The US edition of the first book of the Millenium Trilogy.
I have been meaning to write this post for a long time now, but held off until The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest*, the final installment of Steig Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy was finally published in the US. Starting with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, I have been completely obsessed with this series—so much so that rather than wait for the US publication, I tracked down a copy of the UK edition at a New Delhi bookstore in December.
If you haven’t read these books, you must. You really must. Lisbeth Salander, the “girl” of the titles, is without question one of the most original—and kickass—literary heroines of all time, and the novels are as brilliant and iconoclastic as she is. But beyond that, they’re an extraordinary high-water mark in commercial fiction because, as Chip McGrath of the New York Times wrote: “[The Millenium Trilogy] also has an outspoken feminist subtext, hardly a typical feature of crime novels.”
This is not your typical “crime novel”, with a dick-swinging, hard-boiled, hard-drinking man with a gun fighting off other tough guys. Instead:
The villains are “men who hate women” (the title given the first novel in Sweden, but fortunately changed): rapists, child abusers, sex traffickers, even killers of women.
At the center of the action is the unforgettable Lisbeth Salander:
Salander is 24 when we first meet her but looks like a teenager. She’s elfin, barely 90 pounds, and has dyed black hair “short as a fuse.” Abused as a child and wrongfully institutionalized, Salander engages in dysfunctional, even autistic, behavior that might just reflect an understandable skepticism about human goodness and potential. She exists off the grid, really — having as little to do with people and institutions as possible and following an avenging ethical code of her own devising — and in the first novel makes a living of sorts as a researcher for a security firm, where she benefits from two spectacular assets: a photographic memory and wizardly computer skills. She can hack into anything.
That description is courtesy of Patrick Anderson at the Washington Post. The New York Times’s eminent literary critic Michiko Kakutani says of Salander:
…Stieg Larsson’s fierce pixie of a heroine, is one of the most original characters in a thriller to come along in a while — a gamin, Audrey Hepburn look-alike but with tattoos and piercings, the take-no-prisoners attitude of Lara Croft and the cool, unsentimental intellect of Mr. Spock. She is the vulnerable victim turned vigilante; a willfully antisocial girl, once labeled mentally incompetent by the state’s social services system, who has proved herself to be as incandescently proficient as any video game warrior.
In several wink-y twists, Larsson even draws parallels between Lisbeth and Pippi Longstocking, Astrid Lindgren’s strangely solitary and inexplicably powerful heroine of Swedish children’s books. There’s a darkness to the Pippi Longstocking stories, even though they were written for children, and that dark undercurrent becomes a raging torrent in the Millenium Trilogy. Larsson furiously deconstructs the stereotype of Sweden as an egalitarian, socialist utopia. In the Sydney Morning Herald, Robert Dessaix writes:
Larsson has lacerating comments to make about contemporary Swedish society. His favourite targets are violence against women, the incompetence and cowardice of investigative journalists, the moral bankruptcy of big capital and the virulent strain of Nazism still festering away beneath all that shiny Swedish fairness.
Evil has many faces in the Millenium Trilogy; Larsson did not shy away from the seamy, the disturbing, the violent, the psychotic and the downright terrifying. There is sexual abuse, sex trafficking, war crimes, incest, domestic violence, rape, gay-bashing, neo-fascism, and flagrant abuse of individual rights at every level of the government and judiciary. Patrick Anderson made much of the trilogy’s
“…passionate attack on sexism….At the start of this third volume, out of the blue, Larsson tells us that “from antiquity to modern times, there are many stories of female warriors, of Amazons” and digresses on women warriors in history and myth. He is clearly (and perhaps unnecessarily) telling us that Lisbeth is not simply a lone woman who has been persecuted but a mythic figure, an avenger fighting on behalf of all women against oppression.”
As the fame of the series has grown, the tattooed, violent, anti-social Lisbeth Salander has been elevated to the level of feminist icon. And no wonder—the scene in which she avenges herself on the court-appointed guardian who brutally rapes her is the most memorable payback since Lorena Bobbitt. It even led one Gawker commenter to remark that jurors deciding the fate of rapists should all ask themselves: WWLSD?
