begin with. the author gives lisbeth a pass on: stealing already stolen wealth, rape, torture and neo-colonial sex tourism and pedophilia. some ‘feminist action hero’. for the most part, women in these books are either fucking blomkvist or being raped and murdered.
by the final, clumsy end of the trilogy I don’t think that stieg larsson ever knew any women, much less feminists. the women he portrays are caricatures that for the most part have lots of money and either exist in the story to irritate sexists and rapists when lisbeth is not in the scene or to give larsson a reason to talk about breasts.
and omfg, does he go on about breasts! fucking hell. the minute he starts talking about a woman’s body, it’s all over but the crying. he’ll zero in on the breasts like a child molester going after a rubber ducky. I don’t know how or even if I can ever read about tits again. I may need to gargle with bleach or read some anatomy manuals about human tissue, bone & cellular structure just to re-contextualize the word. by the third novel, larsson gave up all pretense of storytelling on his breast infatuations. he just blurts out passages that have nothing to do with the story and talks about breasts.
then there’s mikael blomkvist, the ‘working class’ penis that fucks pretty much any woman that spends two paragraphs with him. they all seem to end up socializing with each other, after fucking him as some sort of ‘band of sisters’. my friend suggests we write fanfic about the women that fuck mikael blomkvist. I’d read it. maybe Millennium magazine could do a special issue on women who fucked the intrepid penis and how they recovered from the vanilla-ness of it all.
seriously, if someone asks me about these books I’ll take a picture of a penis and say: “this is what the books are about”.
blomkvist is supposed to be some sort of middle class moral avenger, attacking the abusers of power for the good of society / democracy / sweden / his penis. the dude’s got more money than anyone I know and it seems that because he doesn’t have an estate or a lear jet, he’s impoverished. this doesn’t need to be an issue in storytelling but a good portion of the first story and the others to some respect, is about class and the abuse of power. but, the author has blomkvist charging after the wealthiest 1% from his position in the wealthiest 2%. which looks a lot like the same class to the bottom 98%. when the very poor are mentioned, they’re often sex workers from eastern europe that are mentioned only because larsson was describing the foul deeds of one of blomkvist’s adversaries and the death / rape / abuse / exploitation of some croatian sex worker was used to do so.
the first book, ‘girl with the dragon tattoo’ was interesting for me. larsson told the tale of these wealthy cardboard characters in the foreground, while in the background another story was told. intrepid penis and clint eastboob were parading through sweden on a billionaire’s credit card, looking for a pattern of murder in a country and history of wealth. the engaging part was how, as larsson described this history, family, country and community, another parallel tale of class differentiation and abuse was being told. it was as if there were two levels of storytelling going on at the same time: foreground with cardboard characters and background with complex, interdependent relationships within which was the class structure that nurtured oppression, elitism, cruelty, colonialism, torture, murder, devaluation and at the level of institutional, systemic and cultural. hints of christianity, colonialism, racism, nazism and the ever present misogyny all flowed past in larsson’s depiction of the world around intrepid penis and clint eastboob. it was notable and enjoyable to me.
I can tell you that for whatever reason, that was absent in the second and third books. I don’t know why, but it became like a combination of clumsy suspense like larsson smoked a bowl of hash, and then tried to write a swedish version of jason bourne and la femme nikita. take any idea that you wrote down while you were smoking a bong, convinced that it was genius only to examine later as instructions for buttoning your shirt own shirt. maybe larsson got to the end of the first novel and couldn’t figure out how to complete lisbeth salander’s alleged character arc, so he took two more books to ramble on before concluding in the final clumsy, comic 100 pages of book three. who knows? and who cares?
the real mystery here is how on earth these books sold 75 million copies. the millennium trilogy would be every bit the hack writing that 50 shades of grey is, if the first book didn’t have the complexity it does.