Dante wrote the Divine Comedy with characters doomed to Hell despite having Dante's sympathy and affection: a good writer knows when to leave their characters to breath and grow without the writer interfering into the story with his moral judgement. Is bothering in the Iliad when the gods interfere in the fights. Likewise in this book the author won't let breathe the characters, he judges them according to their political choice and decide their dooms according those choices, even more, he kidnaps them to explain his politics through them, making them out of character.The book start in a powerful way... there is a crime and there are two persons that are going to be kind of detectives: Mikael and Lisbeth, trying to solve an apparent impossible case. Both are interesting and clever... and the pace is thrilling... but then the book ends in a kind of sad parody:* Without giving spoilers in the end the case is simply discarded... there is not a clever solution to the mystery of the case... wasted time for a pair of detectives without nothing to investigate.* The "good" characters; are ALWAYS leftists and the"bad" ones are ALWAYS rightists. And the author awards the former and punishes the latter. Honestly it is a bit naïve to think that the capacity of good and evil is based according to the political party one chooses o.O* All the characters do the same things but are discriminated by their political choices: About Lisbeth the author says she tries substances that are perhaps "not very legal"; the daughter of the right-leaning villain instead is judged as "an addict." Mikael treats like garbage her own daughter so "he is not a good father"; the secret nazi father of other character does the same and is described as a monster whose abandonment inflicted pain to his children, although the son gets evil (righ-leaning) and the daughter just afraid but good (left-leaning) anyway.* In Sweden ALL the women are left leaning feminists that are ALWAYS abused by right leaning men, according to the made up statistics dropped by the author they are a sort of slaves in Sweden. Women in this book fall in love always and only if you are leftist...* In Sweden ALL the non white migrants are good and nice men (even the ones in prison!), although conveniently their women are hidden so we don't see retrograde attitudes from them that would change our opinion. This idea is naïve as well, every man and woman is capable of good and evil. I understand Sweden is a country where feminism is very active politically, with the support of Swedish men, I really doubt each Swedish man is a monster and each non-white migrant an angel. One of the migrants is a Muslim man that has no problem trying to cheat his (invisible) wife with Lisbeth, a girl that looks underage and could be his daughter, but as he is migrant Lisbeth finds him automatically attractive.* Men cannot get in love because apparently that is harassment. Women choose and force the men into relationships, in the book Lisbeth commands Mikael to not reject her because that would be harmful to her self-stem... so it doesn't matter if he doesn't love her, he is just a man.* Mikael is incapable of love so he just obeys what women say, otherwise he would be an abuser. Sadly the conclusion is that he not even is capable to care for her daughter but the daughter loves him because he is... (yes?) leftist! xD* The characters are "possessed" by the author: they are talking and suddenly they start to insult people with right leaning tendencies. I am apolitical so it is very tiring to read that diatribe.And so on and so on till the nausea... till it gets the focus of the story and when the case is showed as non-existent then the book deflates and we get a lot of filler pages showing how the world embraces leftist policies, Mikael's magazine is the most popular and all the nazis (everybody that doesn't agree with the politics of the author is called nazi) are dead so a happy end courtesy of Deus ex Machina and nothing else.This book was very promising but in the end I cannot avoid the elephant in the room: it is pretty discriminatory. I am not going to read other books by the author with his idea that your political choice and not your actions are the ones that speak about your quality as a person. And my comparison to Dante is no casual, I have the suspicion through all Stieg Larsson's book that he fell in love with a young lady and he was rejected. The book seems (as the Divine Comedy) like trying to arrange a meeting in dreams with the loved one that in reality couldn't become to be.
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