But Lisbeth is not Stieg Larsson’s only outstanding female character. He also created the business tycoon Harriet Vanger—herself the victim of horrific crimes—the fierce human rights lawyer, Annika Giannini, the sophisticated and unsually astute publisher Erika Berger, the punk singer and kickboxer Miriam Wu, and more than one heroic female police detective. Unlike traditional crime novels, where women are sidekicks at best, Larsson’s female characters are the engine that drives the narrative. Mikael Blomkvist, the trilogy’s hero, is not so much the protagonist as the partner in crime and aide de camp to any number of talented, dynamic women. He moves in their orbit, instead of vice versa. Even Blomkvist’s sexual adventuring with some of the women is portrayed merely as a pleasurable aspect of their partnership rather than the fictional hero’s usual entitlement: bedding as many willing women as the author can throw in his path. In fact, in several cases, Blomkvist is the seduced, rather than the seducer, which he accepts with good humor and without any sense that his masculinity has been diminished. Somewhat surprsingly, despite the fact that the novels tackle misogyny and sexual violence head-on, they’re tremendously sex-positive, as Patrick Anderson pointed out:
The good people in these books — including Mikael, Lisbeth and Mikael’s longtime lover, Erika — embrace consensual sex in all its manifestations: straight, gay, extramarital, serial, kinky, whatever.
Sexual politics pervade the Millenium Trilogy, from the bedroom to the boardroom to the courtroom. Even as he rails against the most despicable violations of women’s rights, Larsson also has a finely-tuned ear for subtler forms of misogyny, and he doesn’t miss a chance to skewer those as well. This is how his character, Erika Berger, describes her first encounter with new male colleagues when she takes over as publisher of a prestigious daily newspaper:
What irritated her the most was that they kept brushing off her arguments with patronizing smiles, making her feel like a teenager being quizzed on her homework. Without actually uttering a single inappropriate word, they displayed toward her an attitude that was so antediluvian it was almost comical. You shouldn’t worry your pretty head over complex matters, little girl.
Any woman who’s spent any time in the workplace—no matter how powerful she’s become—has had that experience. The passage made me gnash my teeth in sympathetic recognition. What’s surprising, and gratifying, is how well a male writer pinpointed and described it; presumably Larsson had witnessed this kind of sexism during his years as a journalist. Unlike most men, however, he was not oblivious to it, nor did he dismiss it. Instead he portrays it bluntly and negatively, then goes out of his way to make sure Berger gets her revenge on the old-boys network.
In another memorable scene, Blomkvist, investigating the death of an Eastern European prostitute, bears down on a man who describes how he’d had sex with the victim when she’d been drugged and tied to a bed. “You raped her.” Blomkvist insists. The suspect throws out all the familiar excuses for why it wasn’t rape: she was a prosititute, she didn’t struggle, someone had left her there for him, he was just the customer… Blomkvist refuses to let the man off the hook, and his obvious contempt and continued insistance that what happened was nothing short of violent rape, made me want to stand up and cheer. There needs to be a hell of a lot more of that kind of moral condemnation in our society, and Larsson wasn’t afraid to use his novel as a soapbox for it, even though some might have discouraged him for fear of alienating potential readers.
Stieg Larsson died in 2004 at age 50, before the first book in the trilogy was published. His friend Mikael Ekman, a fellow journalist, told the New York Times:
“Stieg was a true idealist, a feminist, a believer in freedom. He dedicated his whole life to fighting the right-wing extremists. The biggest thing Stieg did was not the books. It was the work he did for democracy.”
I would argue that these books are “work for democracy.” Popular fiction can open readers’ eyes to injustice and change cultural attitudes, sometimes even more quickly than the crusading journalism that was Stieg Larsson’s day job. The enormous popularity of the Millenium Trilogy, which spans multiple languages and cultures, shows it’s possible to incorporate moral outrage into commercial fiction without sacrificing a great story or a wide readership. These books deserve the largest possible audience, not only because they are terrific, tightly plotted thrillers, but because Larsson’s call to arms against sexism and exploitation is relevant to every society and in every reader’s life.
*The UK edition is titled The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest. For some reason, Knopf, the US publisher, gives it as a singular: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. This American usage error irritates me. Hornets do not live one per nest; the saying is only meaningful because kicking the nest makes hornets swarm—all of them!
I am just finishing the first book in the series and, even though the writing is clunky (and honestly I think the translation was probably hurried; as a former editor, I’m catching stuff the translator should have taken care of), I love this book. His characters are complex and amazing, and it’s really the draw of the novel for me. I’m glad to hear it continues in the next two books, which I’m definitely going to read.
