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|  | Author: Stieg Larsson
Publisher: Maclehose Press Quercus
Buy New: $14.08
as of 3/22/2010 01:40 CDT details
New (4) Used (4) from $7.71
Seller: any_book
Rating:  903 reviews
Sales Rank: 1276428
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Edition: Uk airside e.
Pages: 532
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.8
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.8
ISBN: 1847243495
EAN: 9781847243492
ASIN: 1847243495
Publication Date: January 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: 100% BRAND NEW - FLAWLESS - BOOKSTORE QUALITY - SHIPS WITH TRACKING! Huge seller with millions of transactions. Money back guarantee.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 21-25 of 903
 Vengeance is hers March 14, 2010
Jay Dickson (Portland, OR)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The first book in Stieg Larsson's Millenium Trilogy is many things: a murder case, a financial intrigue, a family saga, and an (ersatz) feminist revenge fantasy. Its extraordinary popularity is almost certainly due to its partaking of the last category. Larsson's tale dwells uncomfortably on the horrible things that can be accomplished by "Men Who Hate Women" (the transliteration of the work's original Swedish title), and then tries to balance the score by offering elaborate retaliations visited upon the misogynists by the novel's avenging angel, an antisocial young woman named Lisbeth Salander who works as a researcher for a security firm. The novel tries to have it both ways: it offers Old Testament-style atrocities committed against women for us (and the novel's soft hero, Mikhael Blomkvist) to cluck over, and also to titillate us; then it offers Salander's vengeance schemes ostensibly to balance the injustices committed against women but really to titillate us even further. It's like "Inglourious Basterds," but imagined in terms of gender politics. Unfortunately, Salander is not as imaginative a creation as many fans of the book have proposed, and seems all too reminiscent of the many fabulous femmes fatales with attitude and technological know-how who have become archetypes of postmodern espionage stories, from Modesty Blaise to Sydney Bristow to La Femme Nikita; moreover, her willingness to sexually please her partner and only friend Blomkvist without him ever asking complicates any claims some have made that this novel truly champions feminism.
The novel works best in its central section, a complex mystery involving the disappearance of an industrial heiress on her family's private island more than thirty years previous to the main events of the novel: the sinister secrets of the Vanger family make the novel work here as a very gripping and dark family saga. Unfortunately, this plot is book-ended by a subplot involving financial intrigue that almost bored me into giving up the novel initially, and that I couldn't wait to get through in its final one hundred or so pages. The international success of the novel is undeniable, and at the very least the work is worth picking up just to see how Larsson can strike so many chords that resonate with a contemporary readership.
An Australian Joke? March 14, 2010
Australian Reader (Brisbane)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I thoroughly enjoyed Larsson's first novel, however I laughed until my stomach hurt over Blomkvist's visit to Australia. Did he get his research off an Aussie who was having a lend of him? As far as I know, only cattle are run on stations close to Tennant Creek, its too rugged and too hot for sheep. As to the chickens and pigs, there are no commercial chicken farms in the Northern Territory. The only pigs around are dangerous feral monsters that would happily eat any of the chickens that weren't taken by the feral dogs and cats. Most of the locals don't drive jeeps - they prefer helicopters, motor bikes and horses to round up the cattle. The preferred vehicle, at least when I lived there was a Landcruiser. The scene where they are shooting the sheep was just hilarious- and seemed so wrong. There is no mention of working dogs or Aboriginal jackaroos. Blomkvist eats a meal of mutton at a local pub(maybe he had a lamb roast) and drives on a back road to the station)they are pretty much all backroads or the one main road, the Stuart Highway.) Then there was the name of the local area - Muckawucka? (Or was it Wuckawucka- I listened to an audio book so I don't have the text to check.) I may be the ignorant one, but I can't find a place of that name on any map. It just sounds like a joke. I was just waiting for a mention of drop bears to complete the gag.
While this was very amusing, it did impact a little on my appreciation of the novel. From that point, on I wondered about the legitimacy of the details given in the rest of the book. However, I still enjoyed the novel very much and recommend it. And to any Australians who read it, expect a good laugh towards the end.
