The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (book - 2005)
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (book - 2005) ***
This is the story that always makes the completely self-absorbed part of me weep: Artist creates masterpiece. Artist experiences limited (if any) success with masterpiece. Artist dies, usually young. Artist's masterpiece becomes a phenomenal success. This is my personal nightmare, and it is played out over and over again in the real world: Jonathan Larson (Rent), Adrienne Shelly (Waitress), many others...and now, Stieg Larsson, author of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and two other books in this series (three, if you count an additional book that was incomplete at the time of his death). All three are currently at the top of the NYT Bestseller list, and there are already Swedish film versions of at least two of the books and a soon-to-be American film remake of the first. And poor Steig experienced none of this success.
Heartbreaking backstory aside, is this book worth all the hype? I wanted to love it. I tried to love it. There were things that I loved about it, but in the end, I couldn't. Perhaps the hype ruined it for me. It is a good (though perhaps a bit predictable) mystery/unlikely detective story. There is a fun, mindless, slightly mysterious 300 page romp in there, and I would've really enjoyed reading that. Sadly, the story was stretched from the 300 page enjoyable romp to a 590+ page saga. What fills in the extra pages? Everything that I didn't really need to know: what the characters ate for dinner, detailed financial analysis that made zero sense to me and went on for pages upon pages upon pages, too much time spent following the main male character (journalist, Mikael Blomkvist) around as he goes about his daily business. He's perfectly fine, marginally interesting, but we've met him in hundreds of other books and we don't need to spend too much time with him to know him well. He's the smart, charming, a little bit rogue, intellectual type. If he were a professor and you were his young, horny female student, you might want to sleep with him, just for the conquest, but that doesn't mean that you really want to follow his every move for 200 pages. The most disturbing waste of text in the book, though, is a horrifyingly gratuitous sexual assault sequence that does almost nothing to forward the plot, but everything to make you tense and uncomfortable for the remainder of the book (and not in the fun way).
So, why do I give this book as many as three stars if it has so many issues? All you need to do is look to the title. Lisbeth Salander (aka The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) is one of the most complex, engaging characters that I have ever encountered in any work of fiction. Simultaneously tough as nails and vulnerable as an upside-down turtle, irresistible and frightening, brilliant, yet disconnected from everyone else's reality. She is amazing, and I think I would pretty much have to follow her anywhere. Does she save the book from just being another overwritten, cheesy mystery novel? Well, she kept this resistant reader on board for 590+ pages. I still haven't decided if I'll read the second book, but I'm not sure if I can resist Lisbeth's siren call. I may just have to know what she'll do next.
This is the story that always makes the completely self-absorbed part of me weep: Artist creates masterpiece. Artist experiences limited (if any) success with masterpiece. Artist dies, usually young. Artist's masterpiece becomes a phenomenal success. This is my personal nightmare, and it is played out over and over again in the real world: Jonathan Larson (Rent), Adrienne Shelly (Waitress), many others...and now, Stieg Larsson, author of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and two other books in this series (three, if you count an additional book that was incomplete at the time of his death). All three are currently at the top of the NYT Bestseller list, and there are already Swedish film versions of at least two of the books and a soon-to-be American film remake of the first. And poor Steig experienced none of this success.
Heartbreaking backstory aside, is this book worth all the hype? I wanted to love it. I tried to love it. There were things that I loved about it, but in the end, I couldn't. Perhaps the hype ruined it for me. It is a good (though perhaps a bit predictable) mystery/unlikely detective story. There is a fun, mindless, slightly mysterious 300 page romp in there, and I would've really enjoyed reading that. Sadly, the story was stretched from the 300 page enjoyable romp to a 590+ page saga. What fills in the extra pages? Everything that I didn't really need to know: what the characters ate for dinner, detailed financial analysis that made zero sense to me and went on for pages upon pages upon pages, too much time spent following the main male character (journalist, Mikael Blomkvist) around as he goes about his daily business. He's perfectly fine, marginally interesting, but we've met him in hundreds of other books and we don't need to spend too much time with him to know him well. He's the smart, charming, a little bit rogue, intellectual type. If he were a professor and you were his young, horny female student, you might want to sleep with him, just for the conquest, but that doesn't mean that you really want to follow his every move for 200 pages. The most disturbing waste of text in the book, though, is a horrifyingly gratuitous sexual assault sequence that does almost nothing to forward the plot, but everything to make you tense and uncomfortable for the remainder of the book (and not in the fun way).
So, why do I give this book as many as three stars if it has so many issues? All you need to do is look to the title. Lisbeth Salander (aka The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) is one of the most complex, engaging characters that I have ever encountered in any work of fiction. Simultaneously tough as nails and vulnerable as an upside-down turtle, irresistible and frightening, brilliant, yet disconnected from everyone else's reality. She is amazing, and I think I would pretty much have to follow her anywhere. Does she save the book from just being another overwritten, cheesy mystery novel? Well, she kept this resistant reader on board for 590+ pages. I still haven't decided if I'll read the second book, but I'm not sure if I can resist Lisbeth's siren call. I may just have to know what she'll do next.