Last month the book club I joined read Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and I have a few things to say about it.
SPOILER ALERT. Those who have not read or are in the middle of the novel will not want to read this post.
Perhaps I have a hitherto unknown proclivity for mystery novels, as I really got into the mystery of Harriet Vanger's disappearance in TGWTDT. But I found the resolution of the mystery a little anticlimactic, and Harriet's miraculous reappearance at the end was a bit hard for me to swallow.
A friend who heard I was reading the novel told me, "I didn't like it, because I felt like Larsson was a misogynist." Now, it's true that the original Swedish title of the book translates literally to Men Who Hate Women. But would someone who really hated women give his book that title? I didn't feel that Larsson was a woman-hater, reading the novel....a womanizer, maybe. What I did feel was that his female characters were two-dimensional. I found it hard to believe in them as real human beings. Maybe, for a variety of interesting reasons, it's difficult for a straight man to create convincing female characters. (Though certainly not impossible.) To make a comparison - last month my book club read Patricia Highsmith's novel (and Hitchcock film inspiration) Strangers on a Train. I felt that Highsmith was much better at creating believable male characters than Larsson is at creating believable female ones.
Lisbeth Salander, the titular girl with the dragon tattoo, was the sort of angsty, angry, tattooed, pierced, antisocial alternative girl-fox that I've encountered so many of in my adventures through the various alternative scenes and subcultures of the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere. And the way Larsson created her in his book, she had more in common with an adolescent boy than with most women I know, which could lead to an interesting psychoanalysis of the author, which I will refrain from attempting, because as an author myself I know that shit is annoying. The additional element of Salander being a brilliant computer whiz, hacker and personal background-checker - sort of an idiot savant amateur private investigator - was also a little tough to take, but not completely beyond the bounds of credibility.
I am in the middle of watching the film version of TGWTDT right now on Netflix. For the most part it remains faithful to the novel, so far, but there's something a bit lackluster about watching a film version of a mystery novel for whose mystery you already know the answer.
