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

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Lines:
I enjoyed it quite a bit. I thought the characters were really interesting, the plot was engaging, and at some point I would like to read the other books. However, it was rather disturbing, but well done because it wasn't too graphic. There was enough information there about the rapes and murders for the reader to understand and get a picture of what was happening without the author describing so much that the reader gets too disgusted to continue.

Really, I think Men Who Hate Women pretty much nails what this book about. It was almost a little overpowering how much misogyny there is in this book and just how unapologetic those men are about it. Also, in the book, other than Salander's guardian, it was condensed to one family, which made it even worse, in my opinion. But I don't know if this book would have hit it off so well over here if they'd kept the original title. I honestly had no idea what this book was about when you guys decided on it and, well, it was kind of a slap to the face once I got to chapter 11.

I'm still kind of letting the ending sink in, so I'll post some more later.

KharBevNor:
I am trying to hack my way through this book, but I'm having trouble getting my teeth in. The prose is dreadful. Seems like it hasn't really been edited much and the translation is odd.

Inlander:
Yeah, it's pretty clear that this book suffers from a severe lack of editing. There are some sections where I think the translator has inserted extra information, such as the bit near the beginning when he explains that Gamla Stan is the oldest part of Stockholm - this surely wouldn't have been in the original Swedish version, everyone in Sweden knows precisely what Gamla Stan is (hell, I think it actually means "Old Town"). But there are some sections where Larsson has obviously just written extremely average prose, which was genuinely surprising for me giving the amount of praise the book has received. I'd like to think that an editor would have gone over the manuscript with him had he lived (he died before the books were published), but given the state of the publishing industry these days I'm not so sure.

Barmymoo:
It wasn't until I was a good way through the book that it occurred to me that the incongruous stilted explanations of things that would presumably be blatantly clear in the original Swedish may have been added by an over-zealous translator. I was interested in Jens' opinion, as presumably the Norwegian would be closer to the Swedish and potentially the weird scientific explanations would be missing.

When I've got a little more time I'll reference some of the worst offenders; it'd be interesting to know if they exist in all translations or just the English.

Aside from that, I enjoyed it in the way that I enjoy most books, but it certainly wasn't brilliant. The fact that Larsson seems to be intending to condemn violent misogyny and then at times seems to take pleasure in it (personally I felt that there was an excess of sex, particularly involving Lisbeth) just didn't add up to me. And looking back, the beginning seems like a totally different book - it had the potential to go somewhere fresh and it just didn't make it.

Lines:
Yeah, the beginning and the last few chapters almost don't fit the rest of the book at all. I understand that Blomkvist was a financial investigative reporter, but the middle just seems so out of place with the beginning and end. I'm beginning to think that if they'd replaced all the Vanger stuff (which was useless for his story about Wennerström) with a different way to get Blomkvist and Salander together to unearth all the crap about Wennerström it could have just as interesting and not so crazy.

As for sex, I think the excess mostly came from Blomkvist. He had a thing with Berger, then this out of the blue thing with Cecilia, and then Salander came along and they had their thing. But really, it came from them both. It was excessive, but it wasn't really elaborated upon too much, so it didn't bother me that much.

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