The Girl Who Played With Fire

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, graphic violence, sexual violence, rape, child sexual abuse, child abuse, physical abuse, gender discrimination, ableism, and cursing.

“She closed her eyes and conjured up the smell of gasoline. He was sitting in a car with the window rolled down. She ran to the car, poured the gasoline through the window, and lit a match. It took only a moment. The flames blazed up. He writhed in agony and she heard his screams of terror and pain. She could smell burned flesh and a more acrid stench of plastic and upholstery turning to carbon in the seats.”

Lisbeth’s violent fantasy at age 13 is designed to establish the fact that her early life experiences are deeply abnormal, and because only certain details are related, her reasons for attacking the man (later revealed to be Zala) are as yet unknown. In the absence of mitigating circumstances, the narrative seemingly aligns with Teleborian’s later statements that Lisbeth is erratic and violent. The details of this passage, such as Zala “writhing in agony,” also show that the young Lisbeth relishes his pain. Only later will Larsson reveal that Zala terrorized Lisbeth and her mother, and this crucial context will transform the Prologue’s violent scene into a justified act of survival.

“Salander had crushed him. He was never going to forget it. She had taken command and humiliated him. She had abused him in a way that had left indelible marks on his body. On an area the size of a book below his navel. She had handcuffed him to his bed, abused him, and tattooed him with I AM A SADISTIC PIG, A PERVERT, AND A RAPIST. Stockholm’s district court had declared Salander legally incompetent. He had been assigned to be her guardian, which made her inescapably dependent on him.”

To reframe Lisbeth as a villain, the abusive Bjurman must engage in some psychological sleight of hand to transform himself from the perpetrator of sexual assault into the target of unjustified violence. The final lines of this passage, which acknowledge the position of power that Bjurman held over Lisbeth, suggest that Lisbeth taking “command” over Bjurman subverts the expected relationship between the two. To Bjurman, sexually assaulting Lisbeth was his “right,” and he sees her retaliation as inappropriate.