I was originally going to wait and read all three of the books in the “Millennium Trilogy” before writing any reviews, but I’m honestly not sure if I’ll ever get around to reading the rest. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the first in Stieg Larsson’s series, published posthumously and taking airport bookstores everywhere by storm. Really, people seem to love it, but I don’t understand why.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo largely follows the story of Mikael Blomkvist, a disgraced magazine editor in need of a long holiday. Blomkvist takes on a weird job of trying to solve a decades-old murder mystery in a remote village, but the twist is that the job is being done for a wealthy industrialist who asks Blomkvist to keep things quiet and pretend like he’s writing a family history. In exchange, he’ll get the dirt he needs for a career-making story. Also in the mix is Lisbeth Salander, a mentally unhinged but brilliant hacker and “researcher” who takes an interest in Blomkvist and the mystery he’s trying to solve. As far as a murder mystery slash thriller goes, the book is fine. There’s danger, sex, intrigue, excitement, sex, a serial killer, sex, and also sex. Did I mention sex? Seriously, Blomkvist sleeps with every female character under the age of 60 in the book in a very James Bond-ish fashion.
The shortcoming of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, though, is that it seems a little amateurish. Maybe it’s an artifact of it’s being translated from Swedish, but I frequently found weird repetitions of words and phrases along the lines of “he walked to the door and stood in the doorway” that seem like an editor should have caught. Larsson also has this odd predilection for detailing every street and neighborhood in Stolkholm that his character walk down, regaling us with their proper Swedish names. I completely understand that in the author’s native language the effect is simply banal, but for the rest of us it keep sounding like some 14 year old trying to make his fantasy world sound exotic by throwing in the elvish or dwarfish names of everything. Entirely my fault for speaking the wrong language and never having been to Sweden, for sure, but I nonetheless couldn’t escape the effect.
The book is also oddly paced. Large chunks of it are spent hearing about the characters clomp around Stolkholm or the tiny village of Hedeby, else we’re hearing about the sausage and liverwurst sandwiches Blomkvist had for lunch. It’s really boring exposition that seems to serve no purpose. There’s also one sequence where Larsson goes into excruciating detail about the laptop computer Salander buys, providing breathless details about processor speed, hard drive space, and RAM that serve only to make the device seem laughably outdated by the time someone from six months in the future reads it. Sequences of action or insight –OR SEX– punctuate the story, but it’s really uneven. There’s also the problem that Lisbeth Salander is a way more interesting character than Mary Sue Blomkvist, yet she disappears entirely from the tale for huge swaths of time. I think Larsson corrects this some in later books, but it accentuates the dull bits here and makes a long novel seem even longer.
So, not sure if I’ll continue on to the other books or not. I’ve got them, though, so maybe I’ll plod on. Does it get better?
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