As we journey farther into the New Year, we’ve been reflecting on all the wonderful books published in 2010, and building our readings lists for 2011. The authors and friends of Oxford University Press are proud to present this series of essays, drawing our attention to books both new and old. Below, Jeanne Munn Bracken (a former librarian and award-winning author) recommends you read Steig Larsson’s trilogy this year.
By Jeanne Munn Bracken
Move over, Stephen King and Mary Higgins Clark. For the year 2010, the hottest buzz in popular literature was Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. Released over the past couple of years, the three novels are available in a wide array of formats: hardcover and paperback books, e-books, audiobooks, and now in Swedish films with English subtitles. Millions of books in dozens of countries and languages have brought the late author immense fame and fortune, although he did not live to enjoy it.
The books’ popularity is based on two major factors: the novels are real page-turners, and Larsson’s own life story is intriguing.
First, the books. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is an amateur sleuth mystery, as disgraced investigative reporter Mikael Blomkvist travels from Stockholm to rural Sweden to find out what happened decades ago to Harriet Vanger, a teenager who disappeared from an island under “locked room” circumstances. Woven into the search is Blomkvist’s own story, involving journalistic misdeeds that result in a jail sentence. Help arrives in the form of Lisbeth Salander, a damaged young woman in her 20s who balances her anti-social personality with consummate computer hacking skills.
After Blomkvist solves the Harriet Vanger conundrum, the subsequent books are more psychological thrillers on the noir side than classic mysteries. In The Girl Who Played with Fire, Salander takes center stage as her back-story is slowly revealed against Blomkvist’s investigation of a sex-trafficking operation that results in the deaths of two of Blomkvist’s friends and colleagues; the murderer appears to be none other than Salender herself. The barely-believable finale pits Salander against her past and sets up The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, which begins immediately after the conclusion of the second novel. In the third novel, political intrigue and chicanery plays out as Salander is tried for the murders.
Larsson mixes in an interesting array of characters to love or hate: Blomkvist’s long-time married lover, a handful of sociopaths, some latter-day Nazis, government operatives, police, computer hackers, and a host of journalists. While the writing is hardly fine literature, the plot zings and fostered the reputation of books that, once started, must be finished at once. With sex, intrigue, violence, revenge, laugh-out-loud humor, and quite a bit of gore, the trilogy has been popular in all age groups among many nationalities.
Larsson’s writing style, while not great literature, combines compelling plots and characters. Since the pseudonymous translator Reg Keeland rendered the books into English in a very short time and was reportedly not able to approve the final edits, the stylistic blame, if there is any, might be his. Still, “Keeland” (really