The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
by Stieg Larsson
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Book Summary Information
Author: Stieg LarssonTranslator: Reg Keeland
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Deckle Edge
Published: 2008-09-16
ISBN: 0307269752
Number of pages: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Book Reviews of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Book Review: Not the great novel advertised as
Summary: 2 Stars
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo has received some new attention in America cause of the imminent release of a very well regarded film adaptation. The book has seemed dimilarly well regarded. However, I found it to be something of a disappointment.
At the heart of the book there's an interesting mystery. Harriet Vanger, the young member of a family of industrialist misanthropes with Nazi tendencies, disappears off of her families isolated island home in the midst of a family retreat, her body is never found. Forty years later her aged uncle hires disgraced journalist Mikael Blomquist to make a last stab at finding out what happened to her. He eventually comes to be helped by a young punk hacker and freelance private investigator, Lisbeth Salander. The mystery is an interesting one, although the general solution to it will be an obvious option for most readers. Blomquist describes it as a "locked room murder mystery on an Island" since a series of events prevented anyone from getting to or from the island at the time the girl disappeared.
Unfortunately, Larson isn't a very good writer. Perhaps some of this is simply a fault of the English translation. The Swedish version may be far more lyrical in presentation. However there are other problems. One of them is the framing device. It takes over a hundred pages before Blomquist really begins to work on the case of the missing girl. Much of this hundred pages is spent delving into minute detail about Blomquist's fued with a corrupt industrialist. A feud which resulted in Blomquist being convicted of criminal libel. Furthermore the fate of Harriet Vanger is revealed with about another hundred pages to go. Those pages are used in a very boring and self congratulatory telling of how Blomquist resolves the feud. Larson is a journalist, a magazine editor like his hero Blomquist, and it's clear that he's living out some of his own fantasies here of the crusading journalist who makes good and changes the world. These sections also serve as a clearinghouse for some of Larson's gripes about the nature of the media, particularly financial reporters, in Sweden. All of this makes for rather boring reading. If Larson wanted to write a story about financial journalism then that is one thing. The mini series State of Play did a fantastic job of delivering an engaging story about newspapermen at work. Yet here it comes off rather dull, tedious, and over detailed.
Furthermore many of the characters are very thinly sketched. We learn a little bit about Blomquist, but not too much. Other than his on-again-off-again relationship with his married publishing partner there's nothing unusual about Blomquist. We're not shown that he's particularly brilliant or talented or diligent and we're not given access to any real hopes, desires, dreams or demons he might have. He just seems to exist. In the hands of a more skilled and thoughtful writer this might be workable as a theme. Various stories have involved discussions of very ordinary and uninvolved people. But that doesn't happen here. Blomquist has a desire to see his magazine return to profitability and respectability and would like to get revenge on his rival Hans-Erik Wennerstrom, but it doesn't seem to dominate his life. The apparent destruction of his journalistic career seems to inspire neither rage or nor any great sadness in him. He merely accepts it. At his libel trial Blomquist never puts up a defense, something that a number of characters ask about, and this is indicative of the character as a whole. He never seems to do much or react to much. Again, in more skilled hands this might mean something as we might explore a Blomquist who is dead but comes alive over the course of the novel. But this doesn't exist.
