Larsson and his partner of 32 years, Eva Gabrielsson, had never married; she wanted to rights to his work, but under Swedish law, it reverted to his family. The movie was nominated for five Academy Awards, including a lead actress nod for Rooney Mara, who played Salander. Sylvere Lotringer, intellectual who infused U.
Veterans of fruitless wars: Two Marine Corps memoirists share their gratitude and dismay. Cinema legend James Ivory, 93, talks about letting it all hang out — and more.
All Sections. About Us. Under the pretext of researching the family history, Blomkvist acquaints himself with members of the extended Vanger family, and worried that he seeks to take advantage of the obsession of a sick old man, most of them resent his presence.
Salander, is assigned a new legal guardian in Nils Bjurman , who is a sadist - extorting sexual favors from her in return for access to her trust fund.
Unaware that she is videotaping his actions, he eventually rapes her. Soon after, she retaliates by incapacitating and torturing him with a taser and tattooing "I am a sadistic pig and a rapist" on his chest. She then forces him to watch the recording of the rape, and threatens to make it public unless he arranges for her to have permanent control over her money.
Blomkvist immerses himself in the case in order to fulfill his contractual obligation, and after discovering that Salander has hacked into his computer, he convinces her to assist him with research. The newly formed team discovers entries in Harriet's diary that list the names of some missing local women whose cases correspond with Bible verses describing brutal forms of divine retribution.
This leads them to suspect that they are on the trail of a serial killer who has remained anonymous for decades. Eventually they become lovers, but due to her past, Blomkvist has trouble getting close to Salander, a loner who treats everyone she meets with hostility.
In the end, the duo discover that Harriet's brother Martin , currently the CEO of Vanger Industries, has been raping and murdering women for years, having been groomed into serial murder by his father, Gottfried, who sexually abused both him and Harriet. Blomkvist attempts a confrontation with Martin, who in turn kidnaps his pursuer and takes him to a torture chamber hidden in Martin's house.
Martin reveals that he is not responsible for Harriet's disappearance and presumed murder, but as Martin is about to kill Blomkvist, Lisbeth bursts in and attacks, rescuing him. Lisbeth frees Blomkvist as Martin escapes and flees in his car. She pursues him onto the highway on her motorcycle, only to see him kill himself by veering straight into a crushing head-on collision with a truck.
The two primary characters are so far not very likable at all - in fact, the review descriptions are more interesting than the book descriptions of them. I'm betting part of the problem is the translation, presumably - but god, there is just some boring writing in here, too. He bought milk. He was cold.
He went home. I am not really exaggerating, either. Actual content: "He put on a pot of coffee and made himself two sandwiches. He had not eaten a proper meal all day, but he was strangely uninterested in food. After drinking the coffee, he took the cigarettes out of his jacket pocket and opened the pack. It sets the tone of "lonely dude being lonely" but really: two sandwiches? That's really just a page I opened to randomly - there is much worse. I am truly bitterly resentful of every minute I am stuck on the side of this mountain without a good book to read.
I'm ready to browse the mini mart down the way and read the real estate magazines instead. I am not trying to insult anyone's taste - so please don't get mad about my opinion.
But if you love this book, please - tell me WHY. What am I missing? Mar 01, Miranda Reads rated it really liked it Shelves: audiobook. Buckle up. It's gonna be Then it's hairpin turn after hairpin turn at breakneck speed. This book was a bit difficult to get into. Mikael Blomkvist a journalist is sentenced to jail for liable. He knows he's right.
His team knows he's right. But they don't have enough evidence to overturn it. His magazine is about to go under and with this jail scandal Henrik Vanger - ex-head of the Vanger corpor Buckle up. Henrik Vanger - ex-head of the Vanger corporation - decides to hire Mikael for a special assignment: writing the family history.
However, that is just a cover. His real job? Solve a decades-old murder of Henrik's favorite niece Harriet. Mikael soon teams up with Lisbeth Salander.
