Sections
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is a competent, albeit problematic conclusion to the Millenium series, written by Stieg Larsson. The book brings together the trilogy’s best features, with a narrative that is socially engaged and deeply concerned with violence against women, but also many of its worst flaws, such as useless plotlines and dialogues full of exposition.
The story begins immediately after the end of the previous book, with protagonist Lisbeth Salander being hospitalized after her encounter with Alexander Zalachenko, a Russian spy who sought political asylum in Sweden. Since Mikael Blomkvist is threatening to publish a story on Zalachenko, some SÄPO officials, [...]
The first volume of the Millenium trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was very successful in being both an engaging thriller and a relevant social critique of the status of women in modern society. However, its sequel, The Girl Who Played with Fire, despite keeping its social aspect intact, presents a very slow-paced narrative that never seems to know exactly which characters and threads are better to focus its attention on: instead of always following the protagonist, the story often digresses, highlighting useless points of view that never interfere in the book’s climax.
It’s Lisbeth Salander who deservedly takes the lead role here. After investigating the frauds [...]
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is an efficient detective story but also a cry about the situation of women in modern society. Stieg Larsson creates, in the first volume of the Millenium trilogy, fascinating characters and an engaging plot, but excels when putting at the basis of the story the problem of how women are explored and discarded in our brutal masculine world.
The protagonist is Mikael Blomkvist, the Swedish editor-in-chief of Millenium’s monthly magazine, who was a hated, but respected journalist until he accused a powerful businessman of corruption without the necessary evidence and was rightfully sue in the process. Taking advantage of Mikael’s [...]