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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005)

by Stieg Larsson

Other authors: See the other authors section.

Series: Millennium (1)

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingConversations / Mentions
41,959171441 (4.03)1 / 963
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.… (more)
  1. 322
    Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg (taz_)
    taz_: Charm school drop-outs Lisbeth Salander of "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" and Smilla Qaaviqaaq Jaspersen of "Smilla's Sense of Snow" strike me as unconventional soul sisters of the detective mystery. Each haunted by demons of the past, fiercely independent, armored in cynicism and misanthropy, they share a certain psychic landscape and brilliant, icy resourcefulness. If you love one, I predict you'll love the other.… (more)
  2. 92
    Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell (Ronoc, Ronoc)
  3. 60
    Mallory's Oracle by Carol O'Connell (kraaivrouw)
    kraaivrouw: I think Lisbeth and Mallory have a lot in common.
  4. 93
    Jar City by Arnaldur Indridason (ansate, ANeumann)
  5. 40
    The Mermaids Singing by Val McDermid (kraaivrouw)
    kraaivrouw: It's mentioned in the book and it's another great thriller.
  6. 40
    The Informationist by Taylor Stevens (aliklein)
  7. 51
    1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (BillPilgrim)
    BillPilgrim: Another kick-ass female heroine
  8. 51
    The Draining Lake by Arnaldur Indridason (ansate)
  9. 20
    Blue Belle by Andrew Vachss (birder4106)
    birder4106: Burke (Vacchs) und Salander (Larsson) haben sehr viel gemeinsam.
  10. 53
    Child of the Hive by Jessica Meats (EllieM)
    EllieM: Are you wondering 'what next?' after reading the The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo? I recommend that you try Child of The Hive by Jessica Meats. Both books are plot driven action packed thrillers with a rather unexpected heroine. Like Lisbeth Salander, Child of the Hive's Sophie is a highly intelligent computer geek. Someone you would not necessarily choose as a best friend but you grow fond of her as the story progresses. Stieg Larsson's blockbuster is a more traditional 'whodunnit' and the main plot puzzle is the identity of the murderer. Jessica Meats writes in a slightly a different genre, Child of The Hive is a speculative thriller on the borders of science fiction, and as such it presents different puzzles. For example a moral one, exactly which sub group should I classify as 'the bad guys'? As for guessing the ending, most people will not see where the book is going. I failed. But the surprising nature of the story is much of its fun. With the benefit of hindsight you can see that the climax of 'Child' is tidy and satisfactory. Certainly not one of those annoying thrillers with a plot balanced on one very unlikely clue which has been carefully draped in numerous red herrings. Both books should appeal to a wide range of readers, but I suggest Child of the Hive is also more suitable for a slightly younger group than The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo which is distinctly adult in places. Child of The Hive is a really ‘good read’, I give it 5 stars out of five… (more)
  11. 31
    A Place of Execution by Val McDermid (adithyajones)
  12. 10
    The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy (5hrdrive)
  13. 21
    Sun Storm by Åsa Larsson (amberwitch)
    amberwitch: Wellwritten crimestories set in Sweden with female protagonists.
  14. 21
    The Crow Road by Iain Banks (Anonymous user)
  15. 1110
    Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist (MyriadBooks, mcenroeucsb)
    mcenroeucsb: Let the Right One In is a Swedish novel about a child vampire who just wants to be a normal kid, the pedophile who is obsessed with her, and the neighbor boy who wants to befriend her.
  16. 32
    The Dogs of Riga by Henning Mankell (Ronoc)
  17. 65
    The Ice Princess by Camilla Läckberg (Patangel)
  18. 00
    One Kick by Chelsea Cain (Anonymous user)
  19. 00
    Purity by Jonathan Franzen (kristina25)
  20. 00
    Brixton Hill by Zoë Beck (JuliaMaria)

(see all 48 recommendations)

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» See also 963 mentions

English (1,555)  Dutch (35)  Spanish (33)  German (14)  Italian (13)  French (13)  Swedish (12)  Catalan (11)  Danish (11)  Portuguese (Brazil) (5)  Portuguese (Portugal) (3)  Finnish (2)  Norwegian (2)  Hebrew (1)  All languages (1,710)
Showing 1-5 of 1555 (next | show all)
I'm just not sure. Maybe it lost something in translation. ( )
  IsraOverZero | Sep 23, 2023 |
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. ( )
  MissysBookshelf | Aug 27, 2023 |
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. ( )
  jumblejim | Aug 26, 2023 |
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 after figuring out who the murder is, despite the Mikael knows that the murder knows who he is and has already tried to kill him twice, he decides to go over to the murder's house without any backup or anyone knowing where he is, passing the gasoline and rifle used in the previous murder attempts on the way to the front door. That, friends, is a suicide attempt.

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. ( )
  settingshadow | Aug 19, 2023 |
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." ( )
  MGADMJK | Aug 17, 2023 |
Showing 1-5 of 1555 (next | show all)
added by grimm | editRomans et Lectures, Calepin (Sep 9, 2009)
 
[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.
added by elenchus | editSlate.com, Nathanial Rich (Jul 8, 2009)
 
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.
added by Shortride | editThe Age, Jeff Glorfeld (Mar 17, 2008)
 

» Add other authors (28 possible)

Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Larsson, Stiegprimary authorall editionsconfirmed
Bjørnson, ElisabethTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Brynolfsson, ReineNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Colom, Núria VivesTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Giorgetti Cima, CarmenTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Gombau i Arnau, AlexandreTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Jorissen-Wedzinga, TinekeTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Keeland, RegTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Kuhn, WibkeTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Kyrö, MarjaTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Mendelsund, PeterCover designersecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Ortega Román, Juan JoséTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Reichlin, SaulNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Vance, SimonNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Wenner, MartinNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Epigraph
Dedication
First words
Det hade blivit en årligen återkommande händelse.
It happened every year, was almost a ritual.
Quotations
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(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
Disambiguation notice
Män som hatar kvinnor ("Men who Hate Women"), 2005. English translation by Reg Keeland under the title The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, January 2008.
ISBN 0307269752 is for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
Publisher's editors
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Canonical DDC/MDS
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References to this work on external resources.

Wikipedia in English (2)

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.

Book description
Synopsis for the Dutch edition: 
"Twee tegenpolen, Mikael Blomkvist en Lisbeth Salander. Hij is een charmante man en een kritische journalist van middelbare leeftijd, uitgever van het tijdschrift Millennium. Zij is een jonge, gecompliceerde, uiterst intelligente vrouw met zwartgeverfd haar, piercings en tatoeages, én een uitermate goede hacker. Samen vormen ze een ongewoon, maar sterk team.

Mikael wordt benaderd door oud-zakenman Henrik Vanger. Veertig jaar geleden is de zestienjarige Harriët Vanger op mysterieuze wijze verdwenen en vermoedelijk vermoord. De zaak is echter nooit opgelost en inmiddels verjaard. Toch wil Henrik Vanger graag dat Mikael zich hier nog eens op stort."

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. 
Haiku summary
Journalist solves type
of locked-room murder with help
of the tattooed girl.
(passion4reading)
Author's premature
death, good PR spark massive
sales phenomenon.
(passion4reading)

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