Book Review
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
4/5 stars
"Not a bad book, but it doesn't show me all that much about Swedish life."
*******

To read a fiction book is to live a possible life.

In the minds of a lot of American people, Scandinavian countries are Some Abstract Thing that they only want to bring up when they want to make some discussion about how "socialism really can work because they do it in the Nordic countries."

This book gives me an impression of what life MAY BE like in Sweden--at least around the early aughts and before the Muslim invasion. (Of course, it's nothing like a James Michener book - - but there is enough local color to be interesting.)

I do wonder about the veracity of a lot of things here: for example, if you did not know that the average wait time for an apartment in Sweden is 9 years....... You would not find it from reading this book. (All the characters here have multiple apartments to choose from; the female protagonist was under guardianship for most of her life, and she couldn't even fill out an application for an apartment because she didn't have control of enough assets to do it. And even past the point when her guardianship was relaxed, she still would have needed another 9 years to wait.)

Sweden seems to be a sparsely populated (about a third lower than the US, itself already sparsely populated) and racially homogeneous country about the size of California.

Some things that I can deduce:

1. Sweden seems to have a lot more coastline than the United States, which may explain some of the openness to outside cultures. (It has the second best level of English of a non-native speaking country in the world --second only to the Netherlands). Lots of American bands were mentioned, such as the Eurythmics. Elvis even showed up a couple of times in here, although he had been dead longer than most of the characters have been alive at this point.

2. The Swedes seem to be orthopractically Christian. There are lots of Christian holidays there for which everything was closed, and they were ones that we have not heard of in the United States.

I get the impression that the erosion of Christianity there (they are still 2/3 Christian, by the way) was not something that took place through a bunch of culture wars or legal edicts.

It was just something that slowly burned itself out over time, and there is still a lot of residue from that era in history. (This is very similar to the way that Chinese people orient buildings based on principles of feng shui/Chinese Geomancy-- even though it's not an active part of people's life as much as it once was.)

3. Puritanism was never a movement there; Lots of characters in this book have open sexual relationships in a matter of fact way and without much internal angst.

4. The legal system there is different, but it is consistent. It's definitely not English common law. And, people can be put in jail for slander. (That's much of the action of this book.)

5. The country seems to be very provincial. For a place that's no bigger than California, you wouldn't imagine that there are so many places that the native speaker could go and not understand the local accent. (Norsjö. Also, there was mention of "strong Norrland" accent a few times.)

Can you imagine someone saying "You have a very strong Northern California accent; Can you switch into Standard English"?

The characters themselves are just a bit past the point of plausibility.

1. People plan on espionage missions with dozens and dozens of steps and none of them go wrong.

2. Everybody speaks two or three languages (native speaker level, of course), and it's very easy for the female protagonist to slip into flawless German with a Norwegian accent for purposes of an espionage mission (p.615)

3. We have this person who was never able to sit down in a classroom anywhere, that is a masterful hacker and can get into everybody else's private files as easily as anyone else can access the public library.

And of course, people don't have any cyber security experts and they always leave everything laying around in such a way as to produce maximum exposure.
*******

It's pretty clear who the author is based on many events in the book:

1. All of the bad people in the book are male;

2. There seem to be (male) sexual abusers and sexual sadists on every corner.

3. (p.627) The author presents some of his warmed over Marxism ("surplus value") having the protagonist flap on about how the stock market doesn't provide value and isn't relevant to the "productive" Swedish economy.

4. Of course, the businessman have to be combination pimps / mobsters/generally bad guys.

5. Of course, businesses are meant to be morally obligated to employ people, at least if you believe what the characters voice.

6. People that are the best businessman also have Nazi affiliations.

How convenient.

Nota Bene: This book is not written in American English. The reader will have to deal with "rucksacks"/"knickers"/"anon" and the like throughout the book.

Verdict: I would not pay much more than $5 for this book. It was a very easy read, and the plot kept the reader involved.

No plans to keep this book, nor reread it.

No plans to read further books in this series.

Just glad that I was able to see what all the fuss was about.

New Vocabulary

öre
exiguous
calcerous
anon
skål
tunnelbana
eka boat
Norrland
Epiphany Day
Aquavit
glögg
Whitsuntide
Midsummer
dogsbody
Val McDermid
Konsum
camisole
halon
Fru
Advokat
PET bottle (Polyethylene terephthalate)¢¢
Practical Pig Complex
Walpurgis Night
aber natürlich