The Millenium Trilogy (tome 1)

After watching so many people reading Millenium Trilogy in the Paris metro for more than a year, I decided—while in New York—to buy the first volume of Stieg Larson‘s The Girl with the dragon tattoo to check whether or not it was worth the hype. The book is definitely gripping: I started it yesterday late afternoon, read it till midnight and finished it tonight! I am nonetheless not completely impressed by the novel, nor do I understand the fundamental reason for its success (more than a million copies sold in France, where the three novels were apparently translated in 2006-2007, much earlier than in the US). The central mystery plot is a classical “huis-clos”, with a murder being committed in a closed place with no obvious murderer and no corpse to show, the solution being rather predictable (because of the flowers) and anti-climactic. Some elements of the financial plot are highly unrealistic, like the school failure Lisbeth Salander speaking Oxford English and perfect German, and breaking in a few minutes into any computer or off-shore bank account, or the major villain Wennerström keeping all the informations about his criminal activities on a single hard-drive. The side inquiry about an unsuspected serial killer is more interesting (for a while) but again not very innovative compared with the rather large current literature on serial killers and female detectives (like Sara Paresky’s V.I. Warshawski)…. This is particularly striking since I read the book in English rather than in French and I did not find much differences in the style and more globally in the setting between The Girl with the dragon tattoo and current American detectiitve storiites like Paresky’s or Cowell’s. (Of course, some Swedish specificities pop up from time to time, but it could almost take place in northern Maine!) In that regard, the criticism of the Swedish social-liberal model is much more present in the older series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö… At last, and in connection with the previous point, while the character of the autistic and unlikely investigator Lisbeth Salander is a fairly interesting creation, her vigilante attitude of implementing her own justice does not really fit within the moral higher grounds of her associate Mikael Blomkvist. Nor with the author’s left-wing and non-violent positions. Nor with the feminist Similarly, the brand name-dropping, especially for Apple products, is a bit at odds with the author’s ideological principles. To be completely honest about this book, I must add that I will most likely read both next volumes of the Millenium Trilogy when they appear in paperback, because they still make for an enjoyable one afternoon read but, again, nothing to rank it as the [Swedish [detective [techno-killer]]] novel of the century!