It was the better of books, it was the worse of books.

[matt_doyle]

Last night I finished reading The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and boy were my feelings mixed.

This will be a spoiler-free review, for anyone who hasn't read it, but the comments will be a spoiler-friendly zone.

So.  The book attempts to talk in a positive, deconstructive manner about classism, sexism, sexual abuse, and rape culture.  It also wants to be an exciting thriller.  Does it succeed at either?

... Maybe?

The fist hundred plus pages are dull as dirt setup.  I almost gave up three or four times, and had concluded that all the hype about this book was baseless bullshit.  Then, when the action began, I changed my mind again, and again, and again.  There's one Wham Line in particular, where the male protagonist talks to his daughter, that had me say "Oh, shit" out loud as soon as I understood the ramifications.  The titular girl, Lisbeth, is a fascinating character, with some ambitious complexities, and a straight-up badass besides in several affirming ways.  Despite several subversions of trope, however, there's still a Hell of a lot of problematic material surrounding her, and while it mostly worked for me, I'm in a nice comfy position of privilege.  The author was clearly trying to highlight real problems surrounding the exploitation of women, and doing that without, you know, exploiting the women in the narrative is hard.  I expect a lot of mileage is varied in reactions to this one.  I can't talk about the iffiest bits of sexual politics in this without spoilers, but suffice to say the male protagonist's obvious role as an author insert Did Not Help.

The prose is often stale (which may be partly a translation issue), reminiscent of Michael Chrichton at his most infodumpy, but the action scenes and emotional punches are handled better.  And I was much happier with the actual, physical crisis point of the book, which was not at all the formulaic thing the author was telegraphing -- good job on the change-up, Stieg.

In any case, I'm intrigued enough that I want to read the second book and watch at least the Swedish version of the movie.

Comments

[unnatrldisaster]

Before you criticize the prose, keep in mind that it was translated from Swedish to English. I think you should have a disclaimer with this fact.

[matt_doyle]

Fair point.

[sunnyskywalker]

I haven't read the book yet, but have seen both the Swedish and American movie versions. Besides everything you mentioned, one problem for me was that for modern audiences, "Nazi" acts as code for "inhumanly evil monster," and so it's a lot easier to write off the whole Vanger storyline as, "Well, but they were Nazis!" I think he was trying to get at something by having the surviving one say he was "the most honest Swede" (or something like that), implying that really all the men have brutal authoritarian rapist urges or something and being a Nazi was just being honest about it... but I don't think it works well enough. Does the book emphasize that point more? Because I remember it being basically a one-liner in both movie versions.

Both versions made me a bit uncomfortable in that they made a big point of how awful it was that all these poor immigrant women were being raped and murdered because no one would miss them... and then there was no effort spent on, you know, trying to identify them from the clues in the basement and seeing if they had families in their birth countries who might be worried about them but had no way to contact them. Or even any extended worry on the main characters' parts that they couldn't do this for some reason, or sadness that maybe none of the women had families to worry about them (or had awful families they were escaping by fleeing to Sweden).

Incidentally, the American casting clears up one problem: it makes more sense for multiple people to be lusting after Blomkvist when he looks like Daniel Craig. Otherwise you'd think they'd just admire him for his journalistic integrity and date someone else. (Unless Swedish people are far less shallow than Americans, I suppose.) Though I think not having Blomkvist be everyone's love interest would have cleared the problem up better.

[matt_doyle]

The book does do a little more with the Nazi thread -- primarily because Nazism is kind of a red herring. Additionally, the problem of the missing women is foregrounded and problematized; it's a major ethical issue the characters struggle with, and nobody is pleased with its resolution.

[sunnyskywalker]

That's a relief! More a problem of adaptation, then.

Incidentally, the Swedish version has lovely cinematography - I think you could freeze-frame it at any point and it would look like one of those northern Renaissance oil paintings. It also looks colder and bleaker than the American version. (Also, there is an adorable cat who is actually quite a good actor in the American version, but anyone who likes cats might want to avoid watching part of that subplot, because the props department did a really convincing job of the cat's sad fate.)

[matt_doyle]

Oh dear. I know exactly what you mean.

[cpolk]

yeah the book has more information about the Nazi background and I get the feeling that steig had a strong reason to include that in the book and it seems to come out in the extended series pretty well- larsson was pretty concerned by the rise of white supremacists in sweden.

the swedish casting choice made me happy for the most part. I enjoyed seeing a woman who would have to be in middle age to accomplish what she has, and actully looks middle aged. it's cool.

[sunnyskywalker]

That is definitely a plus. It's frustrating when movie women seem to skip right from 25 to elderly, for so many reasons.