steig larsson - girl with the dragon tattoo (SPOILERS)

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

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?

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.

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

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.

read the wallander novels, starting with faceless killers

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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

Thirded.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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."

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.

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?

wait, this guy's dead?

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Parody version: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0575100915

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, 26 November 2008

I couldn't make it into any of these books but guiltily enjoyed the swedish movies. I read that the new book, written by an author hired to add to the series, was more readable in some ways so I figured ehhh I'll give it a chance.

I have to tell you, they really needed to hire a translator and then another person to rewrite the prose. There are.... issues? The tone of the narrative still has an "old man writes about young, strong woman but still does not understand women" feeling. There's an awkward bit at the beginning where Blomqvist is in a taxi and the phrase "woman driver" appears even though it says "she" in the next sentence, making it sound like a negative judgment is about her as a woman, not as a cab driver. I hope it's more of an issue where the translator is being too literal and there's a redundancy with gendered pronouns that snuck in due to translation.

Further in, there is the most stereotypically ridiculous portrayal of an autistic kid, though....

yeah, I'm also curious about this new book, just scanning through some of the amazon reviews, some people seem to hate it and don't want the series to continue, some people say it's quite decent but maybe not quite on the same level of the first three... I guess I'm still interested in the characters, and some of the themes of the trilogy (the phone hacking, internet surveillance, the state within a state conspiracies, etc.) seem to resonate even more strongly these days. anyone else read it yet?