Hey-zeus! This has been sitting in the unpublished post pile for FAR too long. Time to get this puppy outta here!
Have you read The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo?
Did you love it and rave about it to everyone you knew?
Or did you think (like me) that it was just a little bit poo?
I don't know many people who didn't love this book. I heard it called "Thrilling" and "Exciting" and "Really different". The buzz/spin surrounding this book was epic. The two pages of call-outs from reviews from around the world are falling over themsleves with repetitive praise about how spectacular this novel is.
In my post reading websearch, I of course stumbled across the review from the so so fabulous First Tuesday Book Club . And on there was 2 blindingly bedazzled reviews. Jennifer Byrne said she thought it was "terrific". Jason Steger said he thought it was a "great read" and "completely absorbing". And their opinions seemed to reflect the wider reading community.
Fortunately there were three wise souls on the panel that week. Marieke Hardy (bless her red-lipped soul! total girl crush!!) was pretty ambivalent about the book, though I totally disagree with her assessment of it being "efficient" and with her experience of being "involved the whole way" through reading.
Wendy Harmer, whom I very rarely agree with, called the book a blunt instrument, and I completely concur that the cliche riddled and clunky phrasing of the book was very off-putting. She cited "she ran away as fast as her legs could carry her" as one such example of groan-worthy narration. She and Peter Corris (a crime writer of more consise tales) both mentioned the vast tracts of exposition, which I found frustrating and useless.
The basic outline of the story is still pretty convaluted. A shamed journo takes a job from a rich dude to simultaneously write his family bio and solve a cold case. He is assisted by a tattood waif hacker with aspergers and a tiny temper. There is a whole lot of corporate crime stuff that I couldn't give a rats about. there is an intriguing rich family of inbred Nazis that I didn't find at all endearing. And the journo, Blomkvist, can't seem to keep it in his trousers and seems to shag anything. Who sets off on multiple missions to uncover the truth about just about everything.
One friend of mine (not Harmer's) said that she liked the fact that it wasn't totally action packed. That it was undulating in tension, and not at constant break neck speed. A refreshing kind of thrillier. I think that is bollocks. If it is NOT thrilling, then it can hardly be called a thriller right? I mean, huge tracts of description of inconequential details are a sure fire way to slow down break neck tension. And I'm sure if I was after a novel of shopping lists of how many pairs of warm socks one dude bought, I would look in the Tedious as Hell section of the bookshop to find it.
The character of Lisbeth Salander - who does have an awsome name, by the way - is intriguing. But by no means three dimonsional. Something of a male fantasy goth style character. Pierced. Monosyllabic. High sexual appetite. And a tendency for violence. But hardly empowered, as some readers suggest. And sure she is likable, and sure she is intruiging. She does make you want to know what happens to her, but then so does the ultra-insipid Bella Swan (I nearly dry retched just typing her name). I have already got a long list of arse kicking female characters in my BFFs of Pop Culture. Buffy, Lyra Belaqua, CJ, Katniss, Viola, Liz Lemon, Eliza Bennet... Lisbeth Salander doesn't really measure up to this high standard. The Times UK agrees with me here, stating she "isn’t so much a character as a revenge fantasy come to life, powering her way through the novel like the heroine of a computer game"
I realise this book is English as a Second Language - which might explain why the figurative language is so cliched and clunky. But that is no excuse for tedious narration and roughly hewn stereotyped charcters. Some ESL books are brilliant in translation. Bernhard Schlick's The Reader for example. Patrick Suskind's Perfume, classics like Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (also a brilliant name - and this one comes directly to mind as I am reading it at the moment.) This ESL novel is not one of those.
And yes, in case you were wondering, I have read the second volume The Girl who played with fire. In it, the oh-so-empowered female protagonist gets breast implants. And when I finished that, I read the third one. Finishing these books was more of a relief than anything else. I can tick that off and give these enormous tomes away to someone who might want them more than me. On Amazon.com, the populist vote is 7:1 positive to negative, so I am outvoted there. But Alex Berenson of the NY Times agrees that the "beginning is dull, the end is unbelievable and dull, the characters are so roughly drawn they are more shadows of stock characters than fully fleshed out humans, and the sexual polotics is all about men who hate women. incidentally, the original swqedish title of the book". The popularity of this series may entirely be about the fact that Laarson is now dead - the Van Gogh approach to the popularity of art.
And no, in case you were wondering, I haven't seen the film.
This book is good for a long plane journey, a lazy summer escape from the maddening Christmas crowds or a long commute to work. As a piece of fiction, in the tomes of the classics, it will not arrive. Or at least it shouldn't.
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