Caprice and Rondo, Gemini

Gemini by Dorothy Dunnett

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
Ah. You know that moment when you read the last page of a book, and you gently close it (or, uh, switch off your electronic reading device of choice) and you breathe out a long breath and you just have to sit there for five or ten minutes smiling and not thinking much, but just quietly hanging on to the last threads of it? Yeah.



So that's the Dunnett, then. These last two books aren't perfect -- Gemini, in particular, spends a lot of to-ing and fro-ing on petty politics that I just didn't care about – but man. This broke my heart in the very best way. Particularly as the last two books are all about building what I found lacking in this series previously, as compared to Lymond. Nicholas makes a home at last, and a family, and permanence, and country, and a holding center. And then at the very last, ah. Francis Crawford, there you are.



Yes.




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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
A disgraced finance reporter investigates a thirty-year-old missing persons case, with the eventual aid of a young hacker with a traumatic history and a largely unnamed cognitive disorder.



Hmm. Okay. The thing that's really good about this book is that it's all about violence against women, but it does not import misogyny and violence into the text. Seriously, no lie. This may be a first in the history of my thriller reading. It doesn't mouth platitudes about gendered violence while simultaneously fetishizing it, the way they usually do. In fact, if this book is about anything, it's examining the many different ways women have of saving themselves, healthy and crazed and frightened and pathological as they might be.



And it is a good mystery, with some genuinely creepy parts (I had to go read out on the couch where my roommate was around the three-quarter mark). But I wasn't as blown away as a lot of people who raved about this book to me. (1) I called one too many of the plot twists ahead of time (though not all of them, mind you). (2) I can blame some of the awkward writing on the translation, but that won't account for the occasional spurts of tell-tell-tell with no show in sight. (3) I'm . . . ambivalent about some of the armchair psychology aimed at our troubled hacker, though the book at least calls itself on its glibness. And there's a nicely nuanced little capsule debate presented more broadly about the intersection of personal choice and familial pathology. Is there ever a meeting point between condemning the serial rapist and pitying what made him that way? (My answer, incidentally, is yes of course).



Basically, what I really want is to read the rest of the trilogy, to see whether he carried through on the promise of the moral depth and careful thinking. But some of the cognitive disability aspects raised my antenna in subliminally alarming ways, so we'll see.




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