Steig Larsson's Lisbeth Salander Series, otherwise known as The Millenium Trilogy
(2005, 2006, 2007)
The stunning trilogy best seller smash actually demanded I read all of it. It only lacks good language, and even that I'm still (after 2100 pages) debating. A) it's translated from the Swedish, so who knows how poetic it really is. B) It can be very subtly brilliant. We'll get to it later.
Kiddo drops books at any stage because they become boring or too full of holes. The fact that the first three in a row of government/police intrigue books she tried ended in less than 10 pages means whole genre is shunned to crap (excluding all Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler novels which one can read for dialogue alone and not care a whit about the plot).
That is, I only read these guys because my mother spent a significant amount shipping them to me, and I have caused too many arguments about what and is not crap literature with her.
Even so, the first 50 or so pages of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo are financial intrigue bullshit and I almost tossed it. But I'm glad I did, because very shortly after that, the character Lisbeth Salander started fleshing herself out: Modern Pippi Longstocking, viking goddess. Absolutely the best actress I can think of to play Lisbeth Salander is Dani, the Suicide Girl from Californication.
She may be, and correct me if I'm wrong here, the first anti-social hacker queen to make it into popular literature. And Larsson knows how to turn the whole affair to make her magnetic – not just in saying 'she was magnetic' as almost any other thriller jockey would. She's even referred to as Pippi Longstocking in conversations with her co-protagonist Mikael Blomkvist—it makes sense. Father as King of the Cannibals to the slip-shod wardrobe.
Blonkvist ain't bad either. I hear he will be played by Daniel Craig. It fits. He's James Bond if Bond had become a gritty investigative reporter. Down to the inexplicable sexuality.
What saves him, and consequentially everything, from becoming a simple Bond cookie cutter is how he deals with that. Instead of picking up and dropping chicks willy-nilly, Blomkvist puts effort into warning them off – he's a ramblin' man and doesn't want you to cry.
This attitude in turn plugs into the attitudes every character has towards sex – not a one of them is exempt from mentioning their sexual preferences, and not once is it explicit, and NOT ONCE is it taboo. The original title for Dragon Tattoo, I gather, was Men Who Hate Women, and when everything is said and done, that is the absolute theme of the trilogy.
More than half the cast is female. Every one of them is competent, strong, intelligent, and sparsely described physically. The men with whom they interact either treat them respectfully, or are misogynistic nuts. For every misogynist there is at least one abused woman. Sometimes the abuse is extensive enough that Kiddo here had to skim through some paragraphs.
The plots, both individually for each book and over-arching, all deal with woman abuse and the good-souled people who must live with it and combat it—even in as sophisticated a country as Sweden. All intrigue and language aside, reading how women like Salander, Erika Berger, and Modig react to crazy situations is genuinely empowering. And I generally despise openly feminist stuff. The point here is not to burn a bra but to point out how counter-productive, illogical it is to treat women as inferior. In extreme cases, how down right evil and destructive it is for men to abuse them. The only point it misses out on, in Kiddo's pasteurized mind, is how equally illogical and counter productive it is for women to treat women in the same ways. But that is for another time.
And before we go too over the original word parameters here, let us look at language. The language is nothing special. No one vocabulary word stands out, no sentence is complex. Benefits of this are the quickness it affords the reader to clip through. Where it becomes interesting, and highly skilled, is how Larsson shifts point of view. The point of view shifts between characters incessently. One paragraph often has three characters thinking at once. The Iowa school of Flannery O'Connor ass kissing would condemn it out of hand, without considering just how complex it becomes, or how multi dimensional the scene becomes. It's cubist.
Eg: In the same scene in a restaurant in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, Blomkvist “noticed he looked vaguely eastern European and was staring at him. Then he saw the sub-machine gun.” while Berger “sat paralyzed as he [the eastern European] raised some kind of gun and aimed it at Blomkvist.” and several minutes later Modig “saw a Swedish army model M/45 sub machine gun.” (p 452-4).
In the same scene: “instinctively [Blomkvist] threw himself at the attacker instead of crouching down or taking cover” while “Berger instinctively took cover when the second series of shots was fired.”
These are the most extreme versions of this I found, but the same tool is employed constantly to make every scene pop. A sensible person will now say “But, that makes for a repetitive book” and the reader of these books will tell you each is perfectly developed simply by what they notice within the same rooms, and how they each ask the same question that it does not matter.
What is astonishing is how perfectly the story ends. Not just how the plot concludes (which is brilliant) but how the perspective of the omniscient narrator shifts dramatically from a cast of several dozen rounded individuals to Salander. Salander, you see, is the least sociable person in the world. As soon as she is free from any obligation to interacting with this tapestry of Stockholm, she does, and therefore, so does the narrator. It's actually shocking in the abruptness.
Brilliant.
Not to mention the number of times coffee is drunk throughout.
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