The Stieg Larsson Phenomenon/: C/D

Feel like this is big enough to be outside the ghetto of ILB, but reposting what was said there below:

steig larsson - girl with the dragon tattoo (SPOILERS)
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anyone read this? it's a massive bestseller in europe

i'm currently reading it and while some of its deficiencies can be put down to a shaky translation i'm unsure how it got so big - it reads like a kind of mushy, modern p.d. james

― Tracer Hand, Tuesday, November 25, 2008 1:01 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I read about it recently - someone had been recommended it by just about everyone they knew...

I've not read it. Would you recommend it?

― AndyTheScot, Tuesday, November 25, 2008 3:53 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

well it has certainly got me turning the pages.

from what i've read of larsson's life, much of it is close to his own experiences. i just found one of the main characters from the novel on facebook! Lisbeth Salander. which is kind of weird.. i have asked to be her friend.

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, November 26, 2008 6:29 AM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

read this, but was v. dissapointed - as you say, its hard to tell if the translation is at fault, but the writing is flat and cliche-ridden, 'the girl with the dragon tattoo' herself is totally unbelievable as a character, and the way the mystery plays itself out is incredibly formulaic and flat. some of the journalistic background stuff was interesting, i guess, but doesn't really go anywhere - all in all, not a patch on Mankel

― Ward Fowler, Wednesday, November 26, 2008 6:54 AM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

where should i start with mankel? i have to say a big attraction of this book - maybe THE big attraction? - is what is to me the exotic locale of northern sweden, with its endless cups of coffee and strange dialects and warm fireplaces and casual sex.

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, November 26, 2008 7:46 AM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

read the wallander novels, starting with faceless killers

― :) Mrs Edward Cullen XD (max), Wednesday, November 26, 2008 7:49 AM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

also read the martin beck novels (not by mankel--Sjöwall and Wahlöö)

― :) Mrs Edward Cullen XD (max), Wednesday, November 26, 2008 7:52 AM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

it may be time to start giving my hackney library card a serious workout.

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, November 26, 2008 7:54 AM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

why do you guys think this book has been such a huge success? it's being turned into a tv movie in sweden next year, and a bidding war has started for the english rights. i agree that it's not particularly remarkable writing and the plot feels pretty creaky. it's extremely padded, with many paragraphs going by that describe the exact model of powerbook lisbeth is buying, or where mikael stopped and what he ate, none of it with the slightest relevance or significance.

i'm not very knowledgeable about crime fiction or thrillers so correct me if i'm wrong here, but there seems to be a few elements that stand out, and probably contribute to the book's success:

1) shocking scenes of sexual violence
2) secrets from the distant past that lurch into the present
3) an antisocial goth hacker heroine
4) lots of casual sex

and most puzzlingly,

5) a huge family tree that is impossible to keep straight or remember, but which is the key to the whole mystery.

is there a fascination with geneology, with family members? is this a key to the book's success?

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, November 26, 2008 8:05 AM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i mean, an amazon reviewer says:

"It's very Swedish, there are a lot of big corporate/financial details (think Wall Street Journal), and the author has a huge gripe about violence against women. If you can get past these three items, then it's a fantastic story."

i actually think the opposite: the swedishness, the financial details (combined with the incredibly baroque family history), and the violence against women are the only things the book has going for it, and if you "get past these three items" you are left with pretty small potatoes.

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, November 26, 2008 8:07 AM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I'm seeing a bit of the push for the next one (The Girl Who Played With Fire!!!, exclamation marks mine): the magazine I work for is leading their crime section with it, and they've run puff on him before. I know 'a new type of heroine' comes up when people are bigging him up; but I think a large part of the sell is that he's a:
a) Nazi-busting journalist and activist
b) Dead
Which is intriguing, and sets him a little apart from the Scandinavian crime pack. As for the actual book's appeal, or the appeal of scandicrime in general, I am totally unqualified to comment.

