I found that he was far too fond of listing thins for my taste; he tells you each item of clothing people are wearing, or each piece of furniture in a room, for no apparent reason, which makes it oddly like reading an Ikea catalogue, but with more rape and torture.
I guess he was a journalist, so maybe that's part of the reason why. Also, North European languages do tend to be less flowery than Romance languages. I've read a couple of (crime) novels by Arnaldur Indridason and he uses very simplistic language - but Icelandic has barely moved on since the Viking days!
Yes, even Tove Jansson up in Finland steers clear of flowery language. I've also noticed the sparseness in Henning Mankell. With Larsson, I thought the matter-of-fact tone worked in the first novel and came across as intentional because the themes were so hard hitting and some of the scenes so gory - it was a successful third person omniscient narrator. But with this second novel it didn't work well, despite it still being a page turner. I put it down to him not being able to juggle so many characters at the same time - relying too much on plot recaps, for example, when switching to a new character.
I hope you don't mind me commenting on this post about something else... I remember you writing about the TV version of Anne of Green Gables a while back and it happened to be on over the weekend - all six hours of it! I am currently wading my way through it and have loved it. I think it stands up well :)
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I just saw the first film yesterday - I'd forgotten (blocked?) how horrible the rape and torture is...
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I guess he was a journalist, so maybe that's part of the reason why. Also, North European languages do tend to be less flowery than Romance languages. I've read a couple of (crime) novels by Arnaldur Indridason and he uses very simplistic language - but Icelandic has barely moved on since the Viking days!
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