The book starts with Salandar abroad. She is enjoying her idyllic vacation and has severed contact with the few ties she has back home in Stockholm including Mikeal Blomkvist the journalist. Her way of relaxation is to curl up with a good book just like you and me. Only the book in question is – Dimensions in Mathematics by Dr. L.C. Parnault .She tries hard to find the proof for Fermat’s last theorem in her leisure time. The theorem states that no three positive integers a, b, and c can satisfy the equation an + bn = cn for any integer value of n greater than two. (i.e. the  Pythagorean theorem).This theorem was first proposed by Fermat in 1637.  In the margin of a copy of Arithmetica he famously claimed that he had a proof that was too large to fit in the margin! Salandar is puzzled by this theorem for 7 weeks, which is not a major frame of time at all considering that the proof was found only as recently as 1993! Salandar is not interested in the proof itself, she wants to discover on her own a methodical way to arrive at it.

Meanwhile, Blomkvist is busy with his new book-publishing venture, which aims to expose the sexual abuse of underage women in Sweden. This book would implicate some of the highly respected elements in Swedish society.  All of a sudden without the slightest warning, the author of this book Svensson and his girlfriend who is his research partner are murdered. The book is in the last stages of completion and on the verge of publication. Circumstantial evidence points in the direction of Salandar as the guilty party. Blomkvist is convinced in his heart of hearts of Salandar’s innocence. His journalistic instincts provoke him to get to the bottom of the mystery and in true Kalle Blomkvist (the detective in Astrid Lindgren’s novels) fashion he starts his own private investigation.

The novel picks up when Salandar becomes a fugitive suspected by the police for triple murder. Newspapers publish horribly distorted facts about her personal life in which her violent tendencies and refusal to cooperate with the authorities are highlighted. She finds herself chased by gangsters at all hours but manages to outwit them each time. Salandar is a survivor determined to get even with anyone who puts her in harms way.  Life is not fair to Salandar but she does not even expect it to be fair. She accepts that there are people out to get you and the authorities will not bother to put them in place if it does not suit their interests.

Angry young woman

In the first book, Salandar’s character piques the reader’s curiosity. One wants to know more about this strange person and this desire is fulfilled to a certain extent in the second book. In this book Salandar is the girl who plays with fire by attempting to kill her bitterest enemy by throwing a Molotov cocktail in his car and using a lighter to set him ablaze on the streets.

Her troubled childhood sheds some light on why she is the way she is:

1.       As a young girl, Salandar had seen her mother repeatedly abused by her father so much so that her mother ultimately ends up brain dead in a clinic for the rest of her life. As a result, Salandar hates men who hate women.

2.       In her school, there was a dimwitted bully who enjoyed beating up kids half his size. One day he chose to pick on Salandar and the stupid girl who refused to give up and back out amused other kids. She took beating after beating until there was not an ounce of strength left in her. The next day she came to school with a huge bat and whacked him on the head leaving him senseless. This episode was reported to the school authorities and Salandar had to withstand the worst of it, as she was a highly uncommunicative kid.

3.        The incident, which finally established her as a lunatic, took place in the Tunnelbana (train station). A pedophile kept feeling her as other passengers watched with on, finally she attacked him with a violent rage and severely injured him. The police caught Salandar and held her in custody. However a woman who observed everything from the beginning persistently pursued the matter with the police and brought it to their attention that the man was misbehaving with Salandar and had provoked her to take action.

4.       The turning point in Salandar’s life occured when ‘All the evil’ took place. She was locked away in an asylum and no amount of explaining did any good. She was simply refused an audience. For a long time Stieg Larsson systematically whets the readers appetite for discovering what, ’All the evil’ stands for. When finally revealed, the plot seems quite fantastic indeed but it does manage to take you by shock.

Society does not look kindly upon women who fight back and respond to infringement of their basic rights with a violent rage instead of with helplessness. Salandar was declared incompetent and appointed a legal guardian to take care of her because she chose to fight back tooth and nail instead of whimpering in a corner. The book shows us that even in a highly developed society the basic human rights, especially those of women are easily exploited and it is hard to get justice. Larsson witnessed the gang rape of a young girl when he was a teenager and he never forgave himself for not being able to help her.  That is the reason his books focus on the abuse of women.

This book stops almost abruptly but at a logical point unlike its predecessor whose ending is extended quite a bit. The 3rd book - ‘The girl who kicked the hornet’s nest’ starts where this one left off and for the first 100 pages or so, I felt that it had nothing new to offer. It just went on beating about the bush concerning the events of ‘The girl who played with fire’. 

About the author

It is easy to see that Larsson has modeled the character of Blomkvist after himself. Larsson was the editor of the anti racist magazine Expo and the graphics designer of the largest Swedish news agency, Tidningarnas TelegrambyrÃ¥ (TT) between 1977 and 1999. He was an expert on [censored] associations and he drew on this expertise in ‘The girl with the Dragon Tattoo’.  He wrote the millennium trilogy in the evenings after work for fun. Never in his wildest dreams would he have thought that he would become so famous worldwide. He gave a couple on interviews on Swedish television but overall was a retiring person who kept away from the media’s glare. He never made more than $30,000 per annum in his entire lifetime and ironically, after his death his books have amassed a fortune for his family. Tourists of all nationalities are flocking to see the ‘Millennium Tour’ in Stockholm which shows all the spots frequented by the characters in Blomkvist’s novel.