― woofwoofwoof, Wednesday, November 26, 2008 10:49 AM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Yeah that's true. The author's story is a huge part of the appeal. The information that he's dead is in bold type on the back of my copy, for instance.

I just forgot one of the biggest selling points - maybe the biggest, in this mid-to-late 2000s literary environment?

CHILD ABUSE

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, November 26, 2008 11:18 AM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Never read "Girl...", but just want to second the praise for the Martin Beck novels.

― James Morrison, Wednesday, November 26, 2008 5:19 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Thirded.

― Ruudside Picnic (James Redd and the Blecchs), Wednesday, November 26, 2008 7:18 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Picked it up from the library a couple weeks ago, but have bogged down quickly every time I've tried to make any progress with it. Writing is flat, dry and dull, situations and characters seem standard for a mass-market thriller. Aside from the extra-textual points of interest, I don't get the appeal.

― contenderizer, Monday, December 1, 2008 6:13 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
10 months pass...

maybe in some socially conservative countries (coff coff FRANCE) the theme about women resonates? i mean the whole thing is really about sexism.

i have picked up the last volume because i am pathetic.

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, October 14, 2009 11:16 AM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

btw the two other people i know besides me who are reading these are french women (NOT the lovely emma b!)

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, October 14, 2009 11:17 AM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I finished the second one a few weeks ago. I'm still wondering if it's the translation at fault for the wooden flat dialogue or it that's just how it's written. The first two held my interest enough that I was annoyed to find the final one isn't being released in the US until summer next year, but as to the appeal it seems the standard sex + violence + bad-guys-get-it-from-pissed-off-cute-n-smart-woman. Major plot points in the second one had me laughing out loud at the total improbability.

― Jaq, Wednesday, October 14, 2009 11:40 AM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

by the way i've now read a martin beck story as well as "the man who smiled" and "one step behind" by mankell... top notch stuff, just fantastically written, and the translations are like silk.

it's funny though - Mankell's stuff is soooo so similar to Sjöwall and Wahlöö.. i could hardly tell the difference TBH. S&W a bit more left-wing than Mankell's "the world is going to shit" philosophy but both obviously concerned about what they see as society-wide degeneration. and S&W's characters possibly a bit more cartoonish but i think i like that about them, they're total characters. everyone in Mankell books is so sympathetic but after awhile i'm like dude, not everybody is can be THAT thoughtful and considerate, can they? maybe in sweden they are.

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, October 14, 2009 1:04 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

also everyone in all these books goes to bed very late and wakes up very early; it's awe-inspiring

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, October 15, 2009 5:36 AM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

something else i've noticed about swede-crime: an acute attention to precise times of day, i.e.

"Larsson woke at 5:40am. He couldn't go back to sleep. So he got up, made coffee, and rubbed his eyes. He felt horrible. The rest of the team would be gathering at 7:45 to go over everything one more time. What had happened to him? Why was he feeling this way? He checked his watch. It was 6:10am."

― Tracer Hand, Friday, October 16, 2009 10:59 AM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Like Jaq, I've been wondering if some of the problems with the writing are down to the translation. There's a lot that seems leaden and flat.

― stet, Friday, October 16, 2009 11:03 AM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Also, there's an explosion of characters in the last book, and almost immediately you're expected to keep track of this whole cast. You get sentences like "[name], [name] and [name] were talking about [name]" where nearly every name is a new and incidental character. I started to wonder about how much editing these books got. Did they leave them untouched "out of respect" or something?

― stet, Friday, October 16, 2009 11:07 AM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

wait, this guy's dead?

― thomp, Saturday, October 17, 2009 10:24 AM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i read all the martin beck ones last year and never got around to starting on the wallander and now in my head he's kenneth branagh and it might be a little late to start, now

― thomp, Saturday, October 17, 2009 10:25 AM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

maybe in some socially conservative countries (coff coff FRANCE) the theme about women resonates? i mean the whole thing is really about sexism.

i have picked up the last volume because i am pathetic.

