A wonderful thing: a few weeks ago, I once again jumped into Adam Bede. Who knows how many times I’ve tried to read it over the last few decades. Really read it, I mean, not just pick out the parts that were going to be on a test. And miraculously, this time it worked. I was transported. I had begun it just before a trip to Charlottesville, and so had it with me through the airports, and among good, good friends on a lovely visit. I was absorbed with it the way a new mother is absorbed with her baby. I’d put it aside when I needed to, but couldn’t wait to get back to it.
And, as is the way after that sort of absorption in a book, I felt completely lost when I’d finished. I scribbled notes about it. I talked about it with my friend Robin. But I was in the mode. I had to keep on reading. Something. Anything.
About the time I’d picked up Adam, I had read a review in the NYT about the last book in Steig Larsson’s trilogy. I had a vague sense of it from other word of mouth and reviews. But this one (by David Kamp in the Sunday magazine) had been thoughtful enough to lay out the back story for me. I read along until I got to this gentlemanly warning: “If you haven’t read ‘Dragon Tattoo,’ I recommend that you forgo the remainder of this review and plunge into it headlong, both because you’ll enjoy yourself and because, as the kids say, spoilers lie ahead.” Drawing on reserves of discipline to which I had no idea I had access, I actually did stop. I didn’t think much about it again until I found myself in that hungry post-Adam space in Charlottesville.
My friend Robin (who deserves a post in her own right, and will get one very soon) had a copy of the first Larsson. I grabbed it, all but slobbering as I did so. And within a week, I had ploughed through all three. Since writers are supposed to read (and most writers are actually more readers, truth be told), I wrote the time off as a professional expense. I had a particular fascination with the Larsson trilogy given the fact that my father was Swedish, and I kind of knew Stockholm, and loved the fact that the books portrayed a real place, not just a nostalgia of wooden Dalarna horses and julboks and Santa Lucia lights.
Now although there is much to say about Adam and much to say about the three Girls, what I wanted to note here was a very odd synchronicity of character name. Lisbeth is not a common name, after all. And yet there are Lisbeths in both.
Lisbeth Bede is Adam’s mother, a truly distasteful character whose only redeeming characteristic seems to be that she (cloyingly) adores her son Adam. A passive-aggressive whiner, she is manipulative, sycophantic, and really awful to her second son Seth. (Poor Seth. He deserves so much more. I guess Methodists don’t expect much. But then his Methodist girlfriend Dinah gets his brother Adam in the end. I don’t get it.) She lives her mature life at the end of the 18th century, when this story takes place. Coy reference is made to The Lyrical Ballads, but I’m sure Lisbeth Bede has no concept of them. Nor is she aware of the deep proto-Romantic beauty of her life in rustic rural England. She drives her husband to drink and an early death in the town stream. She despises most the girls the boys would bring home for wives, consequently her two sons are pushing 30 with no girlfriends. To which they’ll admit anyway.
But Lisbeth Salander. Can there be a more diametrical opposite to Mrs. Bede? Salander – diminutive, “doll-like.” Aggressive, violent, silent. Lisbeth Bede – tall, almost stately except for the fact of all that whining.
Quite the interesting feminist arc between these two women across 200 years. (How much Eliot did Larsson read, by the way, je me demande.) Ah well. More later. Seems interesting, though. I’m just sayin’.
Dawn Aberg 