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The disappearance forty years ago of Harriet Vanger, a young scion of one of the wealthiest families in Sweden, gnaws at her octogenarian uncle, Henrik Vanger. He is determined to know the truth about what he believes was her murder. He hires crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist, recently at the wrong end of a libel case, to get to the bottom of Harriet's disappearance. Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-four-year-old, pierced, tattooed genius hacker, possessed of the hard-earned wisdom of someone twice her age--and a terrifying capacity for ruthlessness--assists Blomkvist with the investigation. This unlikely team discovers a vein of nearly unfathomable iniquity running through the Vanger family, an astonishing corruption at the highest echelon of Swedish industrialism--and a surprising connection between themselves.--From publisher description.… (more)
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I must give kudos to the publisher and the rest of the team who have made this and the other books in the series international bestsellers, especially after the unfortunate death of the author. To catapult any fiction to the top of the charts is quite an accomplishment. But when the original writer is no longer working behind the scenes, it makes it that much more astonishing.
That said, I must get on with my honest review, and the stunning fact that this vapid text could be dressed up and hyped up so much so as to get people to fork over their hard-earned money and be happy that they did so. Like others here on Amazon have already stated, at first I thought the problem might be the translation. However, there are serious errors that go beyond mere translation. The narrative is laden with a constant bombardment of trivial information that detracts from the story. For instance, there is the odd repetition of mundane, technical references:
"After discussion with her mother they had agreed to give Pernilla an iPod, an MP3 player hardly bigger than a matchbox which could store her huge CD collection" (74).
"Malm had worked in PhotoShop, and it took a moment to notice that the building was floating in air" (101).
"At lunchtime Salander booted up her iBook and opened Eudora to write an email...To be on the safe side, she ran the message through her PGP encryption programme" (104).
"He wanted to know whether the connection could handle ADSL and was told that it would be possible by way of a relay in Hedeby, and that it would take several days" (139).
"The family was so extensive that he was forced to create a database in his iBook. He used the NotePad programme [...], one of those full-value products that two men at the Royal Technical College had created and distributed as shareware for a pittance on the Internet" (168).
I appreciate technology as much as the next person. But if it doesn't add to the narrative, the characters, or enhance the reading experience in some way, it becomes mud.
The story also degenerates into frequent references to the weather (as if in one's in a boring conversation and all this is all that's left to discuss):
"The thermometer outside the window said 5 degrees F, and he couldn't remember ever feeling so cold as after that walk..." (138).
"The temperature had dropped to -1 degrees F" (140).
"He had several miserable days in the middle of the month when the termperature dropped to -35 degrees F" (184).
"Then the weather changed and the temperature rose steadily to a balmy 14 degrees F" (185).
"The thermometer showed 6 below zero" (141).
Now, to be fair, I have only managed to muck my way to page 202. Perhaps the rise and fall in temperature will have some vital link to the plot. Perhaps the characters will come alive. I will be sure to let you know if I manage to survive until the end of the book. I am hoping that somehow, miraculously, the novel will redeem itself. If it does, that would be the most astonishing thing of all.
My main objection (other than the horribly clunky translation) is
It's clear the author doesn't understand women very well. We don't just sit around waiting for the first passing journalist to come to town before we jump on him. We just don't. This book read like Larsson's fantasy about what it would be like to be a famous journalist. Women throwing themselves at him left and right, and (oooh!) one of them is a hip Goth-y girl with tattoos! How edgy!
Yawn.
I've got the same feeling I got after reading "The Da Vinci Code." It's like having eaten a
All right, I'm not so familiar with this genre...but this poorly conceived, repetitive, and lackluster translation makes me hope that it was damn good in Swedish. I've never seen so much ham-fisted direct characterization. Larsson doesn't let any of his characters come to life--he has to tell us all about them before they do anything. Oh, and they don't really do anything for the first 100 pages or so. The rape/S&M scenes seemed totally out of place considering the dull prose of the rest of the novel.
