The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson

My posting history for the past month has been absymal. I'll chock it up to all of the craziness that decided to settle into my life for now, but enough about that. Back to books.

Truth be told, my reading has severely decreased because of my internships but I've managed to squeeze in some gems here and there. I'm going to keep these next few posts brief, partly because I read the books a bit ago and partly because I simply want to.

Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Played With Fire, is, for those of you who live under a rock, his follow-up to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

I admittedly had a lot of qualms with Dragon Tattoo, mainly with its rattling on and on about the economic scandal, which I frankly did not care about. A chapter or so would have been enough, but nevertheless I still enjoyed it greatly.

The Girl Who Played With Fire (thankfully) does not delve into economics and rather explores more deeply the fascinating character of Lisbeth Salander. Her background is (almost) fully divulged in the course of a murder investigation.

The parts that I did love about Dragon Tattoo stayed around for Played With Fire, but not in the boring way that Carlos Ruiz Zafon did with The Angel's Game. Lisbeth Salander, Mikael Blomkvist, and all the other main players stuck around for round 2. At the center of the novel was still an expose executed by Millenium magazine and a book counterpart to boot (which a publishing nut like myself has got to love).

Instead of the mystery taking Blomkvist & Co. to the depths of snowy Sweden, this murder investigation takes place in Stockholm itself with only a brief (but powerful) hiatus to the familiar countryside we came to know in the first installment. Also, instead of the mystery centering on one psychopath, it concentrates on the rather large exploitation of human trafficking which does share one thing with original mystery: Eastern European immigrant girls as victims.

But of course, despite any differences, there were still men who hate women and the woman who hates men who hate women. Larsson's chilling look into how the sexes have yet to become equal and how women still have much to overcome is like a blast of frigid cold into our cozy ideas of Sweden as a socialist safe haven for all. (Don't worry, there are plenty of men who love/respect women to ensure that it isn't just a man-bashing mystery.)

While The Girl Who Played With Fire is hardly polemical and not likely to change much in the way of how things are, it still is worth reading not only for the entertainment value of an SVU episode on steroids but also for its (disturbingly) deep questions it raises.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson

I bet that if you are in a social circle that even looks askance at books, you’ve heard a thousand times over that you must, must, must read Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

This (deserved) international success is somewhat bittersweet for on Larsson's Millenium trilogy, of which this is the first. Larsson, a sci-fi fanatic, wrote just these three crime thrillers before he died in 2004 at the age of 50. The entire trilogy was published posthumously to a flurry of legal battles stemming from his will. But thank goodness most of the bitterness is gone... The last in the trilogy is arriving on American shores on Halloween.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First, we’ve got to tackle The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The “heroine” is unlike any other. In fact, the illicit drug homonym of heroine would probably describe Lisbeth Salander a bit better. She is all sorts of screwy but has just enough humanity to make the reader love her.

Before Lisbeth is introduced, the reader is drawn into a web of financial intrigue, which I could have done without. In fact, the first 100 pages and the last 100 pages could have been deleted, but I suppose some people like finance.

The real meat of the novel takes place in the (ice cold) heart of Sweden. It follows Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist reeling from a disgraced image from that whole financial problem. He takes on a freelance mission to write a biography of a corporate powerhouse of a family. Surreptitiously, at one member’s behest, he investigates the disappearance and presume murder of the patriarch's niece. Naturally, he encounters a whole bunch of crazies in that family.

What ensues is a perfect mixture of detective work, illicit romance, and violent intrigue with a perfect amount of Criminal Minds and Law and Order: SVU tossed in. And it doesn't deliver a solution that comes out of left field. If you pay close attention, you can probably fit most of the pieces together as Blomkvist simultaneously does so. The full truth, however, is absolutely startling when revealed.

Is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo great literature? Nope, definitely not. But it’s smart, it’s original, and it’s one hell of a read. I’ll be getting my hands on the sequel pretty quickly.

The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls

(Sorry to start your Monday off with dense subjects but here goes...)

Usually the nonfiction table of a bookshop is like the negative charge to my positive charge. I steer clear without even glancing at the table.  I especially always wonder why people read those blood-curdling memoirs of people like Dave Pelzer (A Boy Called It, A Man Named Dave).  A chronology of an awful childhood? I'll take a raincheck... It's the stuff of nightmares, not of literature. 

But after reading Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle, I think I might be starting to understand why.

If it hadn’t been out since 2005, I would be trying to alert the masses about this one. Dreaming but drunk father.  Storybook move to New York.  Absurd success story. And on the flip side? Endless fires. Despicable adults. Pernicious predators. 

Jeannette Walls' chronicle of her family's peculiar life reverses what most see as an American journey of dreams, westward ho!  Normally, one begins in the claustrophobic East Coast city laden with expectations and suffocating normalcy. One then deserts all social norms for the promise and dream of the West, of the other.  

But the Walls family all but embodies that otherness of the West, and the reality is both gruesomely horrifying and grippingly beautiful.  Mr. Walls steals from his children while instilling them with endless imagination.  The children often go hungry yet grow up with every kid's fantasy of full freedom.  But such a life is not what Jeannette and her siblings crave, and each ends up in the city of all cities: New York. 

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Walls' lifestyle I somewhat glossed over is that they would hate the word you'd probably use to describe them: poor.  It implies there was no choice in their lifetstyle, and it implies there is pity to be poured upon them.  Au contraire. The Walls family, as is duly noted throughout the The Glass Castle, chooses this lifestyle, and the parents maintain it until their dying day.

So you may think I am now a convert to nonfiction, but to be honest, I don’t think that anything is going to live up to this little gem. The only two who are getting a chance are Julie Andrew (who I prefer to call Fraulein Maria) and Joan Didion (because I want to be her).  (Recommendations encouraged here.)

And my last concern? That after this fine work of art Jeannette Walls will have nothing else to write about. I guess we shall see with her upcoming fall release, Half Broke Horses. It's a "true life novel," whatever that means.