Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren

1945

As an adult rereading Pippi Longstocking, I had an uncomfortable sense that I had encountered this character in another guise. Could it be? Lisbeth Salander, the punk, damaged, vengeance-seeking heroine of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo?

Both superheroines who bring their superhuman powers to the defense of victims, brute strength in the case of Pippi, computer hacking in the case of Lisbeth. Both outsiders, awkward in the world, unable to read the cues of adult interaction. Both intolerant of societal norms and human hypocrisy. Both orphans, effectively. Both redheads.

As it turned out, I was right. Stieg Larsson was much influenced by his reading of Astrid Lindgren’s books during childhood. In his Millenium Trilogy, he named his alterego Michael Blomkvist after Lindgren’s boy detective series and he modeled his female feral warrior, Lisbeth Salander, after Pippi Longstocking.

Neither Lindgren nor Larsson were accomplished writing stylists. Lindgren’s prose is wooden and there is no narrative arc. Pippi is a shallow personality lacking any trace of emotional nuance. She tells us at the outset that her mother died and went to heaven, and that her father, a sea captain, was swept overboard during a storm, a catastrophe referred to thusly. “And then this annoying thing had to happen.” Even when saving small boys from a burning building, she seems largely lacking in empathy. When she disrupts the school classroom, when she explodes onto the circus ring, when she taunts the mothers at the coffee klatch with their endless complaints about servants, she is relentless and does not know when to stop. Despite the irritatingly frenetic illustrations that accompany most Pippi editions, there is nothing particularly funny about her antics – rather, they elicit the same kind of uncomfortable embarrassment that meets an off-color joke. Perhaps this is most apparent when she manhandles two burglars into submission and forces them to dance the schottische with her. Hours later, exhausted, they slink away, and I am reminded of the analogous scene when Lisbeth wreaks her revenge on her abusive guardian.

Despite the flaws, Lindgren managed to create a compelling character whose popularity has remained intact for generations of readers. The premise is admirable – a nine year old girl who lives an unsupervised life in the Villa Villekulla, alone save for a monkey and a horse. She is resourceful, independent, irreverent, self-reliant, unconstrained. She is at her best when she shares her unfettered life with Tommy and Annika, the children next door, and it is only towards them that she shows a modicum of affection. The book is at its best when Pippi leads them into a world of imaginative play that showcases her tall tales from her former seafaring life, her transformation of the ordinary humdrum into marvels of wonder, and her 90-degrees-off quirky way of doing things. What I remember from reading Pippi Longstocking as a child was something quite simple – her conferring of treasure status on found objects (“Lumps of gold, ostrich feathers, dead rats, candy snap crackers, little tiny screws, and things like that”) and her secreting her worthless valuables in a hollow tree.

(Illustration of Pippi with horse and monkey by Abby Haddican.)