Lundagatan looked into a courtyard. It was cramped and not the least bit comfortable. The view from her bedroom was a firewall on a gable façade. The view from the kitchen was of the back of the building facing the street and the entrance to the basement storage area. She could see a streetlight from her living room, and a few branches of a birch tree.
The first requirement of her new home was that it should have some sort of view.
She did not have a balcony, and had always envied well-to-do neighbors higher up in the building who spent warm days with a cold beer under an awning on theirs. The second requirement was that her new home would have a balcony.
What should the apartment look like? She thought about Blomkvist’s apartment—700 square feet in one open space in a converted loft on Bellmansgatan with views of City Hall and the locks at Slussen. She liked it there. She wanted to have a pleasant, sparsely furnished apartment that was easy to take care of. That was the third point on her list of requirements.
For years she had lived in cramped spaces. Her kitchen was a mere 100 square feet, with room for only a tiny table and two chairs. Her living room was 200 square feet. The bedroom was 120. Her fourth requirement was that the new apartment should have plenty of space and closets. She wanted to have a proper office and a big bedroom where she could spread herself out.
Her bathroom was a windowless cubbyhole with square cement slabs on the floor, an awkward half bath, and plastic wallpaper that never got really clean no matter how hard she scrubbed it. She wanted a washing machine in the apartment and not down in some basement. She wanted to have tiles and a big bath. She wanted the bathroom to smell fresh, and she wanted to be able to open a window.
—Stieg Larsson,
The Girl Who Played With Fire
As I indicated, this was a long passage, occurring in the first one hundred pages, but the author consciously slowed the reading experience so that the reader could see how this young woman, Salander, was metamorphosing. He showed where Salander was coming from to highlight where she was going. She encountered obstacles while finding a new place, but she persevered—which showed more characterization—and managed to acquire a new apartment. Later the author spends several more pages showing Salander making quite an extensive trip through IKEA to purchase new furniture to replace her marginal leftovers. But the reader sees very little of the new apartment, except that it does have a view and she bought furniture for a spare bedroom. We’re shown only what matters to Salander—that her apartment is large enough to have a spare room, all the furniture is new, and that’s about it.
Later in the same story, five-hundred pages later, another character, Mikael Blomkvist, is asked to describe the protagonist’s sofa as a means of verifying that he really did know her, because the protagonist has a well-earned reputation of guarding her privacy, which includes her home space, to an extreme degree.
On the occasions I visited her she had a worn-out, extremely ugly piece of furniture with a certain curiosity value. I would guess it’s from the early fifties. It has two shapeless cushions covered in brown cloth with a yellow pattern of sorts on it. The cloth is torn in several places and the stuffing was coming out when I saw it last.
—Stieg Larsson,
The Girl Who Played With Fire
Doesn’t this description of one piece of furniture give you a unique perspective on who Salander is? The use of specific Setting details over the course of a book is used to symbolize change—the change in who Salander is from an earlier book and the start of the current story, what she values—or not. Setting reveals in small stages the growth of this character from totally isolated to one willing to live in a different way.
Later, Blomkvist has finally found Salander’s current apartment. Here’s his description:
Blomkvist was
The first requirement of her new home was that it should have some sort of view.
She did not have a balcony, and had always envied well-to-do neighbors higher up in the building who spent warm days with a cold beer under an awning on theirs. The second requirement was that her new home would have a balcony.
What should the apartment look like? She thought about Blomkvist’s apartment—700 square feet in one open space in a converted loft on Bellmansgatan with views of City Hall and the locks at Slussen. She liked it there. She wanted to have a pleasant, sparsely furnished apartment that was easy to take care of. That was the third point on her list of requirements.
For years she had lived in cramped spaces. Her kitchen was a mere 100 square feet, with room for only a tiny table and two chairs. Her living room was 200 square feet. The bedroom was 120. Her fourth requirement was that the new apartment should have plenty of space and closets. She wanted to have a proper office and a big bedroom where she could spread herself out.
Her bathroom was a windowless cubbyhole with square cement slabs on the floor, an awkward half bath, and plastic wallpaper that never got really clean no matter how hard she scrubbed it. She wanted a washing machine in the apartment and not down in some basement. She wanted to have tiles and a big bath. She wanted the bathroom to smell fresh, and she wanted to be able to open a window.
—Stieg Larsson,
The Girl Who Played With Fire
As I indicated, this was a long passage, occurring in the first one hundred pages, but the author consciously slowed the reading experience so that the reader could see how this young woman, Salander, was metamorphosing. He showed where Salander was coming from to highlight where she was going. She encountered obstacles while finding a new place, but she persevered—which showed more characterization—and managed to acquire a new apartment. Later the author spends several more pages showing Salander making quite an extensive trip through IKEA to purchase new furniture to replace her marginal leftovers. But the reader sees very little of the new apartment, except that it does have a view and she bought furniture for a spare bedroom. We’re shown only what matters to Salander—that her apartment is large enough to have a spare room, all the furniture is new, and that’s about it.
Later in the same story, five-hundred pages later, another character, Mikael Blomkvist, is asked to describe the protagonist’s sofa as a means of verifying that he really did know her, because the protagonist has a well-earned reputation of guarding her privacy, which includes her home space, to an extreme degree.
On the occasions I visited her she had a worn-out, extremely ugly piece of furniture with a certain curiosity value. I would guess it’s from the early fifties. It has two shapeless cushions covered in brown cloth with a yellow pattern of sorts on it. The cloth is torn in several places and the stuffing was coming out when I saw it last.
—Stieg Larsson,
The Girl Who Played With Fire
Doesn’t this description of one piece of furniture give you a unique perspective on who Salander is? The use of specific Setting details over the course of a book is used to symbolize change—the change in who Salander is from an earlier book and the start of the current story, what she values—or not. Setting reveals in small stages the growth of this character from totally isolated to one willing to live in a different way.
Later, Blomkvist has finally found Salander’s current apartment. Here’s his description:
Blomkvist was
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