She's a hacker extraordinaire with her own, peculiar brand of justice. She's simply stunning and absolutely puts all other heroines to shame. An absolute motherfreaking badass. Together, they discover far more than their wildest nightmares. NOTE: This was my third time through, and honestly Attempt 1 : Eighth Grade. Read up until the financial scam and lost interest DNF. Attempt 2 : Learned that this was my grandfather's fave book. I wanted to have something in common with him so I reluctantly picked it up.
I listened to the audiobook and became engrossed in the mystery but frequently lost track of who was who. I'm still glad I tried it because it gave me something to write to him about in the weekly letters. Attempt 3 : It's been a bit over a year since my grandfather passed and I just felt like I needed to read it again. Reading this book for the third time just blew my mind. It's been a bittersweet reread. Really, truly a great listen.
View all 25 comments. Mar 18, Teodora rated it really liked it Shelves: on-app , feminism-and-strong-women , favorites , mystery-thriller , mystery-crime. As Dragan Armansky felt in that particular moment about Lisbeth Salander, I felt that about her the whole book.
And I must say that I liked feeling that way about her. That means that she has some sort of wilderness in her personality that makes her so interesting, not only as a character but also as a possible real-life person.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo made me ascend through different stages while reading it. I rarely find a book like this one, to make me feel all sorts of feelings towards it, from all the levels of human sensitivity in thinking. I think I had to read it at least five times to actually get a grip of the story in the beginning.
Maybe it is because I was briefly introduced in the middle of a scene with unknown characters and undiscovered plot. I kept asking myself what was this bug of boredom that I had and then…it hit me.
Even more — as I study Business Administration, all the business talk should be some delicious dessert for me. But NA-AH. But hey, why not creeping some of that ish in my casual reading to keep the brain on its right track of self-destruction, ceteris paribus?
The mystery started to crawl at the surface so I could see and touch it and also expect more and more. Like really good. Your inner Miss Marple must be intrigued. Mine was for sure. Well, let me talk then. Lisbeth Salander.
And the surely nauseous manner in which she was treated. It is absolutely indisputable, morally wrong and socially disgraceful. I am going to be very mean and very direct and I am going to ask a question: What level of psychical constipation do you need to have to pursue such an abominable act? Yeah, those passages made me very sick. And very sad. I felt nauseous after all. The way she seems not to care about anything that may interfere with her principles and also the way she cares about things but never speak them up is just so her , so part of the true individual she is, even though she might look unrealistic constructed.
You do you, girl. You do you. I was on board only for Salander, because she captured my interest from the first time she appeared in scene. But then, Pippi Longstocking and Kalle Blomkvist merged together and gave life to this fabulous Swedish detective dream team and I was down for it.
Talking about the characters of the book, the female characters were such badass women it felt so good reading about them super businesswomen taking over multinational companies? Yeah, okay, sign me up. Even though he is a lousy father and husband and he has some shaky ethics in life, he is definitely a good man by his nature.
And, also, because we are still on the topic: Erika Berger. I absolutely loved her. She is a witty businesswoman, with a lot of gut and a lot of cold blood to make decisions and to run her own world. The passive way that she adopted, the cold feelings that she spread, the taciturn nature and her absolutely killer mind just had me on board. Everyone saw Salander as a victim of society, but I felt that was wrong.
I have never had that feeling about her. She always inspired me survival. She was a fighter by nature and fighters always survive. And this is how Salander made her way through life. In conclusion, this book gave me such a hard time I cannot explain, but it was also a really good book that I might consider as one of my own personal favourites.
Also, as a side note: has anyone notice how much coffee do those people drink?? Or is just me? All in all people, good reading! View all 26 comments. Recommended to Meredith by: every person in the whole wide world.
Shelves: motherless-daughters , chosen-girls , hate-the-writing-respect-the-story , reviewed , monsters , disturbing. Women are raised to routinely fear rape. We called the police! And when she said it, did you see how she looked? I mean. Not you, of course — most girls. I think she was just in it for the money in the first place.