And what's with all the product placement? Entire paragraphs devoted to Salander's Mac? And how many times does Blomqvist pause for "sandwiches," not having enough time for a proper meal? No wonder the damn thing is 600+ pages long.
Murder? Check
Sex? Check
Just enough brutality to make the reader feel edgy for reading it? Check
Excessive information on an obscure (read: boring) topic? Check
"Fringe" Christianity? Check
Congratulations. You have yourself a generic
I would rather eat my own vomit
The 2 pronged premise is
Henrik hires Blomkvist, who to all appearances is taking a break to recuperate from the recent blow to his career and reputation, to investigate Harriet’s disappearance. Initially unwilling, Blomkvist agrees to the request when Henrik promises him evidence against Wennerstrom, at the end of the agreed year. Henrik lives on an island owned by the wealthy Vanger family, surrounded by his relatives, most of whom he detests. Blomqvist moves to the island on the pretext of writing Henrik’s biography, although the Vanger clan is not fooled. And then he along with Lisbeth Salander, a social rebel and astute investigator, forage around for clues to a long cold case.
While the core Vanger clan investigation was interesting to follow, and the novel did pick up speed when the author was delineating this part, most of the book reads like a not-too-adept translation. I found the structure jerky, with the essential fluidity of a mystery novel missing. Larsson is given to providing details of unimportant objects and events, like describing details of the computer/camera that Salander is using or the size of the room that Henrik uses as his office. It would have sufficed to use relative adjectives like “large” or “cutting edge” rather than describe products by brand name - that is a little weird and distracting.
The characters in the book didn’t seem real enough, because although they did things we never got to know why they did them, or what they thought. The action described in third person seems detached, and makes it hard to sympathize with the main protagonists. Also, and I seem to harp about this, a lot of things appeared to be “lost in translation”. Take Blomkvist’s casual attitude to his relationships - he is apparently in one with a married woman (who’s husband is OK with her affair-on-the-side) , but has no qualms with falling into bed with other women - now is that just him, or is it a Swedish thing ? We never know.
Note that I’m not objecting to his “morality”, I’m just asking for a better understanding of his character. If he is such a good guy (and he is) why is he such a good guy ? And if he is such a charming guy that women are simply hopping into his bed (almost) unasked, can we have a better description of him, other than the title of the book he is reading ? Blomkvist was very “active” in the story, but seemed “passive“. His actions were described with detachment, and seemed remote, and I never got a whiff of the passionate murder mystery the reviews had promised.
Salander is the girl in the title. Why I have no idea, because she is not the main character here - Blomkvist is. She has numerous tattoos (besides the dragon one), is almost an orphan (her mother is an asylum of some sort), and has some serious issues with fitting into “normal” society. She is thus a ward of the state, and is required to report to a state-appointed guardian. At 24, she is an accomplished computer hacker, and is at home with numerous state-of-the-art “snooping” gadgets.
The original Swedish book was named “Men who hate women” which probably suited it better, given the whole violence theme in the book. Misogynists abound in the story, and there are graphic descriptions of sexual and other violence in the book. Each chapter is prefaced with statistics on abuse against women.
I dragged my feet on this book, very painfully getting to the end. The stilted style, and the fact that the book continues on for about a hundred pages, after the climax, to a pretty lame ending, put me off. On the whole, I found the book cliché-ridden and badly edited (I would have lopped off a whole lot of useless exposition), and left me thinking that the actions in the book need to be grounded in more context.
Sexually it is a male fantasy.
A bad translation by Reg
A waste of time. Not another Henning Menkel.
For the contrasting character we have twenty-four-year-old Lisbeth Salander, a pierced, tattooed, wraith-like punk with an uncanny ability to conduct in-depth research for the security firm at which she is employed. Lisbeth is damaged goods with a past that haunts her at all turns. But feisty hardly does justice as a description of her hard-as-nails outer shell.
