Post by Lara
12 September 2012
Since we moved to site on August 19th, I have read 6 books front to back. I’m not sure I’m going to manage to write a review for each of them, but I’ll do my best. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson is the first book I read here at site, and it certainly was a fun read. I feel like this is one of those books that everyone managed to read before me. I remember my college bookstore was full of Stieg Larsson novels during my time there, and I always planned to read it, but just never got around to it until I found myself living in Africa with a wealth of time on my hands.
The setting and plot of the novel differ with my current
situation in just about every way: it takes place in Sweden, where the weather
is cold and days get way longer and shorter depending on the time of year, and
it involves a twisted and dangerous mystery with violent crime at its center. Being about 7 degrees from the equator, our
days hardly shorten or lengthen at all, and obviously it’s generally hot here.
Also, we don’t have a grocer within walking distance or a train to take us to a
major city in a matter of a few hours [quick side note: our most recent trip to
Bo, 54 miles away, took us 28 hours one
way!] Also, life here in our small
town in Mende land, Sierra Leone is pretty far from dangerous. It’s not that
crime doesn’t exist, but most of the people here spend a very large portion of
their time doing things like washing clothes by hand, keeping track of
livestock, and cooking their next meal over a fire. There’s no local newspaper
that I’m aware of, and the local police seem to spend a lot of their time
waiting for something interesting to happen.
That being said, much of the action in The Girl with the Dragon
Tattoo takes place in a small island community where nearly everyone
belongs to the same family, which is not far from the reality in our town. Furthermore,
the male main character, Mikael Blomkvist, is an outsider in this small
community— needless to say, I felt like we had some things in common as I read
the novel.
Beyond the setting of the novel, the plot is complex,
violent, and intriguing. Mr. Larsson
gives different sections of the novel their own title pages, and on these pages
he lists a fact about sexual violence in Sweden, such as the percentage of
Swedish women who say they have been threatened by a man. Without going into too much detail, I’ll
point out that at least two of the female main characters are victims of sexual
abuse, and the novel does not shy away from detailing their suffering. In this sphere, I would like to point out a
few parallels to life here in Salone and at home in the states. Sexual abuse and rape are considered
important topics here in Sierra Leone, especially in the wake of a violent
civil war where rape was used as a weapon against many women and girls. Now, a decade after the official end of the
war, the focus has shifted to teenage pregnancy, which often prevents girls
from finishing school or sitting exams. The
issues that face girls and women in Sierra Leone in this sphere are really
quite similar to those that plague Swedish and American girls as well.
Another interesting thing about reading The Girl with the
Dragon Tattoo in Sierra Leone is that the internet plays a vital role in
the movement of the plot, and numerous characters rely on the constant
availability of the web. This is
something I may not have noticed if I read the book in the states, but here
where I have to pay Le 8,000-16,000 per hour as well as cross all my fingers
and toes in order to be able to check my email and possibly my Facebook page, I
was acutely aware that the way the characters relied on being able to search
the web or access a bank account online, etc. was quite different from the
range of things I am able to do online here.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Girl with the
Dragon Tattoo, and look forward to reading the next two books in the series. For anyone who is considering reading it,
please bear in mind that I may have glossed over the depth of the violence that
the novel contains, and also being a murder mystery it tended to bring out a
bit of paranoia in me while I was reading it. That being said, it’s a very
well-written book and in my opinion the author has done a fantastic job of
tying the fictitious events of the novel to the real-life threats that face
women in Sweden—and everywhere—with regard to sexual health and freedom.
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