Man of Mystery

Why do people love Stieg Larsson's novels so much? Particularly with their giant flaws?

From a piece in the New Yorker...

As for the English edition, it was apparently not subject to any such scruples. The translation was done at top speed (because Norstedts needed to show it to a film company), and then it was heavily revised by its editor, Christopher MacLehose, of Quercus Press, in London. Gabrielsson registered bitter complaints about the changes. So did the translator, Steven Murray. He actually took his name off the novels; he is credited under a pseudonym, Reg Keeland. MacLehose stands by his work. “I did edit the translation, yes,” he wrote to me, “but it isn’t a particularly interesting fact or story and it has earned me enough abuse already from the translator and from the author’s former partner. Perhaps [it is] sufficient to say that seven or eight houses in England turned it down in its original form”—Murray’s English translation—“and seven or eight in America. In its edited form, as many Americans bid for it.”

However much the book was revised, it should have been revised more. The opening may have been reworked, as Gedin says, but it still features an episode—somebody telling somebody else at length (twelve pages!) about a series of financial crimes peripheral to the main plot—that, by wide consensus, is staggeringly boring. (And, pace Gedin, it is preceded by a substantial description of a flower.) Elsewhere, there are blatant violations of logic and consistency. Loose ends dangle. There are vast dumps of unnecessary detail. When Lisbeth goes to IKEA, we get a list of every single thing she buys. (“Two Karlanda sofas with sand-colored upholstery, five Poäng armchairs, two round side tables of clear-lacquered birch, a Svansbo coffee table, and several Lack occasional tables,” and that’s just for the living room.) The jokes aren’t funny. The dialogue could not be worse. The phrasing and the vocabulary are consistently banal. (Here is Lisbeth, about to be raped: “Shit, she thought when he ripped off her T-shirt. She realized with terrifying clarity that she was out of her depth.”) I am basing these judgments on the English edition, but, if this text was the product of extensive editing, what must the unedited version have looked like? Maybe somebody will franchise this popular series—hire other writers to produce further volumes. This is not a bad idea. We’re not looking at Tolstoy here. The loss of Larsson’s style would not be a sacrifice.

The most crippling weakness of the trilogy, however, is its hero. Mikael Blomkvist is so anti-masculinist that, in a narrative where people are brandishing chainsaws, he can take no forceful action. That goes for his sex life, too, which features heavily in the plot. Mikael is irresistible to women, we are told, yet he never makes the first move. Not that Larsson’s women have a problem with this. “Are you going to come quietly or do I have to handcuff you?” one says. Lisbeth is more direct. She just walks into his bedroom in the middle of the night and plops down on him. He apparently gives all his bedmates a good time, but one wonders whether he has a good time. A girlfriend says to him that he seems to get a fair amount of action. “Yes, unfortunately,” he answers. Again and again, he tries to maneuver his relations with Lisbeth out of sex and into friendship. “Lisbeth, can you define the word friendship for me?” he asks. She is not sure how to answer. He tells her, avuncularly (he’s almost twenty years older than she), that friendship is built on respect and trust. Ugh!