Women know that if we walk alone in the dark, statistically there is a good chance we will get raped. If we misread that boy next door and his swellness is a con, rape.
And when a person is in a position of being systematically controlled, it often does cause more physical or emotional damage to fight back. It seems to me like it is the equivalent of every man being raised that if he leaves the house at the wrong time, he might encounter a woman who will strip him naked, hold him down, and knee him in the balls while she masturbates. And then in this alternate universe, these boys find out, as they grow up, that most of the men they know have had that happen to them.
We are raised to encounter our daily lives knowing that, even if violence wasn't in our past, violence probably is in our future. I have to say, though, that while I think it is realistic to say that women are raised to fear rape and to incorporate that fear of rape into our daily routine, and that sometimes fighting back makes things more dangerous, I do not believe it is effective to live in fear or to encourage women to live in fear or not defend ourselves.
I think that perpetuates an idea that women are powerless, which then encourages women to freeze up when encountered with violence or even conflict. I think trusting our instincts and learning martial arts is probably more productive. And teaching men not to rape. That seems like the approach this book takes, though it more directly simply reflects, with appropriate outrage, on the levels of male contempt for women.
And I think in that way, in the way it is directed to men, it is about how gross contempt for women is, whether it takes the form of self-absorption or sadism. This book is smart. It is viscerally grotesque in the contrast, and it highlights the theme of consent. It was physically difficult for me to read, especially in the contrast, and I thought that made it very effective.
She is both the outcast that women are when we fight back, and she is something of the misunderstood-bad-boy hero turned girl. I liked that. When she view spoiler [saves Blomkvist, it is all really vivid and heroic, but still corporeal and disgusting. It bothers me when a storyteller starts to let a girl save a guy, but really she only tosses him the gun to save himself.
Salander gets some real action and some real credit, and it is satisfying. Ultimately, it is pretty clear, but not laughing in your face, just resigned, Larsson knows view spoiler [Blomkvist is a self-serving ass, too. He really has only used Salander, and how far is that from hating women? It is certainly not respectful hide spoiler ]. It is a meaningful gradation.
But not all of us get off on kneeing each other in the balls. This struck me as a very masculine translation of male hatred of women and the way women navigate a world that tells us every time we turn a corner that it hates us.
I do see how the graphic descriptions of sadistic violence against women might allow a sadistic audience to read only for that, but the fact that Larsson balances this with graphic violence against men neutralizes the gender-hatred aspect of that to me. Unfortunately, I think you will find you are wrong.
And I don't think it does anybody any good to be afraid to tell these stories. I hated the writing in this book a lot. Like, I hated it a lot. It both hit a lot of pet peeves of mine and it was just objectively bad in a lot of places. The sandwiches! I wonder how much tourism for Sweden Larsson drummed up by the sandwich descriptions. I hope none because gag. I can see how he created the effect of an investigatory report through the writing, so, I think it is intentionally the way it is, but it was a choice I did not enjoy at all.
So, overall this was a very unpleasant book to read, but it was smart, and its smartness outweighed its unpleasantness in my evaluation. It is always kind of a funny experience to read your own words as someone else would write them. So, it was funny to read somebody else say those words. At the same time, Salander felt like a man recording the facts of what he saw a woman do and say once, not like a living, breathing human character.
Also, I had to go buy pickles yesterday because reading about so many of them gave me a craving. Sep 30, Sarita rated it did not like it Shelves: dime-novel-spooks-and-gumshoes. This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Hey, kids, if you like books in which the only major descriptive moments happen during sexual torture scenes, where major characters lack motive, and where the red herrings I may feel less strongly after a few days, but I am having a hard time believing this book has hit the best-seller lists in multiple countries.
Spoiler: They're not. A murderer, at the climax, reveals, "I like killing [people]. That's it. The title character has her macabre past detailed at length. The salient facts to the case - how did she come into possession of her detective-ing skills?
