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Luftslottet som sprängdes by Stieg Larsson


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
[Out in the U.S. next summer, acquired now because I have my vays.:]

More weirdly compelling Swedish reporter/hacker mystery adventures, this time with extra government conspiracy. If you don't know about this series yet, for God's sake don't start here. Because when I bitched that the last book had no denouement at all, it turns out that's because there's actually 600 pages of more plot instead.

This book shouldn't really work, but mostly does. It has this slow, grinding pace, full of starts and stops, which is totally appropriate for the tedious and convoluted investigations that surround Salander in the hospital and then in jail. But this routine with swaths of meetings and new characters and endless back-and-forth is great reality pacing, but bad book pacing. And yet, things really do happen, and the book is emotionally satisfying, and I can cut it a lot of slack for probably not being as thoroughly edited before the author's death as he would have liked.

And really, if this is the last of the series we get, it's not a bad place to stop. I mean, all told, we have three books of convoluted plotting with a cast of vivid characters whose assorted traumas and polyamorous* relationships ring really true to me. And these books are not violent against women in ways that make it difficult for me to pick up other random mysteries now, because the comparison is just too awful.

*Apparently Word knows "polyandrous," but not "polyamorous." Eh?

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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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