Reading Log: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Stieg Larsson)

February 9, 2010

I’ve had The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on my shelf since it was first released (a spontaneous purchase courtesy of a significant sale price and a prominent floor display). I’d tried to get into it at least three times before, but always stalled early and moved onto different things.

I only got around to finishing it because I listed “International Mystery” as a category in my 10*10*10 Reading project… proof the reading project works because it really is a pretty good read that I may never have otherwise experienced.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a kind of open-air, closed-room, cold-case murder mystery involving a girl who goes missing from a small island while the only road in is blocked by an impassable traffic accident. After forty years of obsessive investigation into the case the girl’s grandfather and scion of one of the last of the family owned national companies in the country hires Mikael Blomkvist, a disgraced financial journalist, ostensibly to write a family history about his complicated, bickering, conniving family but secretly to look into his granddaughter’s disappearance. Mikael comes to be assisted by Lisbeth Salander, an anti-social, punk-inspired hacker who possibly suffers from Asperger Syndrome—the girl with the dragon tattoo—who was first hired to investigate him.

Stieg Larsson, a journalist himself, was clearly comfortable with technology, leading to an odd dichotomy in the book: it’s a rare case of fiction that actually (and accurately) uses specific names of technology and software (including links to web sites in a few cases), but the technical wizardry displayed by Salander goes beyond the unbelievable and into the realm of the impossible. Being decidedly unfamiliar with Swedish politics, I can’t tell if Larsson’s characterization of them is similarly stretched. It’s certainly believable that the country’s financial system is as warped and corrupt as Larsson makes it out to be, but unlike the technical fantasies, I have no way of knowing. In life, Larsson was a well-known left-wing activist. Take from that what you will.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is entertaining. It strikes me as a product of its time, with a lineage that owes as much to television, movies and the Internet as it does the mystery fiction that Mikael Blomkvist reads and refers to throughout. It’s not, as a whole, particularly realistic, existing instead in the space of the cinematically unreal, where real pieces and parts are combined to create something no one would mistake for our reality. I’m not saying this to knock the book—I don’t demand true realism from mystery fiction—just to try to place it into context.

Though I still don’t quite have all the family connections and relationships figured out (even with the help of the family tree provided as part of the book’s front matter), that didn’t stand in the way of enjoying the simple pleasures of a well-crafted, thrilling story set in a foreign locale. I’ll certainly read the other two novels in the trilogy at some point…

Tags: 101010 challenge, books, mystery, reading