― Tracer Hand

apparently the swedish title of the first novel translates to: "men who hate women"

so there may be something in that.

― thomp, Saturday, October 17, 2009 10:29 AM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
2 weeks pass...

yeah, it's called that in france too

i have stopped reading this for the moment.. salander's just stuck in a goddamned hotel room! i want action

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, November 5, 2009 8:37 AM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

first one £3 in borders right now. still managed not to buy it.

― thomp, Friday, November 6, 2009 9:16 AM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
7 months pass...

Impulse bought at Borders the other day (neon yellow and green cover + placement right by the counter is pretty clever). Checkout girl says they sell about 20 an hour.

― hills like white people (Hurting 2), Monday, June 28, 2010 11:31 AM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i feel there is something a bit marc loi-esque about larsson.

― joe, Monday, June 28, 2010 11:33 AM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

the movie was among the worst i've ever seen. think: rape, followed by an ass-clutching walk-home, followed by a revenging anal rape involving a dildo toe-kicked into the intitial rapist's ass.

also a bunch of sermonizing about evil and morality and whatever.

― ampersand (remy bean), Monday, June 28, 2010 8:19 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah, the portrayal of violence is a big problem in the books too. it's interesting that blomqvist, presumably a larsson-substitute, feels that sexual assault victims deserve their privacy and betrays his journalistic instincts to protect - spoiler here - harriet vanger, and in later books is concerned in the same way for salander. but larsson is ok with lengthy descriptions of sexual torture which sort of invite the question as to what kind of thrills he thinks he's providing. would much rather those events to have been "offstage".

he's kind of inconsistent about salander too in a weird way. in the second book, salander beats the shit out of a couple of hells angels with the help of a taser and some mace. but she gets easily overpowered by an ageing lawyer when she's raped, despite coming prepared for a physical struggle. it's particularly contrived and out of character, just so that she can have her revenge scene.

also, he had his feminist heroine get a boob job. i mean, really.

― joe, Monday, June 28, 2010 8:55 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2010/07/05/100705sh_shouts_ephron

― progressive cuts (Tracer Hand), Thursday, July 1, 2010 5:57 AM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

one of the few good shouts and murmurs of the last 10 years

― progressive cuts (Tracer Hand), Thursday, July 1, 2010 8:59 AM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I'm almost done with this now - enough that I think I can talk about it. I found it fairly engrossing in the pure sense of just wanting to know what was going to happen badly enough that I was able to read very large chunks at a time. I actually didn't find the writing as unsatisfying as some seem to have. I thought there were a lot of nicely observed in-between moments, and I enjoyed the way the novel toys with/teases the reader, at least most of the time, although toward the end it just sort of felt like anyone could have done it, and when it was finally revealed it seemed almost arbitrary.

There was something a little off about the portrayal of women for sure, like something coming out of severe male guilt of some sort. The Marc Loi comment is otm. Lisbeth Salander seemed a little like an adolescent's comic book fantasy, and the fact that she INSISTS on having sex with the protagonist is a little too convenient. In fact that's exactly it - there's a discomfort with the idea of men initiating sex - it seems to be closely linked to rape and perversion in the author's mind.

― surfer blood for oil (Hurting 2), Saturday, July 3, 2010 9:45 PM Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i.e. whereas things can be made kosher by having the 20something who looks 12 practically force herself on the middle-aged protagonist.

― surfer blood for oil (Hurting 2), Saturday, July 3, 2010 9:52 PM Bookmark

The whole story about the fallout over the estate is weirdly fascinating.

At one of the parties I was at last night a small clutch of folks were talking about the books and movies quite a bit.

My wife summed up the mystique surrounding the book thusly: "Who is this Girl With The Dragon Tatoo, and does she do it?"