When Salander is employed to assist Blomkvist in the final stages of his research into Harriet’s disappearance these two unlikely characters create a tension and a fusion that is gripping, emotional, and compelling. Blomkvist is basically a gentle spirit who, while by no means stodgy, tries his best to do the right thing, but does not always succeed. He is, after all divorced, doesn’t see his daughter as often as he should, and has been having a long-time affair with his married partner, Erika Berger. Salander, in response to her brutal life, is cold, calculating and not opposed to using any means to achieve her goal. As the two spend time with each other, despite their age difference, they connect.
The storyline is developed with slow and detailed precision creating an atmosphere of suspense. Along with a complex storyline Larsson has created complex characters that are easy to care about. We certainly want to know what happened to Harriet and the crazy members of the cloistered Vanger family, but, due to Larsson’s in-depth character development, we want to know even more about Mikael and Lisbeth. The ending of this fascinating mystery at first seems a disappointment until one remembers that this book is just the first in the Millennium trilogy.
On a sad note, before his death in 2004 Larsson was a Swedish journalist and editor-in-chief of Expo magazine, and had just finished the Millennium trilogy when he succumbed to a heart attack and did not live to see his books published.
The book consists of two
One of Larsson's larger objectives in this book is clearly to highlight the disturbing pervasiveness of violence against women. All of the significant violence in the book is gendered, and is perpetrated against female victims. One of its victims is co-protagonist Lisbeth Salander. She is certainly an interesting character, one who is uncomfortable with what many of us might consider basic sociability. She is also a woman who has endured much abuse, and that makes her essential to Larsson's larger point. One of Salander's most significant problems is that legally she is considered a ward of the state. She had been in this position as a child without competent parents, but her status as a legal dependent was allowed to continue into her adulthood. The fact that an adult who earns her own money, holds a job, and is capable of managing the basic elements of day-to-day life can be legally alienated from her money and her basic legal rights is, quite simply, frightening. Clearly Larsson is making an argument against the institution of guardianship. I was unclear if the portion of the text which explain guardianship were part of Larsson's original text, or if they were added by the translator for the non-Swedish audience.
This is not the most amazing book I've ever read, but it's a book I'll certainly think about for some time. I suspect I'll read the next two books in the trilogy, as long as I can stomach the violence. Larsson does not glorify the horrific violence about which he writes, but it is, undeniably, difficult to read.
This book was a real struggle to get in to; the early parts contained too much corporate, legal stuff and I was completely bogged down.
It did improve but I can't say I enjoyed it and cannot see what everyone is getting so excited about.
The only character I really enjoyed reading
The plot centred around a huge dysfunctional corporate family, one of whose members had disappeared at a young age, presumed dead. Our 'hero', Mikael Blomkvist has messed up big time in his journalistic career and takes on the job of looking into her disappearance while things settle down back home. The character of Blomkvist did not appeal to me at all and I found it totally unbelievable that women supposedly threw themselves at him.
I'll admit that I'm not a lover of thrillers and read this for a book group so I am a bit prejudiced. Each time I have to read a thriller I hope it's going to be a great read but so far only Angels and Demons by Dan Brown has earned 5 stars from me!
Your Tags: thriller, sweden
The first place the author started to lose me was in the very first chapter. The
Honestly, I read the first two hundred pages before finally giving up and skimming the rest. I was interested in the overarching mystery of the girl--though when I finally did find out the truth, I wish I hadn't. I know my friend will be disappointed, but I'm definitely going to take a pass on the next two books.
Blomkvist receives this assignment after obeying a summons to Hedeby, a tiny island in the Gulf of Bothnia in the frigid northern part of Sweden (and here I thought it was all Northern and frigid!). He's been summoned by Henrik Vanger, an octogenarian, very rich former captain of industry who's still got his finger in a number of different pies. The apparent assignment--to write a history of the Vanger family, a large, successful, long-lived, and incredibly unpleasant clan--is actually a cover for the real job, which is to discover, nearly forty years later, what happened to Henrik's 16 year old niece Harriet, who had disappeared from the island without a trace.