Her emotional life is ignored until it's needed for a little plot development and then ignored again for a gazillion pages. She makes Kinsey Milhoney look like a guru of emotional awareness and self-knowledge. That is LAME. Stop with the Mac commericials aleady. Is it possible that the well-financed campaign for this book had to do with the fact that the dead author couldn't object to selling Apple and Kawasaki shout-outs? The two plot lines are almost entirely unrelated. They don't even intersect, really; one segues into a second, and then, when the second is wrapped up entirely, the first plot returns to end with a whimper.
There is a Lot of torture-porn in this book. Did I mention that? Detailed description of sexual abuse, incest, and general nastiness that does nothing to advance the plot. It just takes up space making you think there are reasons for the murders, but We listened to this on cd and I kept trying to forward and ending up on the absolute worst moments. Several passages written as an email conversation. It's like the author realized at a certain point that he was so bad at dialogue that he'd better just give it a rest for a while and instead use stilted telegraph talking.
This book was not fun or smart. I kept thinking it was about to be, but I was wrong. View all 45 comments. Dec 26, Madeline rated it liked it Shelves: the-movie-is-better , no-judgements. After having leaped onto the bandwagon with the rest of everyone, I feel a certain amount of pretentious indie pride saying that I wasn't as awed by this book as everyone else apparently was. Which is not to say that the book wasn't enjoyable and exciting; it just didn't knock my socks off whilst simultaneously blowing my mind and rocking my world.
Let's go with the first option. So, the good stuff: the main s After having leaped onto the bandwagon with the rest of everyone, I feel a certain amount of pretentious indie pride saying that I wasn't as awed by this book as everyone else apparently was. So, the good stuff: the main story - a disgraced journalist is hired by a rich old man to write a book about said man's crazy rich family, while secretly working to discover truth behind the disappearance and supposed murder of the man's granddaughter.
Also in play is Lisbeth Salander, a freelance investigator who also happens to be one of the best hackers in Sweden. She also happens to be made of awesome , but I'll get to that later. The journalist is investigating a supposed murder a body was never found, so no one even knows what happened to the girl , so violence is expected.
I just wasn't quite prepared for just how intensely graphic the violence is. There's a lot of stuff dealing with assault, rape, and murder of various women. There is also a lot of sex in the book, and the stuff that gets described in the most detail is definitely not consensual and will probably make you very uncomfortable. You've been warned. The investigation itself is pretty fascinating, implausible as it is that some random guy investigating a disappearance that took place 40 years ago was able to find out completely new leads that weren't found by the police or the girl's grandfather who's been obsessing about the case since forever , but I digress.
The family itself is equal parts interesting, creepy, and frustrating. It's not until the journalist Blomkvist teams up with Lisbeth that things get really interesting, and they made such a fun team I wanted them to get their own detective show. The book deals mainly with crimes against women and those who commit them. Larsson obviously feels very passionately about this subject, as well as what should be done with the men who assault women. And now for the bad stuff: -There's a lot of nattering on about business and computers and journalism and more business stuff that either bored me or went over my head completely.
A map of the island the family compound is located on would have been much more helpful, since I never really figured out the geography of the place. Larsson is especially guilty of this when Lisbeth is concerned - I guess he decided we wouldn't understand what a unique counterculture tough chick she is unless we know that she's always wearing leather jackets, boots, torn jeans, and black t-shirts with angry slogans.
Listen, Stieg: Lisbeth is awesome. She is wonderfully defined simply through her own actions and thoughts - we don't even need the other characters constantly reminding us how antisocial and tough and uncommunicative and badass she is.
Believe me, we can see that. Show don't tell etc. To sum up, I'm going to give the last word to the book itself, and quote a sentence that's actually a character talking about a book featured towards the end of the story - but it could easily describe Larsson's book: "It was uneven stylistically, and in places the writing was actually rather poor - there had been no time for any fine polishing - but the book was animated by a fury that no reader could help but notice.
