The girl with the dragon tattoo

Stieg Larsson, 1954-2004

Book - 2008

The disappearance forty years ago of Harriet Vanger, a young scion of one of the wealthiest families in Sweden, gnaws at her octogenarian uncle, Henrik Vanger. He is determined to know the truth about what he believes was her murder. He hires crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist, recently at the wrong end of a libel case, to get to the bottom of Harriet's disappearance. Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-four-year-old, pierced, tattooed genius hacker, possessed of the hard-earned wisdom of someone twice her age--and a terrifying capacity for ruthlessness--assists Blomkvist with the investigation. This unlikely team discovers a vein of nearly unfathomable iniquity running through the Vanger family, an astonishing corruption at the highest ech...elon of Swedish industrialism--and a surprising connection between themselves.--From publisher description.

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Subjects
Published
New York : Alfred A. Knopf 2008.
Language
English
Swedish
Main Author
Stieg Larsson, 1954-2004 (-)
Other Authors
Reg Keeland, 1943- (-)
Edition
1st American ed
Item Description
Sequel: The girl who played with fire.
Originally published: Stockholm : Norstedt, 2005.
Published as a mass market paperback (with different pagination) by Vintage Crime in 2009.
Physical Description
465 p.
ISBN
9780307454546
9780307949486
9780307473479
9780307269751
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

A journalist, a hacker and a 40-year-old cold case. A FEW years ago, Ake Daun, a professor of European ethnology, posted an article on Sweden's official national Web site, Sweden.se, arguing that Swedes are not in fact gloomy or suicide prone. "Sweden is quite far down in the European suicide table, in 15th place," Daun wrote, blaming a 1960 speech by Dwight Eisenhower for leaving outsiders with the impression that Swedes tended toward "sin, nudity, drunkenness and suicide." Maybe so. But "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," by Stieg Larsson, a Swedish journalist who died of a heart attack in 2004, won't help the country's image any. The novel offers a thoroughly ugly view of human nature, especially when it comes to the way Swedish men treat Swedish women. In Larsson's world, sadism, murder and suicide are commonplace - as is lots of casual sex. (Sweden isn't all bad.) "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," published in Sweden in 2005, became an international best seller. The book opens with an intriguing mystery. Henrik Vanger, an octogenarian industrialist, hires Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist who has just lost a libel case under murky circumstances, to investigate the disappearance of his great-niece, Harriet. Nearly 40 years earlier, Harriet vanished from a small island mostly owned by the Vanger family, and Henrik has never gotten over it. Blomkvist takes on the case, despite serious misgivings, after Henrik promises him 2.4 million kroner (about $372,000 at the current exchange rate) for a year's work. Henrik says he's certain that someone in his family murdered Harriet. "I detest most of the members of my family," he tells Blomkvist. "They are for the most part thieves, misers, bullies and incompetents" - a description that will prove to be, if anything, too kind. The girl of the title isn't Harriet but Lisbeth Salander, a 24-yearold computer hacker with a photographic memory, a violent temper and some serious intimacy issues. After a nasty plot detour involving a lawyer foolish enough to try to take advantage of her, Salander teams with Blomkvist to solve the mystery of Harriet's disappearance. The novel perks up as their investigation gains speed, though readers will need some time to sort through the various cousins and nephews and half-brothers and -sisters who populate the Vanger family. Harriet's case turns out to be connected to a series of murders in the 1950s and '60s. When a cat is killed and its tortured corpse is left outside the cottage where Blomkvist is living, he and Salander realize they may not be working on a cold case after all. BUT if the middle section of "Girl" is a treat, the rest of the novel doesn't quite measure up. The book's original Swedish title was "Men Who Hate Women," a label that just about captures the subtlety of the novel's sexual politics. Except for Blomkvist, nearly every man in the book under age 70 is a violent misogynist. Nor will "Girl" win any awards for characterization. While Blomkvist comes to life as he's investigating the murder, his relationships with his daughter and with Erika Berger, a co-worker who is his occasional lover, seem halfformed and weak. Even after 460 pages, it's not clear whether Blomkvist cares, whether he's troubled by his lack of intimacy or simply resigned to it. Is he stoic or merely Swedish? Either way, he seems more a stock character than a real person. But the real disappointment in "Girl" comes in its final section, after the mystery of Harriet's disappearance has been solved. Without any warning, "Girl" metamorphoses into a boring account of Blomkvist's effort to take down the executive who originally won the libel lawsuit mentioned at the start of the novel. The story of his revenge is boring and implausible, relying heavily on lazy e-mail exchanges between characters. And so "Girl" ends blandly. Only Ake Daun and the Swedish tourist board can be happy about that. Alex Berenson is a reporter for The Times. His most recent novel is "The Ghost War."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]