I read somewhere that Larsson had planned ten novels. Just one reason why his early death was a tragedy.
I’ll probably pick them up at some point, but I’ve heard mixed reviews of these books: that the female characters are awesome but that every single man in the book is so idiotic and/or evil that it becomes almost farcical. I was also told that Larsson co-wrote the books with his (female) partner, who was not credited but may help to explain his uncanny ability to pinpoint and describe subtle sexism in the workplace, etc.
@Yvan: Absolutely untrue about the male characters. Many of them, including the hero, Blomqvist, are moral, thoughtful and pro-woman. In particular, one of Lisbeth’s court-appointed guardians is a heroic, kind man who defends and empathizes with her better than anyone.
Larsson did not co-write the books with his female partner. She has never made that claim, nor has anyone else. Click on the link to Chip McGrath’s article for a long article about her (her name is Eva Gabrielsson) and her battle with Larsson’s father and brother for control of his estate (she and Larsson were never legally married, but were together for 25 years).
@Amanda: I agree the English is sometimes clunky in the first book, whose translation was comissioned by a film production company rather than by Quercus, the publisher. The others are better, I think. There’s also a long backstory to how many books were supposed to be in the series—Larsson’s companion claims to have parts of a fourth and fifth book on a laptop of his, but is withhholding them as part of her legal battle with his father and brother (that’s mentioned in the Chip McGrath article I link to).
But I have to say, the three-book arc works pretty well. Most of the dangling ends are tied up by the third book, which doesn’t end on a cliff-hanger like the first two.
If you liked these, you might also enjoy Nicola Griffith’s crime/mystery novels. A haunted but extremely kickass lesbian protagonist with very feminist themes.
Oh, and here is her blog: http://asknicola.blogspot.com/
I know everyone loves these books, but I read the first one and just could not get into either of the main characters, and found the crimes discovered toward the end extremely disturbing. I think the Harpy book review needs to come with a very large trigger warning for violence and sexual violence.
I’ve been debating back and forth about whether I want to read these books or not. Generally I try to avoid forms of entertainment that are heavy on violence against women. And I also dislike stories where some terrible, violent act happens (usually to a woman or a child) that makes it OK for the audience to cheer the protagonist’s bloody, revenge-motivated rampage, for example, the movie Taken, which I was forced to watch on a bus once. Any thoughts as to whether these aspects of the books might bother the squeamish feminist?
I read them all in Swedish, and the writing is pretty damn clunky in Larsson’s own voice. There is also an annoying amount of Swenglish — English words with a Swedish article or suffix — which makes me kind of mad, since Swedish is a rich language in its own right. Authors like Astrid Lindgren, Selma Lagerlof and Ingmar Bergman all relished it and did it justice, but Larsson didn’t.
It’s a pity he died so soon — a good editor could have worked with him and improved his writing, while keeping his ideas and characters intact.
@Ms M: Sorry, I didn’t mean to be triggering. I’m sort of puzzled as to why you think this should have come with a trigger warning. I didn’t mention any specifics other than that the books contain scenes of sexual violence. Aside from the fact that they’re intrinsic to the plot, I did that because I wouldn’t want anyone would say “oh, you didn’t warn me!” Was there something I should have done differently?
@JennyK: Generally, I avoid books with graphic rape/sexual violence scenes because it often feels gratuitous, as though the author needs something bad and shocking and just defaults to that out of laziness. In this case, there’s definitely a LOT of violence—although not all sexual—but it works in context. It’s definitely not for the squeamish, though.
Becky,
I worded my comment poorly. I should have said the Harpy book review should have mentioned that THE BOOKS should come with a trigger warning for violence etc. The review you wrote was really well done, and was not needing a trigger warning.
Jenny K,
I usually avoid books that include violence against women / children like you mention, and while done in a different way in these books, they were too much for me. As a heavy Sci-Fi reader it is not necessarily the violence, but how it is done that I have problems with. I had a problem with the first book in this series.
Yes, def. agree that if it were possible to put a “trigger warning” sticker on books, these books deserve them.
I finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo this weekend. I agree that the language/translation was a little clunky. I found myself laughing out loud at a handful of the word choices (I haven’t heard “anon” used in anything I’ve read since Shakespeare).
