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 Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz-Zafon

I hesitate to even write this review. I just don’t think my ramblings could possibly do any justice to Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Shadow of the Wind.

But I suppose I’ll start with my reluctance to read it. About a year ago my best friend’s dad Twoey recommended it, but I just brushed him off and figured we wouldn’t have the same literary tastes. But when I started as a bookseller at BookHampton, people (and most importantly, co-workers) were still talking about it. So I made the leap and committed… to the paperback.

At about page 10, I was completely and utterly hooked. It came with me in the Long Island Sound and basically everywhere else short of the driver's seat of my car (when I was listening to A Mercy) until I finally stayed up ‘til 3 a.m. to finish it up. (Confession: I had a related nightmare that night.)

Ruiz Zafón winds his reader through the dark and windy roads of Barcelona, weaving together a plot that is as intricate and interesting as the arhictecture of the city itself. Its parallel love stories and mysteries between two sets of characters in two different times could have entered to the realm of cheesy, but Ruiz Zafón keeps them on the right side of literature. Not a detail spared and not a beat missed.

I’m going to stop there. Just read it. And (inevitably) fall in love. With Spain. With Julian Carax. With the Cemetary of Forgotten Books. With Daniel. But if I told you any more, I’d be robbing you of the chance to experience it in all its gothic glory.

And now I can’t wait to read the prequel/sequel Angel’s Game. Keep an eye out for the review!

The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery

During my brief (but wonderful) stint as a bookseller, I grilled my customers about what they were reading. The Elegance of the Hedgehog (an arguably bizarre title yet still a summer favorite) fared as such: About 75% of the people I talked to just couldn’t get over it and came in asking for Gourmet Rhapsody, pre-release date.

BUT about 25% just couldn’t get through it at all. Unfortunately (now fortunately) I had already bought it when the naysayers came in, so I stuck it out. And this Parisian rendezvous proved a delight although, quite frankly, heart-wrenching as well.

It fulfills the best French stereotypes while acknowledging (mockingly) the worst. It is indulgent but not frivolous. It is intelligent but not pompous. It is philosophical but not condescending. It’s 300+ pages go as quickly and smoothly as a 3-hour lunch with your very best friend over wine and madelines (with a lovely bouquet of Madame Michel's camellias to boot).

Admittedly there is a lot of philosophy that could bog down the book. But press on through it. It works best as a way into the topsy-turvy brains of the duo of narrators rather than the ramblings of dear Ms. Barbery.

And finally, it features three characters whom I just do not want to let go: Madame Michel, a stout, lit-and-film loving concierge; Paloma, a 13-year-old in the most extreme teenage angst I have ever read; and finally, Kakuro Ozu, the new Japanese tenant who introduces much needed zen into both their lives while also learning from them. In fact, I have so enjoyed their company that I’m holding off a bit before I start my next literary endeavor so that they can linger in my imagination just a little longer, unfettered and unbothered.

(P.S. What, you ask, is this so-called "elegance of the hedgehog'? Relax, dear reader. It is answered for you: "Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside, she's covered in quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary - and terribly elegant.")

[Jillian]