Marked for Life

Meet a girl with a tattoo who could haunt you for a long time to come.

It’s almost the end of the year, so it’s an unfair request to make. But what the hell. If you are willing to read one work of fiction this year (or in the one month remaining), read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (and again—so many qualifiers, sorry—it’s only the first volume of the Millennium Trilogy, the Swedish thrillers sweeping the US and Europe that don’t seem to have made an impact in India yet). Okay, so, if you are willing to read three works of fiction this year, read the Millennium Trilogy.

The first hint I got was when I noticed that every mail sent by Open’s ardent reader and critic Ruprekha had a bottom tagline, ‘Do we have a Lisbeth Salander somewhere in each one of us?’ So one day I wrote to her: ‘What is a Lisbeth Salander?’ Hours later, totally coincidentally, I was reading Vanity Fair, and there was Christopher Hitchens, a writer I admire much, writing about Lisbeth Salander. Ruprekha was contemptuous that we journalists would only take notice of a book if Vanity Fair or Hitchens wrote about it, but anyway, on Saturday evening, I bought The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I finished it by 10 pm, Sunday. All 550 pages.

It is an extraordinary thriller, with a convoluted plot, a highly innovative take on the classic ‘locked-room mystery’, with the mystery dating 37 years back! What adds to the glamour (a fact well exploited by its publishers) is that its author died suddenly (no foul play suspected by anyone but extreme conspiracy theorists; after all, he smoked 80 cigarettes a day and did no exercise), shortly before his first novel was printed. But. It is in the tradition of Scandinavian thrillers, exemplified by the works of Maj Sjowall and Per Warloo’s Martin Beck novels (which I hate, despite all critical acclaim), and Peter Hoeg’s Miss Smilla’s Sense of Snow (which is brilliant, but, in my opinion, next best to Dragon Tattoo), a form of writing where you can sense the early twilights and winter that the sky ineffably lends to the soul.

And this is the only paragraph that is important to anyone who is not a thriller fan: please read on after the next sentence. Dragon Tattoo is the most important leftist-plus-gender-sensitive text in crime fiction in decades, perhaps ever. And (the next sentence) every journalist who takes her/himself seriously should read it if she/he still feels that it’s not just a job. Because, Dragon Tattoo is the most bitter examination of journalistic ethics that Europe has produced.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was written by Stieg Larsson, who edited a fearless Swedish magazine called Expo, which was openly left-wing, made no compromises, and cut to the bone of Swedish society, governance and polity. His books (yes, only one of which I have read, but the next one I have started on) are crime novels with such a thorough foundation of social justice ideology that only a moron would finish them without some sense of an eerily hovering uber-text over his/her head.

It’s not rocket science. Every section of Dragon Tattoo starts with a statistic, for example: ‘46% of Swedish women have been subjected to violence by a man.’ And then there’s Salander, a 4’11” tall 24-year-old woman who weighs 40 kg, looks like she is 14, has been called (and abused as) a freak throughout her life—by supposedly the greatest welfare state in the history of humankind, and is a genius hacker. She fights, every day of her life, because she is incapable of ever feeling like a victim. She is one of the greatest fictional characters created in—and for—our times. She needed to be thought up.

In life, the author, Stieg Larsson, described himself—among other things—as a ‘feminist’. It’s an old and tired word, not even a word that women of a certain future would even respond kindly to. But it conveys so much, this word, that it will always be around us, instantly comprehensible, without time-wasting discussions about nuances.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Lisbeth Salander, make things so much simpler. But not less truer in any way. And I’ve done a book review without talking about the story in any way!

About The Author

Sandipan Deb

Sandipan Deb is an IIT-IIM graduate who wandered into journalism after reading a quote from filmmaker George Lucas — “Everyone cage door is open” — and has stayed there (in journalism, not a cage) for the past 19 years. He has written a book on the IITs.