 Great Book - just a little different March 14, 2010
Lazy cook
I loved it from the get go. It was captivating with humor and great descriptions.Very easy to read and held your attention. As soon as I finished it I wanted his other book, The Girl Who Played with Fire. So sad that author died young. What made it a bit different is that it is set in Sweden. You learn alot about Sweden and the culture there.
 OK, But Don't Understand All The Praise March 13, 2010
Peter (Mont Vernon, NH United States)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The translation is TERRIBLE, with poor word choices, hackneyed phrases, and mixed metaphors. Changing the title from the original Swedish "Men Who Hate Women" is a bad mistake. AND the book needs some serious editing, to excise an overly long and uninteresting beginning and to punch-up the story when it degenerates into a lazy list of email exchanges toward the end.
But even with these flaws, I found "Dragon Tattoo" an interesting enough read to justify my time.
For me, much of that interest comes from the female protagonist in the story, who might be severely emotionally damaged but is also strictly moral and thus strangely appealing. She seems to be just about the only character that's well developed in the novel. And even for her, the author clearly doesn't think we're smart enough to figure out the genesis of her underlying quirks by ourselves, as he feels compelled to explain to us about mid-novel that she suffers from Asperger syndrome. Duh! Really? What a shock, NOW her behavior all makes sense (sorry, that was sarcasm there).
While I enjoyed the book enough to give it 3 stars, I don't understand all the enthusiasm and praise that the book has gotten. You want a quirky, broken, female protagonist and a ripper of a who-done-it story? Read "Dark Places" by Gillian Flynn, which I found to be a similar yet FAR superior novel.
If you're looking for a relatively interesting read, that WILL get you guessing about "who-done-it"... or you want to know what your friends are talking about when they discuss Lisbeth Salander... go ahead and read The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Just be ready for some uneven patches, and an annoyingly bad translation (have you dictionary ready to look up "gallimaufry", when you encounter it).
Surprisingly Good March 13, 2010
A Reader (Zembla)
Everyone I knew was reading "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo". None of them could put it down. They devoured it. I was intrigued by the spell this author cast on these readers. What's his secret? I had to know.
So I read it myself. Surprisingly, I couldn't seem to get into it until about the 200-page mark. And, no, not because he spends a lavish amount of time on the legal troubles of the magazine and the perils of financial journalism. (I rather enjoyed that part.) I just found all the principal characters . . . well, unlikeable. Lisabeth Salander is anti-social at face-value. The writer presents her as hard-to-like. (So I don't count that against the novel.) But Mikael Blomkvist, the main character--the man through whose eyes we experience the story--is an unscrupulous scoundrel. He sleeps with another man's wife, immediately cheats on her with an older woman, and then--for no reason whatsoever--sleeps with Salander (a rape victim, young enough to be his daughter). He's an exceptionally sleazy guy with absolutely no conscience--so it's particularly grating when he hypocritically rants on about morality when it comes to the financier Wennerstrom. Likewise with his soapbox (and paternalistic) preaching about violence-against-women.
The guy is as amoral as they come, yet he demands morality from others, without the slightest moment of cognitive dissonance (or self-awareness) on his part.
Additionally, Larsson makes rookie mistakes as a writer when he takes things too far. Like when he cheesily makes Salander have a "photographic memory". Anyone conversant with the subject knows that only about 3 people in all history have had a documented "photographic memory". It's extraordinarily rare. So when he gives the attribute to Salander, it just comes off as silly. (We already liked her at that point. So he should have left well-enough alone. But he threw in that cheese, and added a blemish to an otherwise wonderful character.) Likewise when he has her mention her habit of finishing equations in astrophysics (after dozens of references throughout the book where people assume she's mentally disabled). We get that she has a mind. You don't have to throw in embarrassing stuff like "astrophysics". Reminded me of an axiom from film-making. When a famous director saw a ham over-acting, he'd simply say "Less!"
At those moments when Larsson did that, I felt like saying, "Less!"
But this is all mere quibbling. The story itself is wonderful, gripping and fresh. (I just wish I liked Blomkvist more and didn't find him to be such an obnoxious moral hypocrite and self-righteous prig.)
Showing reviews 21-25 of 903
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