That said, I really love Lisbeth Salander. I suspect she’ll grow on me even more as I read the other 2 books in the series. I also loved just how populated with women the book was. None of them were simple window dressing characters and were highly individualized even if their roles were relatively minor. You’ve mentioned Harriet Vanger and Erika Berger, who are both great characters, but I also really enjoyed Cecelia and Anita Vanger, Susana the cafe owner, Blomkvist’s ex-wife and daughter, and even Isabella Vanger. These characters felt like human beings to me, not caricatures painted with broad strokes like so many of the minor female characters in popular fiction.
It makes me sad that I, that we, should have to make such a fuss over the overt feminism of this trilogy. It’s not that I’m not thrilled that Larsson is a feminist and has infused every word of his stories with that feminism. It’s that overt feminism in literature is so fucking rare. Even in books written by women I might consider feminist, the politics often remain subdued. It’s about time we have some novels that are unapologetic in their feminism as Lisbeth Salander is about who she is.
I just want to clarify that I’m in no way sad that you’re covering the trilogy, BeckySharper, because the books deserve all the attention they’re getting. What makes me sad is that we have to make a deal out of these novels and only these novels because we have so few others to hold up as recent examples of feminist literature.
I enjoyed the books – especially the insight into Sweden and its politics. I have also seen the Swedish film of the first book- with subtitles- here in Australia, after reading the books. The actor playing Salander was absolutely brilliant! (I could be wrong, but I think there was talk of an American remake of the Swedish film.)
Yes, June, with Kristen Stewart and George Clooney. I hope that was a joke!!
Ah, I can wait no longer, I HAVE to buy these this weekend.
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While I haven’t read the books, I found some aspects of the first film really disturbing – the scene where Salander gets revenge on her abusive guardian is basically played as a rape, and the audience is invited to celebrate his comeuppance – to think that he got what he deserved. But if you allow the possibility of a ‘deserved raping’, you’re on pretty dodgy moral grounds.
Plus it was officially the most predictable, formulaic story ever.
I’m told the books are much better though, so they’re next on my reading list!
@june – I saw the movie in Australia as well.. it was good, but Blomquist was not cast well.
I loved the trilogy – it is one of the few fiction series I have read over the last couple of years. The plot and character development are great, and the overt feminism makes them even more appealing to me. Though as indicated above, there can be some quite triggering situations, but I felt that those situations were not gratuitous.
@Becky – thanks for reviewing them!
I honestly didn’t know much about these books until I read this post. Maybe I’ve been living in a vacuum? But you’ve convinced me I need to head to the book store right away.
I’ve had “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” languishing on my bookshelf for weeks! What a fool I am!
@June & JetGirl: I heard Natalie Portman. Ugh. Too horrible to contemplate. Although I might just be able to see Clooney as Blomqvist.
I haven’t seen the movie, although PSoul did and liked it, and I generally trust her taste in film. I’ll probably get it from Netflix at some point. Part of my reluctance to see it is because I have a vision in my head of what Lisbeth looks like and I know if I see the film it will never be the same!
I almost never read contemporary fiction (not enough hours in the day), but you have convinced me. …after I get through the stack of non-fic next to my bed.
This has made me think I should maybe give it a try. I also had the impression they were full of gratuitous violence, and the little snippets I read did have a fairly off-putting style, so I had thought I’d leave it. But if BeckySharper recommends it…
Besides, I’m starting to think it’s one of those things that you have to have read if you want to keep up in social conversations!
For everyone who’s concerned about the violence—I agree completely with what Mackey said about even the triggering situations not being gratuitous. After all, violence is the chief weapon of the Patrarchy, and if you’re going to write a call to arms about violence against women or sexual exploitation of women, you can’t NOT depict those things. The good news is that in this novel the women—and not just Lisbeth—fight back, and yes, they do so violently at times.
Besides, you can always just skim those bits or turn the page if they’re too squicky for you. I frequently do that.
I too adore Lisbeth Salander as a character and would read 1000 books with her in them (even though I have somewhat mixed feelings about the rest of how the existing books played out). She kicks so much ass and is such a wonderful vision of a woman understanding and subverting the system that has oppressed her.
Another thing that I really appreciated, especially about the first book, is that even though it involves a lot of sexual violence, that violence is consistently portrayed as horrifying. There’s not even the hint of titillation, like there is in so many scenes of sexual assault in the movies or wherever–the book very clearly depicts rape as NOT SEXY and the people who find it sexy as severely fucked-up criminal reprobates. Even though the violent scenes are really hard to read because of their brutality, it was such a breath of fresh air to read a book that understands violence against women as violence and not secretly erotic.
