The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2005)

In the original Swedish, the title of this first and best-known crime novel in Stieg Larsson's wildly popular "Millennium" trilogy translates as the rather stark Men Who Hate Women. It says many things at once not just about American marketing but more specifically what this thriller is actually about, and to a rather extensive degree. People complain about the flat, dry language. Someone somewhere must have compared it with Ikea products by now. Sturdy, plain, unadorned, functional, to the point sometimes where it almost becomes laughable. But it serves well as counterpoint to the lurid tenor of events here, guiding it easily into familiar rhythms of detective and especially police procedural fiction. The most dramatic and momentous incidents—sexualized cruelty continually overtopping itself—are invariably followed by scenes with liver pate and cucumber sandwiches, painstakingly assembled. The first Swedish movie version, made for television and chopped down later for theatrical release (I haven't yet caught up with the longer version or the other two installments, or with director David Fincher's more recent version), is a reasonably faithful adaptation, necessarily heightening some parts and compressing others for dramatic effect, which is what movies do. I like better the way the novel so flatly relates everything, the exposition as well as the dramatic climaxes, and in its just under 600 pages it seems to me to be remarkably structured—if this continues across all three similarly sized books, it's pretty impressive in its own right. Larrson was a journalist who died in 2004 at the age of 50 shortly after writing the trilogy. Mikael Blomkvist, our hero, is also a journalist, and Lisbeth Salander is the girl of the American title who comes to his aid. She lacks little that any other superhero in the movies these days has except for a colorful costume. Her superhuman qualities are much easier to take in the book somehow, maybe because people are otherwise so busy with shopping and preparing food. I suppose I could object to the casual and bountiful sex going on, but why bother? Everybody does a variation on that these days in places like the broader mystery genre. (I am a little more annoyed of the tired old idea that anal rape is the single greatest human horror imaginable. Wouldn't it be just as cruel and humiliating to once in awhile break every bone in someone's hand with a hammer? It would have the added advantage of imposing a permanent disability.) Also typically enough, our heroes and villains tend to be too easy to identify as good and bad, wearing their figurative white and black hats; moral complexity is a matter of punkish attitude, '60s-era tolerance and good will, tattoos, piercings, and sexual variety, which is to say, not much at all in evidence. On some level I wouldn't have it any other way. It reads well for bright light and warm weather next to bodies of water. Also fireplaces in winter.

In case it's not at the library.