The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
by Stieg Larsson
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Book Reviews of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Book Review: This Swedish bestseller deserves to be a blockbuster here too.
Summary: 5 Stars
A 24-year-old computer hacker sporting an assortment of tattoos and body piercings and afflicted with Asperger Syndrome or something of the like has been under state guardianship in her native Sweden since she was thirteen. She supports herself by doing deep background investigations for Dragan Armansky, who, in turn, worries the anorexic-looking Lisbeth Salander is "the perfect victim for anyone who wished her ill." Salander may look fourteen and stubbornly shun social norms, but she possesses the inner strength of a determined survivor. She sees more than her word processor page in black and white and despises the users and abusers of this world. She won't hesitate to exact her own unique brand of retribution against small-potatoes bullies, sick predators, and corrupt magnates alike.
Financial journalist Carl Mikael Blomkvist has just been convicted of libeling a financier and is facing a fine and three months in jail. Blomkvist, after a Salander-completed background check, is summoned to a meeting with semi-retired industrialist Henrik Vanger whose far-flung but shrinking corporate empire is wholly family owned. Vanger has brooded for 36 years about the fate of his great niece, Harriet. Blomkvist is expected to live for a year on the island where many Vanger family members still reside and where Harriet was last seen. Under the cover story that he is writing a family history, Blomkvist is to investigate which family member might have done away with the teenager.
So, the stage is set. The reader easily guesses early that somehow Blomkvist and Salander will pool their talents to probe the Vanger mystery. However,Swede Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is no humdrum, formulaic whodunit. It is fascinating and very difficult to put down. Nor is it without some really suspenseful and chillingly ugly scenes....
The issue most saturating The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is that of shocking sexual violence primarily against women but not excluding men. Salander and Blomkvist both confront prima facie evidence of such crimes. Larsson's other major constituent elements are corporate malfeasance that threatens complete collapse of stock markets and anarchistic distrust of officialdom to the point of endorsing (at least, almost) vigilantism. He also deals with racism as he spins a complex web from strands of real and imagined history concerning mid-twentieth century Vanger affiliations with Sweden's fascist groups.
But Larsson's carefully calibrated tale is more than a grisly, cynical world view of his country and the modern world at large. At its core, it is an fascinating character study of a young woman who easily masters computer code but for whom human interaction is almost always more trouble than it is worth, of an investigative reporter who chooses a path of less resistance than Salander but whose humanity reaches out to many including her, and of peripheral characters -- such as Armansky -- who need more of their story told.
Fortunately, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in English translation will be followed by two more in the Millennium series: The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Air Castle that Blew Up. I can't wait. Larsson also made a 200-page start on a fourth book, but sadly he succumbed to a heart attack in 2004 and his father decided the unfinished work will remain unpublished.
I recommend this international bestseller to all who eagerly sift new books for challenging intellectual crime thrillers, who luxuriate in immersing themselves in the ambience of a compellingly created world and memorable characters, who soak up financial and investigative minutiae as well as computer hacking tidbits, and who want to share Larsson's crusade against violence and racism.
Book Review: A complete disaster
Summary: 1 Stars
First, full disclosure: I only managed to read about 150 pages of this book before I gave up in disgust.
That said: what a freaking disaster. I knew going in that this novel was only published in the United States because it was an international bestseller, but that didn't prepare me for how awful the book actually was.
Let me start with the writing. Not the nitty-gritty word choice and sentence structure of the writing; those issues could possibly be the fault of the translation. Translation can't possibly be to blame for the relentless telling instead of showing, however, or the way that the story interrupts itself every three pages to include a paragraph or ten of backstory for Every. Single. Minor. Character. Or the way Every. Single. Dwelling. referenced in the book (whether or not any of the characters actually spends time in it) is described down to the exact square footage (though I was interested to learn that Swedish homes are apparently vastly smaller than American ones). Or the way that the investigation of the mystery is given to us in ten page chunks that manage to stretch on endlessly without actually providing any useful information. Or... well, you get the point. When a chunk of exposition is dumped into the middle of the narrative in a TV show, it's referred to as a visit by the exposition fairy. This novel, in contrast, seems to have been entirely written *by* the exposition fairy, with the narrative fairy fighting tooth and nail to get a word in edgewise.
And don't get me started on the way that the author describes software used by the characters and *then includes a link on where to get it*.
The writing might have been more acceptable if the characters were good, but they aren't. Lisbeth, the highly touted eponymous character, might have improved over time, but in the first 150 pages all I learned is that she had a troubled past, is somewhat punk, is brilliant, and men fall in love with her for no reason. All of which is *told* to us. When we're actually shown what she is, it appears she's someone with good internet surfing skills who likes to poke around her boss's office when he's not in. *shrug* Said boss is even less developed, as we don't get to *see* anything about him at all and even in the telling side of things he gets less page time than his business does. As for the real protagonist of the story, the beleaguered journalist who is being unfairly persecuted by an eeeeeevil financier, all we know about him is that he's hard nosed (but not hard nosed enough to fight back against the financier, apparently), that his career was started by a lucky break, and that he's sleeping with his married coworker (which might have provided some interest except that the coworker's husband doesn't care).
