The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

by Stieg Larsson

One evening in February 2003, Larsson’s character Mikael Blomkvist

went to the cinema to see <the 2001 film> The Lord of the Rings, which he had never before had time to see. He thought that orcs, unlike human beings, were simple and uncomplicated creatures.

One day in November 2018 I picked up a paperback with rather horrid cover design which had been gathering dust in the teacher’s room. As it happened, I also had never before had time to read this book. The English translation of the international bestseller was published in 2008.

I don’t read Swedish so can’t really offer my opinion on “needless prettification” [1] but I also was not impressed by this particular translation. Nor am I into crime novels. Even so, I was gripped. I spent several nights reading into early hours and now, surprise surprise, I want more.

(Meanwhile, the book is back to its former place, waiting for the next reader.)

Ah, Sweden. Beautiful country, it is. Each part of the novel is preceded by an epigraph. Here they are all:

• Eighteen percent of the women in Sweden have at one time been threatened by a man.
• Forty-six percent of the women in Sweden have been subjected to violence by a man.
• Thirteen percent of the women in Sweden have been subjected to aggravated sexual assault outside a sexual relationship.
• Ninety-two percent of women in Sweden who have been subjected to sexual assault have not reported the incident to the police.

No source of these data is quoted, but the (still depressing) statistics is available elsewhere [2].

Larsson’s wish notwithstanding, the English title makes more sense than Swedish Män som hatar kvinnor, “Men Who Hate Women”, as Lisbeth Salander, “a grown-up Pippi Longstocking”, is a (super)heroine par excellence.

Also, as I just realised, it is an almost perfect Christmas story.

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1. According to Wikipedia,

   Both Larsson’s longtime partner Eva Gabrielsson and English translator Steven T. Murray have said that Christopher MacLehose (who works for British publisher Quercus) “needlessly prettified” the English translation; as such, Murray requested he be credited under the pseudonym “Reg Keeland”. The English release also changed the title, even though Larsson specifically refused to allow the Swedish publisher to do so, and the size of Salander’s dragon tattoo; from a large piece covering her entire back, to a small shoulder tattoo.

2. The 2014 EU-wide survey shows that famously egalitarian Nordic countries also lead Europe, percent-wise, in terms of physical, sexual and psychological violence against women. This contrasts with self-perception of the frequency of said violence: for instance, only 9% of women in Finland view the gender violence as “very common”, compared to Spain’s 31% and EU-28 average 27%, while 47% of Finnish women experienced physical and/or sexual violence since the age of 15 (22% in Spain, EU-28 average 33%).