In a parallel narrative we meet Isabel Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo. She's 24, pierced, tattooed, and seemingly utterly anti-social. She works as an investigator for a private security firm, when she feels like it. Salander is uncommunicative, unyielding, and a brilliant investigator. When she is brought together with Mikael Blomkvist the investigation takes off, into surprising territory. From one moment to the next this locked room mystery is transformed into a sex-crimes-and-serial-killers thriller, without missing a beat.
And finally, after the ice cold case is solved, in a lengthy denouement, the book is transformed once again, back into the financial thriller it started out to be.
In The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo it seems that Stieg Larsson strives to be all things to all mystery readers: he's written a financial thriller inside of a locked room mystery that turns into a serial killer whodunit. What's more, he's done a very neat job of it. There are two more novels by Stieg Larsson that are due to be published in the states over the next couple of years, but then, alas, there will be no more: Larsson died in 2004 after delivering all three manuscripts to his Swedish publisher.
I particularly found Lisbeth Salander's character hard to believe, especially her relationship
Was a useful read as I was procrastinating a study assignment ..
Definitely not interested in the next two novels that follow.
This really isn't a very well-written book. That's partly down to the translation*, but most of the blame lies firmly at the feet of Stieg Larsson. It's full of horribly clumsy info-dumps: I get that little details can add atmosphere, but in parts it reads like an Apple advert:
"The rucksack contained her Apple iBook 600 with a twenty-five-gig hard drive and 420 megs of R.A.M., manufactured in January 2002 and equipped with a thirty-five-centimetre screen."
"He put the pictures in a separate folder, opened the Graphic Converter programme, and started the slide show function."
"After that he opened a crime novel by Val McDermid entitled The Mermaids Singing."
And then there's the pivotal plot point that involves Mikael's daughter, who we're told has recently got into Christianity, seeing a list of five-figure numbers with no other context - written by her atheist father - and not only immediately assuming they're Bible references, but knowing off the top of her head what verses they refer to. I find this... unlikely.
But that's not the main issue I have with the book. It's also a very violent story, but that, in itself, is not the problem either: the original Swedish title is Män som hatar kvinnor, or "Men Who Hate Women", which pretty much tells you what to expect, and in any case I'd already seen the film with Noomi Rapace. What bothers me is that it clearly sets out to be a feminist novel, one about violence against women rather than glorifying it, but it doesn't actually live up to its aims.
The whole focus of the novel is on women as victims and/or sex objects. We have two serial killers who torture women to death - women who we know nothing about except their extremely gruesome ends. We have a young woman abused by her father and brother. And the female protagonist is violently raped, for absolutely no reason connected with the plot.
The male protagonist, meanwhile, is inexplicably irresistible to basically every woman he meets. Blomkvist is presented as a thoroughly decent chap who just happens to be "a big hit with women", but something didn't sit quite right about him. I was particularly uncomfortable with the scene where he first meets Salander: he essentially barges into a complete stranger's flat and starts criticising her housekeeping and poking around in her stuff. But it's all OK, because he isn't one of those "men who hate women"!
And then there's Lisbeth Salander herself. On one level, she's a pretty kick-ass character. The trouble is, she's also pretty unrealistic - almost a cartoon superheroine. She's tiny, and "anorexically thin", but manages to take down a grown man using a golf club. She has a photographic memory, is a genius hacker, can speak flawless "Oxford" English and excellent German... and is apparently obsessed with her (lack of) breasts. Apparently, she gets breast implants in the second book, which, what? Why on earth would she do that?
It's not actually a terrible book. In fact, this quote from the epilogue, about Blomkvist's book, is quite fitting:
"It was uneven stylistically, and in places the writing was actually rather poor [...] but the book was animated by a fury that no reader could help but notice."