The Wife With the Insight Into the Male Mind

haha

i never finished the third one btw - i tried heroically but goddamn that was boring

lol hurting's wife otm - from briefly reading the wikipedia blurbs afaict the main appeal lies in hot computer hacker chick who is socially awkward and willing to sleep with anybody

maybe I'm just projecting

david fincher is doing a movie of this so i'd kind of like to like it

know i'll never read it tho

Emma's read, and thoroughly enjoyed, all three. She says it's classy trashy.

just going to repost this, ephron nails it -

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/2010/07/05/100705sh_shouts_ephron

Classy trashy is about right. I couldn't put the first two down, but that NYer link it pretty otm.

*is* pretty otm

Yep, Mr. Jaq showed me that NYer piece yesterday - I started cracking up at the first paragraph. The third one was full of so many "light but nutritious meals" and coffee apparatus descriptions.

I said this on another thread, but the page-long Ikea catalog lists in the 2nd one were so weird and offputting. Why would the editor leave them in? Makes no sense.

Kalle is a total Mary Sue, too.

I had the same feeling about the 2-page macbook (ibook?) description in the first one.

maybe he got paid for product placements??

weird

The apple stuff is total mac fanboyism. Douglas Adams was the same, except better written

Ok actually finished it. I think the best parts are middle-aged, semi-washed-up Bloomkvist getting obsessively into the mystery, checking every possible detail and hitting dead end after dead end. Salander and the financial intrigue are really forced and hackneyed even though the libel plot made a good initial setup. Bloomkvist feels believable (other than his unlikely effect on women) whereas there's almost nothing believable about Salander.

i ride for mankell all the time--not his recent weird stuff like the man from beijing but the wallander novels. larsson i dont have the patience for.

i think sjowall and wahloo are better than mankell, but theyre super similar.

btw the stiltedness of the prose of all these books is sort of an effect of translation, but also sort of the nature of swedish sentence structure/density/prose style, according to my girlfriend, who speaks swedish

so... i'm gonna love this but feel cheap? awes.

yes. do it.

there's almost nothing believable about Salander

Wait 'til you read the second one

Em lol'd at the NYer piece.

I saw the Dragon Tattoo movie when it came out before I became aware that there was a phenomenon or even a book. I thought it married the worst aspects of cartoonish exploitation with the worst aspects of maudlin middlebrow drama. The rape stuff in particular, I thought was handled very poorly and pretty offensively. Just a really bad mix of revelling in tawdry kicks with what I'd describe as a half-hearted attempt at distancing itself from the unsavoriness of those kicks, for appearances sake if nothing else.

I read all three of these, my thoughts are here.

basically the first one is decent, the second one is terrible, and the third one is good but would be incomprehensible unless you read the second one

Just watched the movie and quite enjoyed the mystery set up, landscapes etc. The rest of it was disappointing;
<SPOILERS>
in fact I was quite surprised that people are STILL making movies with the sequence where the protagonists get split up, one of them finds some reason to confide in the bad guy about what he suspects, notices something that gives the game away JUST too late, all the while the other good guy has figured it out and is racing towards the climactic scene... where OF COURSE the bad guy describes exactly what he's done. I mean, even if it was written exactly like this in the book, couldn't someone have changed it up a bit?

Also, couldn't Harriet have maybe mentioned to someone that there was a serial killer on the loose doing loads of unsolved murders?

Every other person I see on the bus is still reading one of these books, btw.

I like the second one. It's totally the Salander Supremacy, but I'm fine with that. Third one OTOH with extended court scenes and seemingly endless length and number of characters tired me out a bit.

don't forget our main character being in a hospital bed for the first 200 pages or so

Yeah that sucked too.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jun/09/moralist-stieg-larsson/

^^^ have never read these but completely enjoyed this

Agreed. Are there that many technical spec scenes in these books? I don't think I could handle that.

I say after reading about how the books are full of rape & incest.

hmm, weird, i finally picked the first two of these up during some recent travels— i'd already exhausted the magazine racks of three airports— and i found the first two to be quite enthralling, though was hyper-aware of their shortcomings, esp re: the endless descriptions of eating and so on.