Lisbeth Salander, the second protagonist, is more thoroughly sketched. A punk computer hacker, she is a ward of the state who makes her money doing freelance private investigating work. Salander, while a talented hacker, is antisocial in the extreme, and filled with rage at the world around her. She's described by one character as being "the perfect victim" and clearly was the victim of some sort of horrible mistreatment. The problem with Salander is that she's too well sketched. Or rather, that Larson spends enough time describing her antisocial side and no time describing any other side. I found myself coming out of the novel with a deep loathing for Salander. For instance, she is someone who is fanatical about her own personal privacy, erecting boundaries that she refuses to let others cross, but who thinks nothing of snooping into the lives, and computers, of others. Larson also portrays her as a complete misanthrope, and yet there's the sense that we're supposed to agree with her when she thinks other people are idiots for wanting to do things differently than her. Inexplicably a number of characters also seem attracted to her, either romantically or paternally, or, creepily enough in a novel that has major themes about sexual violence against women, both. Yet we're never shown why anyone would like Salander or tolerate her presence for more than a few minutes. The only times I felt any connection to her was when she violently punished some rapists. Finally, there's another creepy aspect. Salander ends up in a sexual relationship with Blomquist, a man many years her senior and who is obviously a stand in for the author. In a book which deals with themes of the sexual exploitation of, and violence against, women, it's rather creepy that the author would involve a fictionalized version of himself in a relationship with a rape victim who is young enough to be his daughter. And the relationship with Blomquist seems to be based on nothing. Salander is portrayed as a thorough misanthrope who hates most people instantly. Yet she likes Blomquist for no real reason. There's no clear indiciation of why we, or Salander, should consider Blomquist any different from anyone else whose path she has crossed, especially her boss Dragan Armansky who is portrayed as nearly identical to Blomquist in that he has both a fatherly and a sexual interest in Salander.
There's also things that get left out. The pacing of the mystery is a bit off. When it begins to get cracked open it cracks open very rapidly. At the same time there's extended passages about rather mundane things. Do we really need to know every step Blomquist takes and every person he talks to in tracking down someone who took a picture on the day the crime took place? Also, we don't get a lot of development of the victim herself. Despite being the center of the novel, and the obsession of her uncle for forty years, she's pretty much a cipher. The novel also, by casting a serial killer as one of the main players, ironically perhaps gives a distorted impression about violence against women since most women who are subjected to violence are not the victims of sadistic strangers, but rather men who they know. Finally, there's an interesting thread that Larson doesn't really do anything with. Both Blomquist, Salander, and the killer who they track down, are investigators of a sort: Blomquist a reporter, Salander a private investigator and personal snoop, and the killer a serial kidnapper who methodically stalks and investigates his victims. Yet this idea is left unexplored. There's no real investigation of what investigation means to these people. Of why they feel drawn to finding things out and solving mysteries. Also, for a book which is, on many levels, fundamentally about violence against women (the original Swedish title is "Men Who Hate Women", the novel doesn't really discuss much about the nature of violence against women or patriarchy in society. It's presented more as a catalog of horrors.
Summary of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
A sensation across Europe?millions of copies soldA spellbinding amalgam of murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue.
It?s about the disappearance forty years ago of Harriet Vanger, a young scion of one of the wealthiest families in Sweden . . . and about her octogenarian uncle, determined to know the truth about what he believes was her murder.
It?s about Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently at the wrong end of a libel case, hired to get to the bottom of Harriet?s disappearance . . . and about Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-four-year-old pierced and tattooed genius hacker possessed of the hard-earned wisdom of someone twice her age?and a terrifying capacity for ruthlessness to go with it?who assists Blomkvist with the investigation. This unlikely team discovers a vein of nearly unfathomable iniquity running through the Vanger family, astonishing corruption in the highest echelons of Swedish industrialism?and an unexpected connection between themselves.
It?s a contagiously exciting, stunningly intelligent novel about society at its most hidden, and about the intimate lives of a brilliantly realized cast of characters, all of them forced to face the darker aspects of their world and of their own lives.
Amazon Best of the Month, September 2008: Once you start The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, there's no turning back. This debut thriller--the first in a trilogy from the late Stieg Larsson--is a serious page-turner rivaling the best of Charlie Huston and Michael Connelly. Mikael Blomkvist, a once-respected financial journalist, watches his professional life rapidly crumble around him. Prospects appear bleak until an unexpected (and unsettling) offer to resurrect his name is extended by an old-school titan of Swedish industry. The catch--and there's always a catch--is that Blomkvist must first spend a year researching a mysterious disappearance that has remained unsolved for nearly four decades. With few other options, he accepts and enlists the help of investigator Lisbeth Salander, a misunderstood genius with a cache of authority issues. Little is as it seems in Larsson's novel, but there is at least one constant: you really don't want to mess with the girl with the dragon tattoo. --Dave Callanan
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