The Girl Who Played with Fire and
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
By Steig Larsson
Audio Book
Library (Audio/Book)
Rating 7 of 10

A review of the first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, can be found here.

Steig Larsson has written an impressive and gripping trilogy about a government conspiracy to cover up a Swedish espionage agency’s abuse of a young girl, Lisbeth Salendar’s, rights.  This story is ultimately about, as Blomkvist, the key journalist who uncovers the story, says “the violence perpetrated against women and the men who do it.”

While the novel is a page turner (or driveway listener as the case may be), I found myself wrestling with parts of what I was listening to throughout books.  The violence perpetrated against women is at times hard to hear described.  I also found that the scenes of consensual sex were a bit overblown at times.  Ironically, while Blomkvist declares that the story is about the violence perpetrated against women and the men who do it” and he spends the entire book trying to uncover that abuse and expose it, he causes a kind of subtle violence against women (and men) by sleeping around with almost every woman in the story and hurting most of them.  Casual and recreational sex without commitment abound.

By the end of the book all the women with whom Blomkvist sleeps seem to end up hurt (or potentially hurt) by his lack of commitment to one of them.  Lisbeth fell in love with him and was hurt by his relationship with Erika Berger.  Erika is the woman with whom Blomkvist’s affair destroyed his marriage and who now openly continues the affair with the consent of her husband.  Erika finds herself feeling empty at the prospect of Blomkvist falling in love with Monica Figuerola, a police officer who comes on the scene at the end of the story and who and falls for Blomkvist and he for her.  Then there’s Harriet Vanger and Cecelia Vanger, both of whom end up in Blomkvist’s bed in the first book.  What’s going on here?!  Blomkvist’s sister, the lawyer who defends Lisbeth, sums up her brother’s sex life when she claims that it is disrespectful of all the women with whom he sleeps.  This kind of promiscuous sex isn’t nearly as violent as rape, but as much as we try to separate sex from commitment, this separation is a kind of subtle violence against the heart of both men and women.

Larson is a master storyteller, and the tale that he spins is amazing.  Because I was listening to it as an audio book, I found myself looking forward to or extending my next car ride.  I did wonder whether Larson ends up doing a disservice to women who experience violence by couching the story within such a fanciful plot.  Because the violence done to Lisbeth is done by a Russian spy defected to Sweden and a super secret section within the Swedish espionage department, it is a little too easy to toss off the implications as far fetched as well.   How many women are haunted by defected Russian spies?  How man women are beaten down by a government conspiracy?  Probably not many.  But many women are beaten by their husbands as they go about their average life.  If Larsson ultimately wanted to help women who are abused, he might have done better to take his amazing story-telling skills and turn them toward the average suburban household.  But that probably wouldn’t have been nearly as entertaining.

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