The trouble is, that feminist fury doesn't make up for the other issues. And that's really disappointing.
*I hesitate to criticise the translator, because I gather that he is himself very unhappy with the way his text was edited by the publisher, but the fact remains that, whoever's fault it is, the translation as published is Not Good.
As a person who judges books by their covers 85% of the time and refuses to read inside flaps: it will come as no surprise that this book was no exception. Although, this time, while the cover was intriguing it
It was only this past month that I finally got around to reading the book. When I started reading I was slightly annoyed, mostly with myself. I didn't understand the financial gibberish; money, politics, more money, stocks, fraud. . .the book might as well have been in its original Swedish. That was short lived, though, I decided to keep reading and not worry about understanding everything.
This is a story written by a truly gifted and complex person. Stieg Larrson must have been incredibly intelligent. It is sad he was unable to live to see the success of his books.
If I never go to Sweden, I may have been there through this book. His ability to describe the country in which his characters live so vividly is admirable. The characters themselves leap off the page, eager to claim their stakes in the real world, not just the book world.
Lisabeth was such an intricate character. While she was not easily accessible to the other people in the book, she was to me as the reader. The pain, the “introvertedness”, the anger, were so real and easy to relate to. Where is this girl? I'd like to befriend her.
The mystery kept me reading and thinking. I was eager to solve it along side of Mikael and Lisabeth. I really appreciate that this book, while happening in the span of a year, moves along. Many books written like this, you're stuck reading 20 – 40 pages of nothing. The author manages to have the story last a year, but have the plot continually moving as well. Each part was an intricately woven piece of the story, never boring.
1. Mikael - Mikael is an absolute gary-stu. The whole time I was reading about how he's just such a nice, honest guy, how everyone thinks he's still a
2. Apparently Lisbeth is based on a real person (also named Lisbeth) Larsson knew in school, who was gang-raped by his friends while he stood by and couldn't help. The fact that he translated that experience into some sort of stand in character who can take revenge and thereby relieve his own guilt is absolutely abhorrent. How dare someone take another person's tragedy from them, and turn it into a plot point to absolve their guilt. It isn't his tragedy to claim, and the fact that he did I find repulsive.
3. The whole book is built around bad things happening to women (hence the title, The Men Who Hate Women). As a woman, I don't really feel the need to have a man tell me how bad things are for me. Thanks buddy, but please take your well-meaning but ultimately offensive mansplaining elsewhere.
4. Honestly, the plot is just boring. Mild finance drama followed by drawn-out family drama that honestly wasn't that interesting, and all of it is explained rather than experienced. It's mostly Character A telling Character X about something that happened, then Character B telling Character X about something that happened, and so on and so forth, while couched in some of the most boring financial revenge drama this side of an 80's movie plot. Ugh.
I'll be upfront and say that I didn't love the book. I know this puts me in the minority. I thought it was a decent read (albeit one that scared me) but not one that was sublime. The prologue opens with an elderly man getting a framed, pressed flower delivered on his birthday. He views this annual birthday present as a taunt from a murderer but the yearly flowers have afforded no further clues as to what really happened to his great-niece 40 years prior when she went missing, presumed dead. Jumping then to the first chapter of the novel, the reader is introduced to Mikael Blomkvist, a financial reporter who has just been found guilty of libel against a large and powerful player in the Swedish financial market. He is trying to figure out where his life and career will go now when he is hired to investigate the 40 year old disappearance of Henrik Vanger's great-niece and to write a family history of the Vangers, long-time financial giants. Although he is not a crime reporter, he is intrigued enough to take the job when the bait dangled in front of him is not only a large sum of money, but some hidden information that will allow him to take down the man who successfully sued him.
