The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
by Stieg Larsson
2008, 465 pp.
The original Swedish title of this book means Men Who Hated Women, and that title is an excellent forewarning about what the book is about. If you like gritty crime novels or shows like CSI, you’ll probably love the book. My eyes and stomach prefer much milder fare, but I’ll still probably read the second installment, The Girl Who Played with Fire, when it comes out next year.
The girl who has the dragon tattoo is Lisbeth Salander, a girl in her mid-twenties who is a PI and can find out just about everything about anyone. I liked her. A lot. Her character was fascinating and Larsson ends the book in such a way that leaves you wanting to hear more of her story and background.
Mikael Blomqvist is a journalist who has just lost a court case for libel, which then puts his reputation and his magazine Millennium at risk. He decides to temporarily leave the paper in the hands of his partner to save face. Enter Henrik Vanger. Vanger is the former CEO of his family business, the Vanger Corporation. He hires Blomqvist to write a family history of the Vangers as a pretext to dig into the disappearance of his niece, Harriet Vanger. The case has been cold for decades and though Mikael believes he won’t be able to find any new evidence, he accepts. This is where the book really grabbed me and kept me reading until 1 am to learn the outcome.
The book really has three storylines to it, the Harriet Vanger story is in the middle, with Lisbeth Salander’s story on the outside of that, and with Mikael Blomqvist’s story on the very outer edges. Consequently, the climax occurs with quite a few pages still left in the book. So at first it felt like the book should be over, but then after awhile I was able to get into the secondary and tertiary stories as well.
As I stated in the beginning, it really is about men who hate women, so if you read it be prepared for what that involves. I didn’t care for the more graphic scenes in the book, but I do know that not everyone is as sensitive to that as I am. And I do want to find out more about the girl with the dragon tattoo when The Girl Who Played with Fire comes out next year.
After his wife Kath’s death, Glyn is going through all her paperwork and finds a folder with ‘DO NOT OPEN: DESTROY’ on it. Of course he opens it, only to find a picture of his wife holding hands with another man. Glyn then sets out to find out about the details of his wife’s life that he never knew about, and he finds out that he really didn’t know his wife all that well. As he finds out more and more, he needs to enlist Kath’s friends and her sister Elaine to fill in the gaps to the mystery, ‘Who was Kath, really?’
Although I haven’t yet read Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize winning Interpreter of Maladies, after reading Unaccustomed Earth, I can understand why the committee was so impressed with her writing. Her stories of the Bengali immigrant experience were very well developed, and they had closure to them, something I’ve noticed is often times lacking in modern short stories. All the characters in the book have similar backgrounds — high intelligence and high potential — yet each story was unique. Each character was struggling with his or her own set of issues, most of them due to the individuals’ adjustment, or lack thereof, of living in a culture so different from their own or that of their parents.
Bjartur of Summerhouses has one goal: total independence. After being a servant for 18 years, he finally obtains his own land, and while ever seeking the land’s improvements, Bjartur and his extreme self-reliance costs his family dearly. He mistreats his own wife and children, not overtly, but through his unwillingness to accept help of any kind from neighbors. His independence, his dog, and his sheep are of primary and utmost importance. But is it possible to be too independent? What happens to Bjartur when his own children demand independence from him?
I first read Pippi over 30 years ago, and it has always had a special place in my childhood reading memories. Unfortunately, it really doesn’t hold up when read as an adult, at least for me anyway. I still enjoyed it (rated it a 4), and if I had a daughter, I would love for her to read it. I love how it shows Pippi’s independence and the way she’s mature but childish at the same time. I love her interaction with Tommy, Annika, and Mr. Nilsson. But, it just didn’t live up to my childhood memory of it. I adored this book as a youngster and wanted to adore it again. I liked it very much but didn’t love it. Perhaps some books are best left in our childhood.
I read this during the read-a-thon in the late night hours, and it was a perfect fit. I love Lois Lowry. I haven’t found a book yet by her that I didn’t like, and she is the author I’ve read the most of this year.