UPDATE: I just watched the film version of this book the original Swedish one, thank you verra much , and am adding this to my "the movie is better" shelf. Not that the book isn't good; it's just that the movie streamlines the story and gets rid of everything I complained about earlier in this review.
In the movie, all the minor characters and business-drama babble has been eliminated, Erika and Mikael's weird three-way relationship is thankfully unmentioned, Mikael never boffs Cecilia Vanger, and Noomi Rapace is so fucking cool as Lisbeth I can't even handle it. I'm also pretty sure they took some stuff from The Girl Who Played With Fire and put it in the movie, because there's some stuff about Lisbeth's past that I don't remember from the book.
While the American version is, in a technical sense, a better movie Fincher is a much better director - for just one example, the scene where Henrik Vanger explains the circumstances of Harriet's disappearance is a masterful example of show-don't-tell , I dislike the changes they made to the ending, and I simply cannot accept Rooney Mara as Lisbeth.
If you're interested, this article explains pretty much every complaint I have about American Lisbeth. View all 59 comments. I re-read this book by audio and even though the narrator was good, he didn't do a good job on Lisbeth's voice. I wish that Noomi Rapace would have done her own voice. That would have been awesome. So, I have been a fan of this series for quite some time. I have the movie trilogy box set of the books that are fan freaking tastic!
Although, now I have to switch from dvd to blu-ray! I also have a couple of different copies of the books! Lisbeth Salander is just freaking awesome. She's so bloody sm I re-read this book by audio and even though the narrator was good, he didn't do a good job on Lisbeth's voice. She's so bloody smart, I wish I was as smart as her and could be an awesome hacker like her too.
I freaking loved when she got back at the b stard who raped her as well. Wheewwwww, if only everyone could get that kind of revenge on their rapist. Oh, happy day! There are other things going on in the book but the main story line is about an uncle wanting to find out what happened to his niece, Harriet. He ends up hiring Mikael Blomkvist to find out what happened. Then Mikael gets lucky to have Lisbeth help him. Do these two find out some secrets!
Mikael almost gets killed a time or two. Makes you wonder what all they are hiding! And of course, it's a big ole nasty secret. Why am I not surprised.
It was just as hard to read about the second time around. Of course, there were other scenes that I had to skim through again, but I digress. If you haven't wandered into the world that is Lisbeth Salander, what are you waiting for? And try and watch the movie trilogy. They used to have it on Netflix, that is where I originally watched them and then went straight to Amazon to buy them.
Yes, they are that good as well as the books. Happy Reading! View all 38 comments. So here is the first warning to you, if you don't handle violence against women and children well, skip this novel. It's hard to give a short synopsis of the book. I found this book extremely engaging and full of action and came to regret many times that I had an audio version instead of a regular paper book. I also enjoyed immensely the amount details about everything - the publishing business, twisted Swedish family, corporate crime, history and political order of Sweden, etc.
I am guessing if you don't care to read about any of this subjects, this book is not for you, because it is packed with this information. My only qualm about this book, a small one, was the characterization. The character of Mikael Blomkvist smelled of a male wish fulfillment fantasy, the one where a man is adored by all women, gets laid all the time and always gets lauded for his stellar bedroom skills.
Lisbeth Salander also felt a little shaky and I thought Asberger's decease didn't quite account for her strange personality. I thought her antisocial behavior was inconsistent. This however didn't spoil my reading experience. View all 50 comments. He takes on a journalist with a honourable heart, and a record of trying to take on the dark-side of corporate Sweden; and then there's the diminutive, asocial, delinquent and frankly dangerous girl with a tattoo; chance, fate, destiny who knows, but somehow these two very determined and very stubborn people are brought together with this mystery to solve.
On third! I found this still the greatest modern crime fiction I've ever read. Some of the most complex and multi-faceted characterisations ever printed; simply one of the most assured, dynamic and breath taking debuts of a female character
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