Meanwhile, 24 year old Lisbeth Salander, a young woman who is a ward of the state, perhaps because of her Asperger's like personality (the diagnosis here is entirely mine) and who is a genius at private investigating thanks in large part to her incredible computer skills, has been hired to investigate both Mikael Blomkvist and his nemesis, Wennerstrom, also by Henrik Vanger. Ultimately because of this connection, she ends up pairing up with Blomkvist to work on the long-unsolved mystery of what really happened to Harriet Vanger. As Mikael and Lisbeth start digging, they uncover many dark and appalling secrets about the Vanger family. Grisly murders are described and lead to the ultimate, somewhat surprising denouement of this thriller.
In order to flesh out his characters, Larsson not only focuses on the main thread of the narrative, the investigation into Harriet Vanger's disappearance, but he also makes many side excursions into the lives of Mikael and Lisbeth. The reader experiences for him or herself what makes these characters tick and why they react in the ways they do. While this makes for multi-dimensional characters, it also adds to the sometimes confusing narrative hops. Larsson will go from one character to another within the same chapter and without any warning, making for occasionally choppy transitions. There are also some sloppy bits at the very end that have no good explanation, dialogue that makes no sense given the recent developments in the plot line and one character who is dropped entirely despite her long-time proximity to the baddie. These things bothered me far more than they are likely to bother others, especially mystery fans who will be a bit more engaged in the book than I was. Hovering above the story always magnifies any faults and I just couldn't find my way into the story more deeply. The themes of violence against women, obsession, desire, and truth and justice all play out at different times in the novel, overlapping, highlighting, and occasionally tangling together. I really can't speak to this compared to other mysteries but I do think that most mystery lovers will thoroughly enjoy this one. Meanwhile, I am not pleased to note that this same bookclub is reading yet another book with a murder in it. Do you think they're trying to tell me something?
The plot is fairly convoluted and, in the interest of maintaining suspense, I won't provide a huge plot summary. Basically, journalist Mikael Blomkvist is hired by Henrik Vanger, a wealthy but aging Swedish industry magnate, to find out the truth behind how his niece, Harriet Vanger, disappeared decades earlier. Reeling from a set of professional setbacks, Mikael accepts the case though he has little hope of unearthing any new evidence about Harriet's likely murder. As the novel progresses, he hires Lisbeth Salander to help him as he begins to unravel the truth behind Harriet's disappearance and stumbles upon several dark secrets hidden by the wealthy Vanger family.
As previously mentioned, I avoid mysteries because the "whodunit" aspect is usually unrewarding to me. As the daughter of a mother who could, 15 minutes into a suspense movie, point to a character, and off-handedly say, "He did it," I'm fairly adept at figuring it out before the end. But Larsson threw me; I smugly thought I knew who did it, Larsson let me believe I was right (even including a lengthy scene which I thought was building to the denouement), and then--WTF?!?--a twist I never saw coming. I was right, but at the same time was not right. Well played, Mr. Larsson. I thoroughly enjoyed being caught off-guard.
In addition, he had strong and compelling characters in the form of Blomkvist and Salander. Blomkvist is an admirable, yet flawed man (though they are, for the most part, flaws we can easily forgive and make him seem all the more human; most derive from the fact that his passion for his job supersedes what should be more important human relationships). Lisbeth Salander, however, is the real driving force in the novel. I probably wouldn't have made it through the first few chapters of the novel if I weren't eagerly awaiting my next peek at Salander. I've read in other reviews, and agree, that Salander is like a character from a Tarantino movie. She is over-the-top awesome, but that's what is so enjoyable about her. Pierced and tattooed, antisocial, and seemingly emotionless, we learn why Salander is the way she is. Salander is the product of a state-run system that mislabeled her mental state early on; she is the monster created when no one wants to take the time or initiative to properly diagnose an emotionally or mentally troubled individual. Despite what should have been obvious setbacks, Salander is a genius but understandably has some serious authority issues. She is at once a fascinating, yet troubling character that I look forward to reading more about in Larsson's sequels.