Fun Stuff > ENJOY

QC Forum Book Group - The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Discussion Thread

(1/9) > >>

Lines:
I made a separate thread so people who have finished the book can talk about it. There is spoiler potential, be warned.

Discuss!

Inlander:
Thanks! I was thinking of doing this myself. (I'll add more useful comment after I've had a shower and breakfast.)

JD:
After reading the second book, I gotta say Lisbeth makes way more sense as a character.

Inlander:
As has been noted in the other thread, the original Swedish title translates into English as Men Who Hate Women. This is, obviously, a radically different title from the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and this along with the statistics about abuse of women that accompany each new section of the book make pretty clear the intention Larsson had in mind when he was writing it: to use the thriller genre to highlight a genuine social ill in Sweden. I'm curious to know, though, to what degree do you think he succeeded? Do you feel better informed about Swedish society after reading the book than you did beforehand? Or do you just feel entertained? And to what degree (if any) do you think the building of an entertainment (which the book primarily is, I think) around horrific violence against women, even if that violence is condemned at every turn, work against Larsson's (as opposed to the book's) intention?

Inlander:
Okay, maybe that's a bit too heavy to start with. So how about this: the book has sold millions of copies world-wide, has almost single-handedly ensured that people have stopped talking about Dan Brown, has been praised by the critics from hill to dale - but what did you actually think of it? Did you think it lived up to the hype? Surpassed it? Fell short?

Personally I thought it was an interesting story with pretensions to being something greater, conveyed by prose that was functional at best and downright awkward at worst (probably not helped by what seems like a fairly uninspired and at times clunky translation into English). Having said that I am half-way through reading the second book now so I'm enjoying the characters and their stories well enough. It's a page turner but I don't know if it's much more than that.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page