The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo New York : Vintage Books, 2011, c2009.
1st Vintage Crime/Black Lizard premium mass-market ed.
644 p. : maps ; 20 cm.
With the recent US release of the movie, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, requests for Stieg Larsson's novels really started to pick up here in the library. When I heard someone who saw the movie say how violent and disturbing some of it was - I thought I should read the bestseller and see what I thought of it myself...
Having just finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I can definitely understand the success of the novel. Like Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, it is tightly plotted, well told and filled with unexpected twists and turns. Though the novel deals with very disturbing incidents of rape and murder - it is not luridly gratuitous. The plot is also quite complicated and requires the concentrated attention of the reader - so it is a book that would appeal to mature readers only.
For myself, I don't think I'll be reading the following two novels in the trilogy - The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. As compelling as the plot was, and as relevant as the plot elements of corporate and financial criminality are, I frankly find the world of the novel too disturbing to be entertaining - and that is what these novels excel at. I know that there are serial killers, abusive sadists and rapists - but reading fictional thrillers about them just doesn't appeal to me all that much.
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