The mystery is presumably what makes this story so popular and I will admit I'm mildly interested in it. Unfortunately, despite scores of pages of relentless fact-spewing, huge holes in the mystery go entirely unexplained. For example, all suspects between the ages of 20-25 are considered in the clear. Why? Who knows! But watch out for those infants, because everyone knows it's always the baby who did it.
To be honest, I'm hard pressed to imagine how this novel could have ever been a bestseller at all. Perhaps the writing style is what's popular in Sweden (and Europe as a whole). Perhaps a *lot* is lost in translation. Perhaps it's just that the author is dead and people are overlooking things that they wouldn't overlook in the work of a living author. Whatever the reason for its success, this novel is one of the most overrated books I've ever attempted to read and my only wish is that I hadn't wasted three hours of my life on trying to slog through the mess.
Book Review: Vapid at the core
Summary: 1 Stars
This book fails as a crime thriller/mystery on so many levels.
1. Structurally vapid at its core. The trope of a great mystery-thriller is that the good must represent a worthy match for the evil -- here, the wonderfully drawn (sic) character of Lisbeth (the "good") is completely disappointed by the inconsistently and poorly rendered character of the antagonist. I won't spoil the plot by giving names. The best part of this book is the middle part (as others have said), where Lisbeth is truly fully developed and is revealed and proven through a series of very direct encounters with her guardian. Indeed, the representation of exploitative, physical evil represented by Lisbeth's guardian meets the standard of a good thriller, and it provides a solid match for Lisbeth's creative and intellectual strengths. Unfortunately, the plot quickly turns elsewhere and forces Lisbeth to play on a field with an evil antagonist who is very badly written, self-contradictory, uninteresting, tiresome, unbelievable as a villain and, in sum, unworthy of Lisbeth as an adversary.
2. A Badly Plotted Heroine. As noted, Lisbeth is fully drawn and a memorable character. Her function in the book is to move the plot forward through research and hacking. Sadly, there is nothing in her character that connects to her skills in research and hacking. Instead of some ringed-up, tatooed wild girl , we could as easily have had a nice college girl in the engineering department sporting a ponytail and good manners. There is nothing convincing about why Lisbeth has to be the way she is in order to have the skills she has. Yes, the skills are critical to the outcome of the book.
3. A Mash up of Three Books. The book consists of three completely separate plots: (1) the search for revenge against a arms-dealing industrialist, (2) the search for a missing grandniece and (3) a search for a serial killer. Although strewn with family names and characters that are hard to keep straight (and will make your head hurt, as they are all only side stories with no bearing on the plot) the search for the missing grandniece actually proceeds fairly conventionally, with interviews and documentary evidence and search in archives, etc. etc. This search is mildly entertaining. The search for the serial killer shows up late in the book as there arises a discovery that missing persons and family members seem to be linked. Here is where the book starts to blow up, as the author (clearly remembering the trope that great good much be matched by great evil -- See "vapid at its core" above) suddenly creates a grotesque backstory for his new villain that is fully displayed and explained in less than two pages and has no foreshadowing or logic altogether. Indeed, the weight of evidence leading to this villain is only just tenuously put together when -- completely out of character -- the villain shows up of his own accord and starts trying to kill our hero. Nonetheless, This improbable villain is now tied to the missing niece and so now we find out something about why and how the niece has gone missing. Thank you for that. Finally, the story about the evil industrialist held some promise -- especially for a financial writer like Larsson, one expect some unique insights into international money skullduggery -- but all devolves into the usual plundered Swiss Bank Account story, with no great detail at all as to the underlying felonies of the corporate creep.
In sum, this is a confused book, badly edited for consistency, whose ultimate antagonist is unworthy of the great female character Larsson has created (even though her abilities have little to do with the character and more with the needs of the plot).
Book Review: Good Story, Bad Writing
Summary: 3 Stars
The Girl With A Dragon Tattoo has good ideas for a story. It's based on two situational questions; To what extent would a failed investigative writer go to obtain his redemption? - And - What would a sub-culture detective do with an intriguing case about a man who may have set up to fail by an corrupt industrialist?
Sounds good, right? I thought so too!
As I said, the set up is great and it is. At the start of the novel we find Mikael Blomkvist at the worst time in his life, he's been sued for writing an incorrect story about a wealthy industrialist. In the meantime, a security company (with a investigations department) has been hired to prove that Blomkvist has been set up, enter Lisbeth Salander, the girl who by eponym is the title of the book. I won't give up what happens, but suffice to say that she (Lisbeth) is not a typical P.I. She's different and so is this book.
Let's start with characters. Larsson does a terrific job in creating characters. Lisbeth Salander is by far the most memorable P.I. I've read in a long time. She's real because her tragic circumstances make her larger than life. Blomkvist and the rest of the cast are also well crafted.
