Sunday, July 11, 2010

Book Report: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson


So this was the last book in The Girl Who.... series about Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist, the strangely matched crime fighting/ mystery solving duo from Sweden. It was a very fast read, with many interesting twists and turns and I was quite sad when I read the last page. I had this odd sort of "I can't wait to read the next one" kind of feeling, and then, I remembered that there were no more of them, because of Stieg Larrson's untimely passing. This is a bummer and has left me no alternative but to begin reading Team of Rivals which is good and I am learning and loving the strength and intellect of Abraham Lincoln, but it lacks the page turning nature of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.

Anyway, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest begins with Lisbeth Salander being admitted to the hospital with a bullet in her head. She is then placed only a few rooms down the hall from her father, who is responsible for the bullet. It turns out that he is a spy and Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander (once she recovers from brain surgery and Mikael has smuggled her palm computer into the hospital room) must work together to find out the particulars.

Their investigation leads them into the heart of the Swedish government, where there is clearly corruption involved. Once she recovers enough to go to trial, Lisbeth must also defend herself against her classification as a mentally disabled person, so that she can live free and have charge of her own affairs and money. With the help of her creepy internet friends, Mikael Blomkvist, Mikael's sister (who is pulled in as Lisbeth's lawyer), and a whole host of police officers fighting for right, Lisbeth, of course, triumphs.

These books have been undeniably fascinating, but I have a few criticisms. For one, there were SO MANY new characters that I was constantly forgetting who they were and why they were there. I just couldn't bring myself to make a notebook page of characters so that I could keep everyone straight. It is a novel, for the love of Mike; a summer read!!!!

Another issue, is that I just can't get into the whole publishing world aspect of the novels that Larrson seems to push. The ups and downs of editors, people leaving newspapers to work for other newspapers, sideline plots about drama of higher-ups at newspapers. Honestly, there was a whole side plot about overpriced toilets that were made in Thailand or some such, that I only wanted to stop.

Also, I began to find the whole weird relationship between Mikael Blomkvist and Erica Berger a little too something; maybe too Swedish, too unbelievable, or just too unnecessary. They have this 25 year relationship, where they have ruined each other's relationships, prevented each other from moving on, and everyone is supposed to be comfortable with the fact that they have this magnetic relationship that keeps drawing them together, even though Erica is married to someone else and Mikael tries to date other people, but his relationships are generally ruined by his relationship with Berger. It was beginning to wear on me. Larrson should have wrapped that aspect of the trilogy in the first novel. OR, maybe I am not Swedish enough and that aspect of the the culture is lost on me, Betsy Sloan, quite possibly least Swedish person I know.

Finally, I thought that this Norah Ephron article in The New Yorker was hilarious, because is also made the very good point that Lisbeth Salander is almost needlessly terse and irritable all the time. Ehpron also makes the very good point THAT whenever Stieg Larrson is writing about street names or cities or buildings, we have no idea what he is talking about because those names are so incredibly foreign.

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