cityhobgoblin's Profile

One scene in the book is telling: the main journalist character enters Salander's giant apartment when she is not home and, familiar with her stark personality, is momentarily choked up by how empty the place is. No decorations on the walls, no art, no personal "flair", all an outgrowth of her emotionally distanced survival-coping strategies. This IKEA shopping list is just a dramatic illustration of her mental functions: a vast, memorized checklist of functional items that she has never had to acquire or really contemplate having. It becomes an abstract problem for her to "solve", and something she loses interest in as soon as she completes it. It's definitely symbolic of a woman with a previously deprived and stunted reality finally poking her head out of her rabbit hole into a very unknown world, that of "normal" consumerism. When I consider that her character is depicted as having a savant-genius level of rational intelligence, balanced against a bottomless well of anger and suspicion, I find the mundanity of this section hilarious, actually. Hundreds of pages about serial killers and morbid conspiracies and patricide...and a pause to go shopping for side tables! NOT mere product placement, that is just shallow cynicism from someone who knows nothing about the author's communist-hard-left politics.