Hey, kids! It’s your pal, Akatzen, back with another Book Report.

I tend to be somewhat suspicious of hype. If I go see a much-hyped movie, my suspicion helps me keep from getting too disappointed if the movie fails to live up to the hype. For example, following the hype of Black-suit Spiderman, Spiderman 3 was downright awful. Posthumous hype is particularly dangerous. We nearly always remember the dead as someone better (and occasionally, much worse) than they were.
Look at The Dark Knight, directed by Christopher Nolan. Heath Ledger’s performance received good notice before he died, but after his death, the hype over his character shot through the roof. Luckily, his performance actually lived up to the hype, and in some ways, I believe surpassed it.

On the other hand, the posthumous hype around Rent was much better than the musical actually is (this is, of course, my opinion, and I’m sure Admiral Eo will disagree).

So I was understandably wary of the hype surrounding Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
When the book hit the shelves in 2005, its author had been dead for a year, due to a massive heart attack. Due to his journalism exposing many Swedish extreme right and racist organizations, some conspiracy theory arose that his heart attack was induced because of the numerous death threats he received. In 2008, he was the second best-selling author in the world, behind Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. The Swedish film company Yellow Bird filmed the movie version of the novel, releasing it in Sweden in 2009. The film hit American shores in late March, and you can read a bit of what Sgt. Angle has to say about it here. An American film version of the book is in the works, with a tentative release date in 2012. Needless to say, the hype behind the book is extensive. (Okay, perhaps “needless to say” is one of those sayings that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, since I did say it.)

The Swedish title of the book is Män som Hatar Kvinnor, which translates to “Men who Hate Women”. The content of the book completely lives up to the hype, in my opinion. The novel is a crime thriller, following in the vein of Agatha Christie and Thomas Harris, and maybe with a little bit of John Grisham thrown in. The world the characters live in, however, is totally contemporary.
Mikael Blomkvist is a journalist for (and co-owner of) Millennium magazine, a journal dealing mainly with high-finance investigative reporting. The start of the novel finds him going head to head with perhaps the Swedish version of Goldman Sachs.
Lisbeth Salander is a free-lance investigator for a security firm. She is 26, socially awkward and sullen, has enough tattoos (including a dragon on her shoulder, hence the title) and piercings to front a punk band, and is probably the best private investigator in Sweden.
Their paths converge as they attempt to find out what happened to a missing scion of a wealthy corporate family.

(I’m trying to be incredibly vague here, since the book is, after all, a mystery.)

As a mystery thriller, the book works pretty well. I figured it out pretty early on, but I doubted my guess very nearly the whole way through. Finding out I guessed it actually came as a surprise. Now, I know some of you might be saying, “Hey, um, Akatzen? If you guessed the mystery, how is it that it works well?“
Well, I’d read the book for an hour or so before going to sleep, and as I’m lying their in the dark, I found myself turning over every detail the book gave me in my head. I became just as engrossed in the mystery as the main characters, but from the safety of my bedroom. They had to deal with danger. If I’m engrossed in figuring out the mystery of a novel at times when I’m not reading the novel, then I’d say the book is a pretty damn good mystery.

Thematically, the book deals with some pretty weighty issues too. Reviewer Robert Dessaix wrote, “His favorite targets are violence against women, the incompetence and cowardice of investigative journalists, the moral bankruptcy of big capital and the virulent strain of Nazism still festering away …” (Sydney Morning Herald, February 2008). The “Nature vs. Nurture” debate comes up a bit as well.
The real treat of the novel is Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo. Incredibly intelligent but socially withdrawn, she has an enormous force of will and believes firmly in righteous retribution. There’s incredibly depth to her character, and it’s revealed in delightful — and also sometimes ghastly — ways.

So go and pick this one up. It’s the first book in a trilogy, so if nothing else, it’ll give you something to do for a while.

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_