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Loading... The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005)by Stieg Larsson
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I'm just not sure. Maybe it lost something in translation. ( ) This book is the first book of the Millinnium trilogy: 1) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; 2) The Girl Who Played with Fire; and 3) The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. I chose to read this book to fill a couple of reading challenges: 52 books in a year (mystery/suspense) AND literary passport (Sweden), plus my daughter read this book while in high school a few years back and gave it a 5-star. I give it a 3-star…just an average read; therefore, I won’t be reading the rest of the trilogy. The first third of the story started out so slow and boring, talking about the politics and financial shadiness of corporate businesses. BLAH! It started out with the lead character, Mikael Blomkvist, a financial journalist, losing a case against a prominent individual, Hans-Erik Wennerstrom, and sentenced to serve a couple of months in prison for libel. I didn’t even really understand what I was reading. Then suddenly Blomkvist was hired to solve an unsolved mystery of a young teen in a small town in Sweden. I actually enjoyed this part of the story. The author put together a great story of the mystery of the disappearance of Harriet Vanger, which had an unexpected ending. I was wrong the whole time. The story should have ended after the mystery was solved, but it didn’t. It kept going and going, rambling on and on…more about the shady corporations, then more nothingness about “the girl with the dragon tattoo”, who yes, played a big part in her research to help solve the mystery, but I felt she was just a secondary character. I’m not sure why she deserved the title of the book. THE MOVIE: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), starring Daniel Craig as Mikael Blomkvist and Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander, as the girl with the dragon tattoo. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Stieg Larsson, a true journalist, never got to even see his Millinnium trilogy in print, which were published in 2005, after his death in 2004. He handed in his manuscripts for the three books, then died suddenly of a heart attack after climbing stairs at his work, at age 50. It's rare that I read pop bestsellers, because it's rare that I find them worth reading. But I'm always happy to read a fast-paced page-turner, if it's good. I'm very happy I read THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, because it's very good. It's richly populated with distinct and memorable characters and it has a driving narrative style that left me never wanting to stop reading for the night. That's a rare talent for a writer to have, and even some great writers do not have it, the gift of being able to compel readers to turn just one more page. The titular girl, Lisbeth Salander, is a fascinating construct, a character with mysteries of her own beyond that of the plot, and she is an intriguing creation, one who as a fictional human being resists sentimental responses yet as a fictional device demands them. Both her personality and her intellectual gifts as depicted engage the reader intensely, and she is well matched with the investigative reporter Mikhael Blomvitz, a linkage which, while quite different in the details, reminds one of those between Archie Stout and Nero Wolfe or John Watson and Sherlock Holmes. Individually, each might be insufficient to the tasks of the plots or to the requirements of literature, but in combination is made a thing greater than the sum of its elements. The mystery at the heart of this book is far-fetched yet ultimately satisfyingly authentic, and the great twin drivers of exciting fiction, resolution and revenge, are effectively utilized. I'm looking with strong anticipation to the next to books in the series, and already regretting the unfortunate early death of the author. This was the vacation of disappointing reading material. There's little redeeming about the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Perhaps the best thing I have to say about it is that it's fast paced, and once you actually get to the mystery, it's a little compelling to at least see what comes of it. That being said, there's a lot not to like. Let's start with the fact that absolutely no progress is made on the central mystery until page 294, when the character all of a sudden announces that he's found three clues. What happens until then? Lots of backstory on totally extraneous materials and three very explicit sexual assaults that have literally nothing to do with the main plotline (and never really come up again.) The pacing is particularly awkward, because we're usually subjected to all information once in the main plotline, regurgitated a second time (often verbatim) by the private investigators and then a third time either in a newspaper article or quoted from the main character's book. Similarly, the book extends for over 100 pages after the mystery has been solved. These pages are ostensibly to wrap up the sketchy finances plotline, but pretty much exist to tell us that the main character is drinking coffee and not going into work for a 100 pages until an authorial fiat fixes the financial plotline. Want to talk about characters? The main character is a flimsy self-insertion, who is adored by all women, hired to solve a mystery