The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, aka Isn't Sweden An Awful Place?

Last night, I finished reading The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, the first book in Stieg Larsson's internationally best-selling trilogy. It had actually been recommended to me by my mother-in-law, of all people. I had also seen the crazy trailer to the upcoming David Fincher film adaptation of the book, and while I didn't understand what the heck was going on, it seemed stylish and looked like it might be kinda cool. So, even though mystery thrillers aren't always tops on my book list, I decided to give it a try.

(MOSTLY NON-SPOILERY thoughts below, because I'm too tired for a lengthy review)

I confess it took me a while to get through the book, partly due to my having a lot on my plate (such as trying to post on my blog every day...hey-o!). But I also felt the book itself took a while to get rolling; and even when the main story really clicks into place, there are a bunch of seemingly irrelevant scenes & plot lines that really mess with the story's momentum. And then, when the big mystery is solved, it seems to happen awfully fast, after which we spend a bunch of time on denouement that had me drumming my fingers impatiently.

So, in a nutshell, I thought the book had some pacing issues. For supposedly being an "edge of your seat" thriller, it felt (for the most part) fairly deliberative and careful (although it does have a few noteworthy bursts of adrenaline that are pretty effective). Slow pacing is not, by itself, a bad thing--I had merely heard the book was very tense throughout, and I never really felt that. Maybe Dragon Tattoo was improperly marketed/hyped? Oh well. This book had more serious issues than that--like making me hate Sweden without ever setting foot there.

Here's what Larsson's book taught me about Sweden:

1. It's dark, rainy & cold about 10 1/2 months of the year.
2. Everyone obsesses about how many apartments/homes they own
3. There are a ton of ex-Nazis or Nazi sympathizers still living in Sweden, dating from the WWII era; in fact, many of them have risen to places of prominence in business/politics.
4. You can do jail time for libel!! That's the dilemma looming before the "hero" of the story at the beginning of the book. As an American and a former journalism major, that bugged the heck out of me, and I never quite got over it!
5. People are pretty loose. There is an awful lot of sleeping around in this book (a lot of it consensual, a lot of it, sadly, not). Our "hero" (I use that term loosely, because he was kind of an annoying guy sometimes) seems to sleep with a half-dozen women, all casually, throughout the course of the book. And our "heroine", a glum Goth pixie genius, seems to think sex is a prerequisite of getting to know anyone, boy or girl.
6. Related to #5: every other man in Sweden seems to be a sexual predator of some kind. The heroine has obviously been victim to extensive sexual abuse in her past, and much of the central mystery of the novel involves a weird father/son rape/murder cult. Icky ick. And then there's an annoying subplot involving our heroine being serially raped by her caseworker (one of those "irrelevant, wandering" digressions I mentioned above...so it was unnecessary and gross)!
7. Larsson began each section of his book with horrible statistics like, "68% of Swedish women have been victims of sexual assault," or "only 14% of Swedish women that have been raped have ever told anyone about it." Good grief...what's with the culture of misogyny going on here? Even if these stats are totally pulled out of thin air, it certainly doesn't paint the culture in a favorable light at all.

Maybe the author was just trying to get my guard up; warning the reader of the terrible crimes & vicious acts that were imminent in his story. If so, I guess it worked, because I spent the book thinking all Swedish men were giant perverts & sickos. Unfortunately, the female "avenger" character, Lisbeth Salander (she of the dragon tattoo) isn't the most pleasant character to read about either. I felt for her, because it was obvious she'd had a hard life, but she was so severely drawn that she became a caricature of oppressed women fighting back against the injustice of life. She never felt real to me at all--she had some good scenes, but she felt about as authentic as a unicorn.

Oh, well, I'm being too hard on a book that, at its heart, is a silly pulp thriller. The central mystery was legitimately interesting, the Vanger family dynamics were interesting (even if they weren't as fleshed out as I'd hoped at times), and the banter between the characters made for some fun reading. I enjoyed the interplay between the media and Big Business in Sweden; it was exciting for me to see the business magazine try to bring down a corrupt businessman. And Lisbeth, despite her many problems as a character, does get to shine in a few scenes, particularly a caper in Europe towards the book's end.

I think I'll read the other books in the series (eventually). I'd give this book three out of five stars; it's good summer reading, but it certainly does make you want to take a shower afterwards, to wipe off the Swedish ickiness.