Steig Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

by Theresa Yuan
Staff Writer

Six Word Summary: Punk Hacker almost redeems languid thriller.

What’s yellow and black and read all over? This summer’s mega hit The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Random House, $11.99) from Swedish writer Steig Larsson continues to be a bestseller this January. It is immensely readable and features a handful of striking and eccentric characters. But beyond the hype, is this a mystery-thriller worth reading?

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has a straightforward premise- a girl, Harriet Vanger, disappeared forty years ago, and her elderly uncle now wants to find the truth behind her disappearance. He hires crafty journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who is between jobs due to his ability to dish the dirt on corruption a little too well. Blomkvist joins forces with Lisbeth Salander, a gifted but disturbed hacker, to solve the case. Mix in the deadly Vanger family, Nazi war crimes, and Bible-citing serial killer, and you’ve got a potent Larsson thriller.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is written, above all else, to be read quickly. Description is minimal and characters don’t contemplate events- they react. But for all the action that takes place over five hundred whopping pages, not much happens. Blomkvist and Lisbeth spend half the novel traveling between Hedeby, the Swedish island belonging to the Vanger clan, and Stockholm. The last quarter of the novel should contain a rapid-fire of revelations, but the pacing remains sluggish.

Additionally, wording is robotic and forced at times. Granted, Larsson wrote in Swedish and the entire novel was translated from scratch. Some references and tidbits were clearly lost in translation.

All in all, the novel’s one redeeming trait is Lisbeth Salander. She’s a punk and a former child delinquent, and with her borderline mystical ability to uncover dirty secrets, no one who takes advantage of her gets away for long. Larsson handles her bisexuality the same way he handles her black-and-white outlook on justice, and that’s extremely effectively.

Read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to get inside the mind of a deadly, ingenious, and hacking punk. But the plot is slow and the wording awkward; the novel is also so explicit the WA Library doesn’t lend out copies except under extenuating circumstances. So don’t expect a snappy plot but watch for that unforgettable female lead.