So character and premise make for a promising story and I wish I could say that the rest of the writing were just as promising, but it's not. The book is filled with lots of telling in narrative, which would have played out beautifully in scenes to show what happened. Then there's also the use of passive verb sentences and adverbs. In writing, adverbs are like pimples on a beauty queen - the two don't belong together. Larsson uses them far too much.
He also intrudes into the story in an effort to make connections from previous chapters into the one you may be reading at the time. The omniscient author - as it's called - should stay out of the story for the sake of the story. An example of this is in pages 52 and 53 when Larsson, in a chapter about Blomkvist, intrudes to remind the reader that "... Just as Salander had guessed, it was his continual infidelity that drove his wife to leave." At this point and on page 53 we know that Blomkvist and Salander have not met, they have no clue that the other exists, but Larsson knew.
Does this review sound pedantic to you? Well, I'll be the first to admit it is because the techniques Larsson employed quite liberally in this book - many modern authors do - damage this novel. Why? First, there is no substitute for good writing, even in commercial fiction. Second, the techniques are short cuts used often by first time writers and here's where this review takes another turn for the better.
Stieg Larsson was a first time (fiction) writer when he submitted this novel and it's sequels for publication. He may may have been short on experience with using language (and grammar) in fiction because it's visible in The Girl With A Dragon Tattoo. Perhaps, his use of language gets better in the next two novels and/or a lot may have been lost in translation from the original Swedish version. That's why I give this novel the benefit of the doubt.
Now, honestly there are lots of novelists - American and European - that write a lot worse than Stieg Larsson. There in is the state of the publishing world today; it is lamentable that publishing houses spend next to nothing on proper editing. So blame the publisher as opposed to Stieg Larsson for the flaws in this novel, may he rest in peace.
Hence, I strongly suggest that readers should set their sights low with this book. Expect next to nothing and you may find a gem inside. Enjoy and remember that writers are only as good as their editors.
Book Review: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is one of those hidden gems that no one really knows about until they start hearing about the hype. For the uneducated, this book represents the first in a series of posthumous works done by a Swedish man named Stieg Larsson, a former editor in chief of a Swedish anti-racist magazine, Expo. Died at the still-young age of fifty, he left a series of manuscripts behind and these have become a sort of a publishing phenomenon, gaining fans in as far as Asia and America and every continent in between. But this series has teeth, has grit like no other, and the international success is well deserved. A writer of political journalism who has such masterful storytelling in his repertoire, however direct and clunky, is a gift rarely seen.
What we have here could be described as a typical thriller hook: the plot of the missing girl. A girl named Harriet Vanger has been missing for well over four decades, which turns out to be something of an unsolved mystery. That is the impetus for Henrik Vanger's obsession in solving the case of the missing niece. Along the way, he employs a character said to be the closest thing to a Stieg Larsson literary alter ego, Mikael Blomqvist, a journalist, who in turn finds out a devious secret within the Vanger family. But the true star of the book (and the series, for that matter) is the seemingly anti-social computer hacker, who turns out to be the one who actually falls in love, albeit in the only way that she knows. But not before she gets knee deep in the case herself.
If there is one thing to be said about the gothic and rather rude Lisbeth Salander, it is that she contains some of Larsson's own traits, as mentioned by many of his biographers. Not surprising at all. One can only see how this series became an overnight publishing sensation. The character symbolizes a sort of enigma on which the other seemingly strange happenings (some of them could be deemed to be offensive) could have been pointing towards. A mystery in female form, and yet she feels familiar, friendly even. Larsson's choice of characters feels symbolic. Consistent with the rest of the book, every plot detail, however clumsy and coincidental, feels symbolic in the overall theme of domestic and psychopathic abuse. Which is why, I think, Harlan Corben coined it to be a novel of big ideas, which it certainly is. Larsson does cramp a lot of seemingly post-modern furnishings to the story as well, but frequent mentions of Apple's Powerbook seem an overtly expressed obsession on Larsson's part.
However, that remains a small concern, as the story does have some scary moments in which status quos are changed in an instant. Coupled with issues as raw and shocking as serial murder and rape, this book does enthrall even hardcore thriller fans, partly because of its intense shock value, but more so the charming articulation of the shocking subject matter itself. The crimes seem impactful and meaningful in view of the overall plot and Larsson's worldview never feels compromised on top of it. Although he writes in a Jason Starr-esque style that emphasizes plot above beautiful reading prose, the plot here feels appropriate to the book's purposes, the compelling factor of it drawing us in, making us turn the pages at a staggering rate.
To experience such a phenomenal piece of work in depth, you need to read it for yourself. This is because, frankly, mere words can never sufficiently detail every single nuance in this book. It would be impossible to do such a thing. Just know that when you come into this book, don't feel intimidated in the least. Instead, approach this thrilling crime story with open arms. The dividends are bountiful.