I have been exploring Goethe’s concept of ‘world literature’ for a while. The questions Goethe raised become all the more important in the new age of globalisation. Does something qualify as world literature if it authentically represents a place unfamiliar to us? Does such authenticity have to rely on prevalent tropes in order to find a wide audience? Does world literature signify newness or standardisation, or some combination thereof? To the extent that it is authentic, can it be translated?

By looking at some of the ‘international literary sensations’ since the turn of the millennium — J.K. Rowling, Karl Ove Knausgård, Roberto Bolaño, Haruki Murakami, Elena Ferrante and Arundhati Roy — we can put the conceptual apparatus of world literature to test. Do these books, that translate so well, have something in common? Are there extra-literary reasons for their popularity, or are they moving the literary conversation forward?

Stieg Larsson’s bestseller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, that I only just read, is uneven in its introduction and conclusion, but has a generally high literary quality — and a very high pleasure quotient. It is the story of a morally uncompromising financial journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, who gets involved — with the help of the anorexic punk computer hacker Lisbeth Salander — in exposing the dark side of what we think of as the Swedish utopia: financial corruption, Nazism, violent misogyny and the authoritarian grip of the welfare state.

Larsson’s tragic death at 50, before his novels were published and reached a world audience, only adds to his aura of intrepid whistleblower. And yet, despite his appealing personality and that of his characters Blomkvist and Salander, I have my doubts.

Many authors finding global success have adopted some genre framework, such as the detective story, as with Larsson. The exposure of family secrets is another familiar modality, part of the default literary language guaranteeing success.

Let me note some aspects of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo that seem to me representative.

Such global novels as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo tend to be overstuffed with all the material of our current popular discontent. Financial shenanigans, sadism, torture, and corrupt government, media and business are all there. Despite including nearly every individual and social pathology — often taken to extremes — I’m not sure if any of it adds up to why these exist in conjunction and what connection they might have to modern capitalism.

Like other novels in its vein, the book posits a super-conspiracy to counter populist conspiracies, beyond what the plebes are used to. But the way Larsson neatly resolves every loose end and metes out retribution to every deserving party takes away the power of such conspiracy. It would seem that the sophisticated author can successfully deconstruct, expose and resolve meta-conspiracy.

The successful global author has, above all, the nature of globalisation as his subject matter.

Different worlds intersect at a dizzying pace, the way they do in the new media.

The overstuffed nature of Larsson’s novel (other recent South Asian, African and Latin American novels come to mind) seems connected to the language, which is transparent and therefore easily translatable. Reading it in Reg Keeland’s translation, I didn’t feel as if I was losing anything (such is not the case with, for example, Orhan Pamuk’s novels). The speed of events is great, the scope enormous and yet the language moves smoothly from one concern to another.

The language that speaks of sexual abuse and financial abuse sounds the same. I am not disturbed, but feel rather privileged at being invited to view an underground torture chamber in an idyllic Swedish village, or the intrepidity of an autistic young female protagonist unravelling conspiracies stretching over decades through sheer computer acumen.

Hacking, as we have seen in Julian Assange’s work with WikiLeaks (to mention a popular global hero of the moment), would seem to be an all-purpose balm for all that ails contemporary capitalism. One person can still, if not bring the system down, at least make it more transparent, even if that person is as psychologically damaged as Lisbeth Salander.

I don’t mean to be too harsh on Larsson. For a debut novelist, he seems to have pulled off something of a miracle with his supreme confidence. And yet there is something even about this that bothers me — I mean the lack of hesitation, the absence of pause and silence.

As may be true of the other recent global bestsellers I mentioned, Larsson’s characters seem all too familiar from media representations, yet lack the development that is the special province of literary writing. I don’t mean that the characters in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo don’t change — they do, over time — but that they don’t ask us to change.

This set of questions can be applied to other examples of recent world literature, such as Bolaño and Murakami. Such writing seems to stand at a comfortable distance from both modernism and postmodernism. It may often seem postmodern — Murakami is always in search of a missing woman, as is true of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — in adopting the conventions of genre writing for purposes other than entertainment, but it puts the reader in a superior posture in relation to social reality.

It is well-known that Larsson was witness at a young age to the gang rape of a girl, where he remained a mute bystander. This guilt seems to have provided much of the fuel for his writing. And yet The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (I intend to read the sequels) seems to have an attitude toward sexual violence that makes us look into it without feeling dirtied — unlike, say, with William Faulkner. Partly it’s the conventions of contemporary world literature (is that what this book is?) that enable this odd distance between the reader and the observed pathologies.

The superior conspiracy such authors seem to be hunting may be eluding them after all.

The columnist is the author of Karachi Raj and Soraya: Sonnets. His book on literary criticism, Literary Writing in the 21st Century: Conversations, was published recently

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, September 24th, 2017