While I'm no card-carrying member of the F*eminists, I don't think this is a very feminist book, nor a tome that can be considered life-affirming for any species on this planet. And I'm not just saying that because this is a book carelessly littered with tortured, raped and, frequently, dead, bodies. I'm not saying that just because it's an all-around stinky book from the more depoliticized standpoints of style and intellect. Well, maybe I'm saying that a little--this guy gets it:
No, I do not have the authority for such takedowns. (Plus, it's already been done superbly here). To give voice to my critique, which concerns the main characters' sexual relationship, I'm turning to an old fossil:
The most prevalent form of escape from emotional complexity is promiscuity: the attempt to achieve a strict separation between sex and feeling. Here again, escape masquerades as liberation, regression as progress. The progressive ideology of "nonbinding commitments" and "cool sex" makes a virtue of emotional disengagement, while purporting to criticize the depersonalization of sex. Enlightened authorities like Alex Comfort, Nena and George O'Neill, Robert and Anna Francoeur insist on the need to humanize sex by making it into a "total experience" instead of a mechanical performance; yet in the same breath they condemn the human emotions of jealousy and possessiveness and decry "romantic illusions." "Radical" therapeutic wisdom urges men and women to express their needs and wishes without reserve--since all needs and wishes have equal legitimacy--but warns them not to expect a single mate to satisfy them. This program seeks to allay emotional tensions, in effect, by reducing the demands men and women make on each other, instead of making men and women better able to meet them. The promotion of sex as a "healthy," "normal" part of life masks a desire to divest it of the emotional intensity that unavoidably clings to it: the remainders of earlier entanglements with parents, the "unhealthy" inclination to re-create those relations in relation with lovers. The enlightened insistence that sex is not "dirty" expresses a wish to sanitize it by washing away its unconscious associations.
-- Christopher Lasch, The Culture of NarcissismAmong other odious things, Girl is a book about Blomkvist, Swedish "superstud" journalist, and his three Neapolitan scoops: post-menopausal Cecilia, forty-something Berger, and our titular, "anorexic," "childlike" heroine. Blomkvist is such a swell guy that he fucks them all and does not think of them. They, however, think about him a lot. Cecilia has to end their affair after she falls in love with him. And while Berger plays the foxy adultress--complete with an "agreement" with the husband--we never hear about her seeking satisfaction from other men. The only scene that includes her husband describes her pretending to be asleep as he climbs into bed with her. Salander (Salamander?), an arm chair psychologist's Asperger's case, fucks him more months before suddenly realizing her feelings. She buys him a godawful Elvis souvenir and rushes to his apartment to declare her love...just in time to see Berger and Blomkvist getting there at the same time to have the same casual sex they've been having for twenty years. Ouch!--massive butthurtness (oh wait, she already had some of that before...). I assume the next book describes her cliched revenge in detail.
That said, I will be reading both sequels in the future...because I suffer from low self-esteem and poor decision-making skills.
