The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Having read “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” coming up with terms how to describe it is a bit difficult. One could use words such as “gritty” or “raw” or “dark” and those words would fit but I’m not sure I would use them in a one or two word summary. I think I would go with “serious” and maybe “complicated”.

Structurally the novel jumps through a few perspectives, the protagonists ultimately being Blomkvist and Salander. I do appreciate that the names were not anglicanized and that many words stayed in (presumably) Swedish or another language as needed and usually later explained to the reader.

And I’m not really going to go into a plot summary, there’s a movie for that (which I enjoyed and got me interested in the books) and Wikipedia if one is so inclined.

The book starts off slowly, and I mean very very slowly. It picks up to a moderate pace, has a wonderful double climax of sorts, and then a few chapters coasting down to a not so sweet end, depending on which protagonist is your favorite. Not a bad end mind you, just not the happiest for Salander, which is okay, it would not have been very fitting if she got a “happily ever after” anyways.

I would like to mention one rather annoying thing the author, Stieg Larsson, does on about three occasions in the middle of the book. He starts a scene of consensual adult foreplay and just as the characters are going to have sex swaps character perspective for a rape scene. He then plays out the rape scene and concludes by going back to the nice afterglow of the adult consensual relations. Put simply, it is rather twisted and messes with your head.

Overall though, quite an enjoyable novel and I’m looking forward to reading the others in the Millennium series.

Also, one more note, Stieg Larsson does an interesting job in blending his different character perspective, rather than having them accidentally collide later at least one of the disparate perspectives is always aware of the other and often has had an effect of some sort on the life of the other character. I contrast this the often separate yet colliding paths, or at least less directly connected paths as shown in Orson Scott Card’s and Aaron Johnson’s “The First Formic Wars” trilogy or in William Gibson’s “Sprawl Trilogy” in which most other characters are unaware of one another until their paths collide.