I also loved these books (the first 2 anyways, planning to start the 3rd this weekend), but was initially very reluctant to read them as a) I’m not really into crime novels, and b) I was afraid this was yet another excuse for an eroticized male-fantasy version of a heroine. Sooooo not the case.
As for the writing style, its definitely clunky (more so with the first novel), and the translation could have been better, but after reading the NY Times article about Larsson, it makes more sense. He was a newspaper reporter who clearly had something to say, and while his style may not be up there with the literary greats, he is a good story-teller, and the pacing and suspense of these books make up for the simplistic style.
Great summer reading. Though, I agree that some scenes are not for the faint of heart. I’ve actually hesitated seeing the film for that reason… it’s one thing to read those scenes in a book, but another to have to watch them play out on screen.
Thanks for reviewing these Becky!
JetGirl,
I read them all in Swedish as well, but really liked them, and disagree with your opinion on Larsson’s writing style. The other authors and filmmaker you mentioned were of an entirely different generation. I loved how Larsson mixed in conversational (modern) Swenglish– this is how I talk!
I have read the first two and enjoyed them. I’m not a big fan of violence, but at least the descriptions of the sexual violence were subdued and lacking any erotic elements.
One minor but refreshing thing for me was that for the most part, people’s looks were hardly described at all, with the exception of Salander and some of the bad guys. Too often novels are way too full of descriptions of what the female characters look like or are wearing. For some reason that’s a pet peeve of mine.
Fair enough, Tanja. I use plenty of Swenglish too. But I guess I’m also a lit snob, which is why I almost threw “The DaVinci Code” across the room, the lousy writing bugged me so much.
I use thelocal.se for my source of English-language Swedish news. They reported in January that his life partner, Eva Gabrielsson, does claim to have done more than just proofread. She admitted this after several people that knew HIM raised doubts about his writing ability. One article says:
Journalist Anders Hellberg worked with Larsson at the TT news agency for a few years straddling the end of the seventies and the start of the eighties.
While Hellberg lauds Larsson for his research skills and encyclopedic knowledge of Sweden, he also stresses the extreme verbal limitations of a man whose death predated a rapid rise to the top of the world’s best-seller lists.
Gabrielsson says:
“I have a hard time seeing what is solely Stieg and solely me in Millennium’s language, contents, and so on. It’s not about who wrote it down. Or edited.”
I could easily believe that he may have written the first drafts, and then she “polished” them.
Also, they report that the leads would be played by Brad Pitt and Carey Mulligan, in the US version. Personally, I thought the casting in the Swedish version was great. I remember thinking “only outside Hollywood would the characters look like real people, of the actual AGE the characters are supposed to be.” I hope they release the subtitled versions here, too, and not just the Hollywood versions of 2 and 3.
@Catnmus: That doesn’t really sound like a claim of co-authorship to me.
Even if Gabrielsson edited or “polished” Larsson’s drafts by making suggestions or even by line-editing the manuscript, that would not make her the co-author by any publishing industry standard.
Bear in mind, every paid book doctor or publishing house editor does EXACTLY that kind of work without claiming co-authorship.
I rarely purchase books in hardcover, but I ran out at lunch to pick up Hornets’ Nest because I couldn’t wait to read it. It’s been sitting on my desk taunting me, and I suspect I’ll be reading it for most of the evening. It took me a while to get into the first one, I think primarily because of the translation, but once I did I couldn’t put it down. The second one was infinitely better as far as the translation goes, and I am SO excited to start the third.
One of the things I love about Salander is her resourcefulness. Not only is she a woman, she looks like the very definition of frailty – 90 pounds, under 5 feet tall, resembles a teenage boy. Her build suggests she’s an easy target, but those who target her find out quickly that she’s far from it. And that’s primarily because she’s smart and thorough and courageous, not because she’s got some super-strength or ability that totally lacks in verisimilitude. I also love how unapologetic she is about being fierce and kickass. She has no interest in paying even lip service to conventional femininity, which I admire.
So yeah, cosign. Highly recommended (for those who can tolerate non-gratuitous, but graphic, violence and sexual assault).