on the basis of zero credentials and seems to just manage to stumble into evidence ignored for the previous 50ish years. Perhaps the most damning thing is that His sidekick is not just a quirky anti-hero. She's a bona fide psychopath who gets revenge on a predator by sexually assaulting him. Um, not awesome. Also, her deep secret on how she's such a good private investigator? She's a hacker. That's so lame it doesn't even deserve spoiler tags. It keeps getting repeated -- Oh no, someone might find out that Lisbeth is a hacker! Newsflash: every fictionalized private investigator since 1985 has hacked in some form or another. How about the writing? The translation is definitely clumsy, but it can't camouflage the underlying clumsy writing. My two pet peeves? Larsson's decision that it is necessary for us to know everything that a character does at all times (at one point he tells us the time a character wakes up, the time he drinks his coffee and how long he waits before leaving the cabin.) The second is Larsson's need for us to know what brand of object is in use. It's like if I made sure you knew that Becca wrote this review on her husband's Dell laptop, having used her Android phone to use the Goodreads App to select this book at the Borders bookstore inside the Cleveland Hopkins Airport. The graphic crimes, especially sex crimes depicted have been very controversial, and I don't feel I can review this completely without mentioning them. I'm far from squeamish, but both the crimes themselves and the statistics about violence against women in Sweden seemed to have no purpose to their inclusions. For an author who complains in his book about the use of sex crimes in literature for titillation, well, the lady doth protest too much, methinks. Here's what I wrote in 2010 about this read: "One of Trilogy: Great read (fast pace, immersing), memorable characters (Lisbeth, Michael), big dose of modern Sweden, rich & powerful & getting away with murder (literally!) family."
[Richman reviews several Scandinavian novels, including Larsson's.] Why have readers taken to these writers? The novels are not formally innovative: With a few exceptions, these are straightforward whodunits, hewing closely to conventional models from the English tradition. Nor does their appeal depend on a "relentlessly bleak view of the world," as a writer for the London Times has put it. Bleak worldviews are not particularly hard to come by in crime novels, no matter what country they come from. What distinguishes these books is not some element of Nordic grimness but their evocation of an almost sublime tranquility. When a crime occurs, it is shocking exactly because it disrupts a world that, at least to an American reader, seems utopian in its peacefulness, happiness, and orderliness. It’s Mr. Larsson’s two protagonists — Carl Mikael Blomkvist, a reporter filling the role of detective, and his sidekick, Lisbeth Salander, a k a the girl with the dragon tattoo — who make this novel more than your run-of-the-mill mystery: they’re both compelling, conflicted, complicated people, idiosyncratic in the extreme, and interesting enough to compensate for the plot mechanics, which seize up as the book nears its unsatisfying conclusion. The novel offers a thoroughly ugly view of human nature, especially when it comes to the way Swedish men treat Swedish women. In Larsson’s world, sadism, murder and suicide are commonplace — as is lots of casual sex. (Sweden isn’t all bad.) The first-time author's excitement at his creation is palpable, strangely, in the book's sometimes amateurish construction. There are frequent long digressions in this big book (more than 500 pages) in which he laboriously fills in back-story details. Then there is the Vanger family; what might have seemed like a bit of fun gets out of hand as easily more than 20 people with the surname Vanger are mixed into the story. To his credit, though, he always regains control and restores momentum. Belongs to SeriesMillennium (1) Belongs to Publisher SeriesFarfalle [Marsilio] (130) Heyne Allgemeine Reihe (43245) Áncora y Delfín (1124) Is contained inHas the adaptationIs abridged inIs parodied inHas as a reference guide/companionHas as a studyHas as a student's study guideAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
The disappearance forty years ago of Harriet Vanger, a young scion of one of the wealthiest families in Sweden, gnaws at her octogenarian uncle, Henrik Vanger. He is determined to know the truth about what he believes was her murder. He hires crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist, recently at the wrong end of a libel case, to get to the bottom of Harriet's disappearance. Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-four-year-old, pierced, tattooed genius hacker, possessed of the hard-earned wisdom of someone twice her age--and a terrifying capacity for ruthlessness--assists Blomkvist with the investigation. This unlikely team discovers a vein of nearly unfathomable iniquity running through the Vanger family, an astonishing corruption at the highest echelon of Swedish industrialism--and a surprising connection between themselves.--From publisher description. No library descriptions found.
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)839.738Literature German literature and literatures of related languages Other Germanic literatures Swedish literature Swedish fiction 2000-LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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