The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in 2008, a few months after it was published in English translation. By the time I got around to reading the book, it had already become a phenomenon. I remember resisting all the displays of it in store windows, until I finally decided to seek out the source of the fuss.

Although I tore through it, and had to give Larsson points for the propulsive mechanics of his storytelling, I continued to resist its popularity even as I turned the pages. To me, the eponymous heroine, Lisbeth Salander, came off as a turbo-charged version of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. I particularly resented any feminist claims for the story, since Salander was so clearly the product of male fantasy.

Despite these mixed feelings, I went on to finish the rest of the trilogy. Something about the books spoke to me. For one thing, it features Nazis or neo-Nazis as its main villains. It felt great rooting against proper scumbags. And skeptical as I was of Larsson’s portrayal of a feminist warrior, I still wanted to understand it. It seemed somehow important to separate the legitimate aspects of his female revenge narrative from the fantastical ones.

Then there is the intriguing Russian motif. Russia comes up as a recurring theme in my reading of Scandinavian texts. A lot of the tension in, say, Swedish crime fiction is rooted in how hard it is to strive toward a Utopian society when you are living a short hop from a criminal state. Since at least some of the original impetus for the Scandinavian model of social welfare was to stave off Communism, there is a repeating or self-referential quality to this theme. These countries have long defined themselves in opposition to their bear of a neighbor. It’s as if Russia contributes both the highest and the lowest notes in the composition, whether through its actions or simply the gloomy alternative it presents. In the Millennium trilogy, this Russian motif starts out distant and delicate, slowly building to the violent crescendo of the series.

On first reading, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo presented a few interesting ideas, but what I really got from it only emerged over time. I kept thinking about it in the early days of the Trump administration.

The story of the first book in the series revolves around the rich, creepy Vanger family, who have run a major Swedish company for a hundred years—including during World War Two, when Nazi Germany counted as their main customer. The patriarch of the family, Henrik Vanger, quickly convinces the journalist Mikael Blomqvist that his relatives are a deplorable lot, pointing out that several of them were members of the Swedish Nazi Party. As I encountered this family in the pages of the book, I remember having the passing but distinct thought, “Thank God the U.S. does not have this kind of Nazi hangover.”

Presumably I meant this in a limited sense, in that our captains of industry are not usually literal Nazis. Yet the naïveté or undeserved smugness informing the thought came back to bite me when Trump rose to power. That brief shudder of gratitude haunted me in the wake of the 2016 election. I had read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo almost a decade before, but several aspects of it suddenly seemed to apply in force. The thing that struck me about Trump was that he managed to weld together the American white supremacist tradition and European blood-and-soil politics. Trump’s father, the son of a German immigrant, was arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1927. How would a man of German descent who participated in the most racist paramilitary group in America have viewed the rise of Hitler? What was his attitude toward the pro-Hitler group operating in the U.S. in the 1930s, the German American Bund?

I asked myself, “What if the Trumps are the Vangers?”

Add to this the Russian theme of the trilogy, which in the first book takes the form of the industrialist who accuses Blomqvist of libel, Hans-Erik Wennerström. The informant who feeds Blomqvist misleading documents describes Wennerström as one of the Western capitalists who could not wait to set up shop in Eastern Europe and Russia after the fall of the Berlin wall. Later, when Blomqvist can prove that Wennerström really is a crook, one of the industrialist’s crimes turns out to involve “extremely unorthodox businesses in Russia.” Salander shows Blomqvist that Wennerström is really a “gangster” who launders money for the Russian mafia.

A wealthy man moving in the highest circles of industry and government, who appears to be a legitimate businessman and yet operates as a front for the Russian mafia? That certainly rings a bell! Not only do Wennerström’s persona and business have parallels with Trump’s, his main role in the narrative is that of an enemy to the free press.

The most visceral part of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is its rampant misogyny. Its original title in Swedish, which Larsson insisted on over the objections of his publisher, was Män som hatar kvinnor. Men who hate women. The plot hinges on the search for a missing girl, who turns out to be connected to a string of unsolved murders of women. Blomqvist and Salander slowly work out that the Vanger family’s Nazi past has some bearing on the killings. In this way, Larsson establishes a link between far-right ideology and misogyny.

The murders date from long ago. Hatred of women abounds in Salander’s present as well. She gets raped by her legal guardian, and decides to take elaborate revenge. The sexual violence goes to such an extreme that it took me out of the story altogether, the first time I read it. It seemed gratuitous—especially since the version I read did not explicitly have a title like Misogyny and More Misogyny to alert me to the centrality of this theme.

Despite my qualms about the necessity of the violence, the rape and revenge sections of the book remained the most memorable parts for years afterward. Of course they did: lurid scenes tend to stick in the mind. When my other thoughts about the book started to resurface in connection with Trump, they popped up around the existing buoy of gratuitous brutality, which had never submerged. By then I wondered if the scenes really counted as all that gratuitous, since misogyny and sexual violence so clearly dovetailed with right-wing ideology in my own experience. They fit together perfectly in the persona of a president infamous for telling his sycophants to grab women by their private parts.

Grasping the gestalt of Larsson’s work in a way I had not a decade earlier, I began to wonder why it had such predictive power. How had Larsson done it? I knew that he was an investigative journalist as well as a crime novelist, and that he had focused on the far right. Still, it was quite a feat.

I’ll take a stab at an answer in my next installment.