I’ve also been reading Denise Mina’s mysteries — she’s Scottish, and her female protagonists’ struggles to extricate themselves from their Irish Catholic families (and to have careers, and to be human beings) really struck a chord with me. She takes on violence against women and children from the inside, and she’s harrowing and brilliant on class, alcoholism, the Church, and both the pleasures and restrictions of a being part of a close-knit family and community. Here’s a good interview with her:http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/jul/29/crimebooks.features
I read the first 150 pages of the first book, and just could not get into it. I know people love them, but I found it extremely meh. I do wonder if it had something to do with the translation, which struck me as clunky.
Oh, how I love a good revenge story.
Are there very vivid descriptions of violent physical torture in these books? Not that your average instance of sexual violence isn’t torture, but I have developed a pretty good way to deal with descriptions of sexual violence–I can easily imagine/see it as a sort of standard, unsingular event, with no specific details. But with descriptions of torture, I have trouble ignoring the details, which then bore into my brain and make me sick. So I can handle “she killed him in such and such way with such and such blood everywhere,” but any of those torture-porn-esque movies, with scary people in masks forcing people to chop off their own legs or shoot their dogs or such, make me feel dizzy just to think about.
But I’d love to read these books if I could handle the violence. I just know that once I read one, I won’t be able to stop until I finish them, and if they’re too violent for me I’ll have nightmares for the rest of the summer, and won’t get any sleep.
@Cimorene: I agree with the other commenters who’ve said the violence isn’t gratuitious, and I don’t think it’s especially graphic.
Larsson tells you what happened, but the tone is matter-of fact and journalistic instead of masturbatory. He never gets into that really nasty fetishistic second-by-second description of torture/rape/violence that a lot of crime writers do. That kind of writing always infuriates and sickens me; I wouldn’t recommend a book that featured scenes like that.
I don’t know if this is true or not, but I heard that the main character rapes someone, and that there are extra marital affairs. Please tell me this is not true. The books sound interesting but I don’t want to read a series where rape and cheating are portrayed as a good thing.
(I’m not bugged that their is rape and cheating, just that they are supposedly shown as good things the reader should cheer for)
@Kiki: Do you think I would have written in praise of books where we’re supposed to cheer for rape? At no point in this series is rape portrayed as something “the reader should cheer for”—as I think the post makes perfectly clear.
The main character, Lisbeth, is a rape victim, not a rapist. As for the “cheating”, one of the main characters has an open marriage, and has an extra-marital relationship with the full knowledge and consent of her husband. We’re neither supposed to cheer for it nor condemn it—it’s portrayed as a personal choice between consenting adults.
I just finished it. I started it at 11 last night and didn’t stop reading it until I finished it at 7 this morning. It was good. The violence was alluded to but it definitely didn’t make me sick–well, actually it did, but only in the general Oh the Patriarchy I Hate You kind of way, not the I Can’t Get This Horrific Image Out of My Head kind of way. I can handle the first–it does summarize my day-to-day way of living, after all. But the second fucks me up too bad to handle it well and I end up a weeping mess.
I’ll refrain from further musings so’s to not be too spoiler-y.
Now I must go read the rest of the series. Thank you, internet, for providing me with instant BookCrack.
Wow, Cimorene! You get 1,000 extra points for devouring that book so quickly!
Glad you liked it! You’ll enjoy the others…the 3rd is particularly satisfying.
@BeckySharper
Thanks for clearing that up for me.
Anecdotal, but something that makes me wonder: in Spanish, the titles are translated as “Los hombres que no amaban a las mujeres” (the men who didn’t love women), “La chica que soñaba con una cerilla y un bidón de gasolina” (the girl who dreamed about a match and a can of gasoline) and “La reina en el palacio de las corrientes de aire” (the queen in the drafty palace). I don’t speak Swedish but, intuitively, I’d say the Spanish translation is truer to the original titles. Anybody have any thoughts on why the English translation departs so much from the original?
Apart from maybe sounding less clunky and/or more marketable, I think this change shifts the focus of the novels, especially in the first one, in which Blomkvist is as central as Salander, yet the title construes the novel as being mostly about her.
@Gorda: It’s a good question. I actually disagree about the Spanish title. It is softer than the Swedish, and by softening the word “hate”, they removed some of the shock value that Larsson intended. I would have translated it into Spanish as Los hombres que odiaban a las mujeres.
As for the English titles, my guess is that the publisher prefered the repetition of “girl who” because it links the books thematically, which is a common style for mystery series. I also think the colloquialism “castles in the air” and “can of gasoline” don’t work quite as well in English, so the (UK) publisher chose ones that are more familiar to an English-speaking audience.
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