I think that is part of the reason why The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series has been so popular, because it takes people to somewhere which is seen as right off the beaten track. In the English-speaking world it is seen as somewhere really exotic, covered in ice and snow. And there are really interesting characters and great story lines as well.
If you want to be a crime writer it is one of the books that you absolutely have to read. It has been one of the most successful, if not the most successful, crime novel of the 20th century. You could argue that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is as well, but I think this book (Silence of the Lambs) is infinitely superior.
It used to be – from the distant perspective of Australia – that Sweden was seen as being as close to this goal as possible. But clearly those values and goals have been very much eroded in the Scandinavian countries, as much as they have in English-speaking countries. When you read, for example, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo books, not only are the people not heroic, but there’s this atmosphere of a welfare state that’s a thing of the past. There are continuously characters saying, “Well, in the old days we might have been able to do something, but now we can’t afford it.”
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