12. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Category: 50 Books

12. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

This review may contain spoilers. I don’t know. It depends. What you may think is a spoiler I may think is an annoying plot device. You’ve been warned.

I know, I’m the last person to have read this book.

Things to know about this book:
1. This is actually book one of the Millenium Trilogy. This is great because for some ridiculous reason, Swedish crime fiction is translated and published in the US, but we only get book 3 or 4. It makes zero sense, but there you go. So this time we actually got book one first. Yay!

2. Stieg Larsson is dead. The three books in the tril have been published posthumously.

3. This is one of the few Scandinavian crime books I’ve read that didn’t have a tree on the cover.

It’s basically a whodunit with some extra stuff thrown in for character development. For instance the two main characters are Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist, and Lisbeth Salander a young antisocial computer hacker/researcher. They both have these really big things in their lives going on, Blomkvist is a financial journalist who has to serve time in prison for libel, while Salander has to deal with a handicapped mother in a nursing home as well as the fact that Salander is much abused by her guardian/advocate. But those are just subplots.

The main plot is a whodunit that happened the the 1960s. Henrik Vanger is an old rich industrailist who hires Blomkvist to find out who killed his niece Harriet in 1966. Loads of stuff happens then Blomkvist needs to hire an assistant to help him research, enter: Salander. Loads of stuff happens after that as well.

And now for the Airing of Grievances:

1. The Vanger family history/family tree. It was way too dense and confusing. And then you have to read about how Blomkvist is confused about it as well. And you might say, “Jaimie, you dolt, it was supposed to be confusing.” Yes, but it really added nothing to the book, except of course extra pages. Because here’s the thing, if BOTH main characters each get their own subplot, and then they BOTH come in and work the main plot? WE DON’T NEED 30 EXTRA CHARACTERS. Just saying.

2. Up until the last 70-ish pages I thought Salander was 19 years old. Turns out she’s been 25 this whole time. How was I missing that? I know that sometimes things are lost in translation. This might be one of those things. Also, it’s very possible that it’s my bad, and I didn’t read something correctly. So I’m not holding this against the book. But it did not help my feelings on:

3. The Blomkvist/Salander hook up. Give me a damn break. A book written by a middle-age guy about a middle-age guy who has a bunch of sex with the twenty-something smart hottie chick. How fucking clever is that?  And then to make it where she initiates? Fine, I can buy that, she’s been abused by older men her whole life. I get that. But I was very disappointed in Blomkvist (though he has no idea of her past, so it’s not quite so fair to blame him so harshly).

Would it have been so terrible to have them just be friends? Couldn’t they have done something AWESOME and have treated each other as peers? Wouldn’t that have been novel? I mean, especially if there’s a social message you’re trying to get across in this book in the first place. And there IS a social message. At the beginning of each section is a statistic about violence/sexual assault against women in Sweden. Not to mention that the Swedish title of the book is “Män som hatar kvinnor” which means Men Who Hate Women. And of course Blomkvist isn’t violent or abusive AT ALL towards Salander but also? The fucked up relationship ISN’T HELPING.

4. Blomkvist is a slut. He has sex with all the available women. Is this his tragic flaw?

5. And Salander comes to the conclusion that she’s falling in love with Blomkvist? Really? You want me to buy that a possibly autistic/asperger’s syndrome, slightly obsessive, antisocial (and when i say antisocial i don’t mean she doesn’t like to be around people, i mean antisocial personality disorder) abused girl who has just recently been able to hold a semi-regular freelance job, would just acclimate to a new relationship and be all, “i’m in love! yay!” Seriously, throughout the whole book she’s shown no social or emotional recipriocity, but at the end decides that she’s in love with Blomkvist? And it’s a normal thing? I mean, maybe if she had some kind of obsessive, stalker-y love i could swallow that easier than the puppy-love outlook i’m supposed to swallow. I’m calling bullshit on this.

6. There is no number 6.

7. The book could have been a 100 pages shorter if it would have JUST GOTTEN TO THE POINT ALREADY.  If, on the other hand, you love to read loads and loads of exposition, this book is for you. I don’t mind reading loads and loads of exposition as long as there’s a pay off at the end.

8. The pay off was not worth the loads and loads of expostion.

9. The Vanger family: I hated them at the beginning of the book, I hate them at the end of the book. That’s not a problem I have with the book, I just wanted you to know.

10. I think the author betrays Salander’s vengefulness at the end. She wants the families of the murdered women to know what happened to them, but she settles for what? A hit to the Vanger pocketbook? No way!

I was so excited to finally read this book because I had only heard good things about it. But after reading it I was really disappointed. I will say that the mystery itself, just the mystery and the solving of it was well done. The rest was a waste of time.

Book two comes to the US in June? July? I’m not sure. I will read it out of curiousity, but I’m not as excited about it as I had been.

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