A Friday in November It happened every year, was almost a ritual. And this was his eighty-second birthday. When, as usual, the flower was delivered, he took off the wrapping paper and then picked up the telephone to call Detective Superintendent Morell who, when he retired, had moved to Lake Siljan in Dalarna. They were not only the same age, they had been born on the same day-which was something of an irony under the circumstances. The old policeman was sitting with his coffee, waiting, expecting the call. "It arrived." "What is it this year?" "I don't know what kind it is. I'll have to get someone to tell me what it is. It's white." "No letter, I suppose." "Just the flower. The frame is the same kind as last year. One of those do-it-yourself ones." "Postmark?" "Stockholm." "Handwriting?" "Same as always, all in capitals. Upright, neat lettering." With that, the subject was exhausted, and not another word was exchanged for almost a minute. The retired policeman leaned back in his kitchen chair and drew on his pipe. He knew he was no longer expected to come up with a pithy comment or any sharp question which would shed a new light on the case. Those days had long since passed, and the exchange between the two men seemed like a ritual attaching to a mystery which no-one else in the whole world had the least interest in unravelling. The Latin name was Leptospermum (Myrtaceae) rubinette . It was a plant about ten centimetres high with small, heather-like foliage and a white flower with five petals about two centimetres across. The plant was native to the Australian bush and uplands, where it was to be found among tussocks of grass. There it was called Desert Snow. Someone at the botanical gardens in Uppsala would later confirm that it was a plant seldom cultivated in Sweden. The botanist wrote in her report that it was related to the tea tree and that it was sometimes confused with its more common cousin Leptospermum scoparium, which grew in abundance in New Zealand. What distinguished them, she pointed out, was that rubinette had a small number of microscopic pink dots at the tips of the petals, giving the flower a faint pinkish tinge. Rubinette was altogether an unpretentious flower. It had no known medicinal properties, and it could not induce hallucinatory experiences. It was neither edible, nor had a use in the manufacture of plant dyes. On the other hand, the aboriginal people of Australia regarded as sacred the region and the flora around Ayers Rock. The botanist said that she herself had never seen one before, but after consulting her colleagues she was to report that attempts had been made to introduce the plant at a nursery in Göteborg, and that it might, of course, be cultivated by amateur botanists. It was difficult to grow in Sweden because it thrived in a dry climate and had to remain indoors half of the year. It would not thrive in calcareous soil and it had to be watered from below. It needed pampering. The fact of its being so rare a flower ought to have made it easier to trace the source of this particular specimen, but in practice it was an impossible task. There was no registry to look it up in, no licences to explore. Anywhere from a handful to a few hundred enthusiasts could have had access to seeds or plants. And those could have changed hands between friends or been bought by mail order from anywhere in Europe, anywhere in the Antipodes. But it was only one in the series of mystifying flowers that each year arrived by post on the first day of November. They were always beautiful and for the most part rare flowers, always pressed, mounted on watercolour paper in a simple frame measuring 15cm by 28cm. Excerpted from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.