The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — Read 2010.08.15

Prompted by the little fushigi I had with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I went out and purchased it on Saturday, Aug 14th. Began it in the afternoon, and finished it Sunday morning.

Larson, Stieg.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2009.06.23. ISBN 9780143170099. Book One of the Millennium Trilogy.

I was surprised at how good this book is. I am always skeptical of NY Times', or other bestseller lists, and consequently this is the first I have purchased from such a list in many, many years. (Way to go fushigi!) All the elements of this book as a work of fiction work: complexity of the story and completeness of the details to make it credible; sophistication and humanity of the characters make it engaging; quality of the writing in terms of pacing, clarity, and elegance makes it delectable; relevance to the real world makes it substantive. And okay, it has some great blood and guts and sex scenes, too, but for the most part they lack any feeling of being gratuitous. Finally, the David and Goliath elements always get me rooting for the underdog and TGWTDT has two underdogs that balance and complement each other — the anti-social punk Lisbeth Salander and the socially conscious reporter Mikael Blomkvist.

Besides falling in love with Salander, what surprised me most about the book, and what is likely a significant part of its being more than just a best selling crime fiction novel, is that Larson makes three powerful and real indictments on the global society. The first is that there is still, at a very fundamental psychological level, an anti-female, even misogynist, underbelly. The second is that capitalism has run amok and the corporate foxes are now not just guarding the hen houses but owning them too. And the third is that the corporate media is egregiously failing to safeguard democracy from the consequences of corporate greed business ethics. The book is in not 'preachy,' but more a matter-of-fact but exhilarating exploration of these realities through the experiences of Salander and Blomkvist. As an example of the last two ideas is the big banks' recent ethical and associated financial failures and the inadequacy of the media's reportage before and after the scam was exposed — the Millennium Trilogy was written before the crash happened. As to the second, as a resident of metropolitan Vancouver, I recently watched a police representative apologize for the police's failure to apprehend more quickly a serial killer of about 50 prostitutes over ten or more years because these women were in effect disposable in being unimportant in their and the society's eyes.

Great read. My first binge read in more than fifteen years.

☆☆☆☆☆