Thursday, July 8, 2010

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

“After putting down the telephone the eighty-two-year-old birthday boy sat for a long time looking at the pretty but meaningless flower whose name he did not yet know. Then he looked up at the wall above his desk. There hung forty-three pressed flowers in their frames. Four rows of ten, and one at the bottom with four. In the top row one was missing from the ninth slot. Desert Snow would be number forty-four.”
– Prologue, pg. 6

“Armansky’s star researcher was a pale, anorexic young woman who had hair as short as a fuse, and a pierced nose and eyebrows. She had a wasp tattoo about an inch long on her neck, a tattooed loop around the biceps of her left arm and another around her left ankle. On those occasions when she had been wearing a tank top, Armansky also saw that she had a dragon tattoo on her left shoulder blade. She was a natural redhead, but she dyed her hair raven black. She looks as though she had just emerged from a week-long orgy with a gang of hard rockers.”
– Chapter 2, pg. 32

“She frowned. Blomkvist’s strange behavior in the courtroom had presented an interesting challenge, and Salander did not like aborting an assignment once she had started. People always have secrets. It’s just a matter of finding out what they are.” – Chapter 7, pg. 102

“As far as he could tell, she had been looking towards the corner of the building that housed Sundström’s Haberdashery. It was a perfectly normal corner of a building, where a cross street vanished behind it. What did you see there, Harriet?” – Chapter 16, pg. 237

So those were some of my favorite quotes from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

I have heard that Larsson’s Millennium trilogy is supposed to be the Lord of the Rings of mystery novels. Maybe I have forgotten how bad this genre is, but I wasn’t that impressed. First off, it annoyed the heck out of me that it took 200 pages for the two main characters to meet. Not that Salamander (you can’t describe a character as lizard-like and then name her Salander) got much page time, despite the book’s misleading title. Although, I’m glad the publisher changed it from Men Who Hated Women, because that’s just plain stupid. Also, the author is clearly male – the casual sex thing Blomkvist had going with Berger would never fly in the real world. All women are jealous. At
least he got that right at the very end with Salamander …even though the age difference made me cringe (another inaccurate male fantasy). My last and biggest gripe: How freaking cliché can you get? They both independently discover who the killer is at the same time, stupidly refuse to involve the police, and then one of them confronts him ALONE leaving the other to save the day? Yeah, we’ve never seen that happen before. EVER. Of course, I’ll still be reading the next book just because Larsson never explained what ‘All The Evil’ meant and I want to find out what Robert Lindberg has to say for himself on his M-30 next Midsummer’s Eve.

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