THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATOO

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATOO
Stieg Larson
Vintage Crime, 590 pp


A person writing a review of “The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo” on Amazon said, “a million Europeans can’t be wrong.” First, I give you the bureaucrats of the European Union. Next, I give you this stupidly long book, so popular in Europe that it’s sold a million copies there.

A local friend lent me the book, raving about how good it was, and I dived right in. I dived right in to an opening third or so of the book—I won’t call it the opening third of the story, because the story is so thin there—that left me numb with boredom. First Larson introduces a huge family in backstory, but absolutely no one does anything whatever, so I couldn’t keep the names straight, and almost no action occurs, except for riding on trains and eating at a cafe. Most tellingly, I didn’t care what the names were.

You probably know that the story is about a financial journalist searching for the long-lost niece of a Swedish industrialist. So you can remember, the journalist’s name is Blomkvist. Blomkvist gets sued for libel by another big industrialist, who wins the lawsuit, so Blomkvist is free to move to someplace far north in Sweden to settle into a cabin and investigate. Somewhere too late in the book we meet Lisbeth Salander, a weird girl with a knack for computer searches, and it is she who sports the dragon tattoo. Everywhere along the way Larson throws in long, meandering backstory, or sidestory, or whatever his exposition really is, to the point where I just wanted to stop reading.

But . . . the local friend raved, didn’t she? So I slogged on. There’s no one in this book to care about and there’s no one in it who is intrinsically interesting at all. Salander should be an empathetic character, but Larson keeps turning her colder, emptier, and more self-haunted. It’s impossible to care about her. Blomkvist falls into bed with most women mentioned, but I never could see exactly why he’s so attractive. Couldn’t care about him either.

Along the way are some chilling, sadistic sexual assaults, along with backstoried murders, clinically yet somehow almost salaciously described. Turns out there’s a serial killer, somewhere out there in the clichés with which the prose is littered. I won’t spoil the “story” by saying any more. Just be aware that there’s some graphic sadistic content here. A commenter on the Internet said that the original title (in Sweden) was “Men Who Hate Women.” Reading about the exploitation and use of women in this book makes it clear that the Swedish title had much more meaning. The girl with the dragon tattoo is an accessory who does amazing research and takes some amazing actions on her own, but she isn’t exactly a heroine. Blomkvist isn’t exactly a hero either.

If this commentary doesn’t hang together very well, I believe it’s because Larson’s long book had little glue in it. Nothing stuck.

I wondered where the editors were when this nearly 600-page tome went to formatting. Sleeping. Downsized. Non-existent. Somebody should have cut a third to a half of this wandering example of literary junk. To be fair, the book has gotten many favorable reviews: raves, in fact. Well, just beware.

If I had it to do over, I woudn't have bothered to read this one. If you simply must, do borrow it from the library; don’t pay a nickel for the many hours of boring “huh?!” reactions you’re in for from yourself. But, just in case you enjoy extended expositional suffering, here is a link for your convenience: