Saturday, April 30, 2011

Thanks, Stieg

I just said good-bye to Lisbeth.

Several weeks ago, my visiting nephew, Ryan, had told me the Stieg Larsson series was very good. I found "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" a little thick off the top, but when it got good, it was very good! The pace of  the second book helped make it my favorite and the New York Times assessment on its back cover, "intricate, puzzle-like...startling and violent", works for me.

The third book was only available in hardcover. After finishing the second, I thought, initially, I would simply wait until the third book came out in paperback. Ha! I managed to hold off two and a half weeks before I caved-in and bought "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest". At least it was 30 per cent off!

During those two and a half weeks, I left Lisbeth at Gosseberga on a kitchen bench with a bullet in her brain. I needed to know she would be OK and that her father would get what was coming to him. I wanted to know what happened to Niederman.

I don't usually go for grotesque, twisted, literary fiction and the series is full of that, but the characters and plot were thoroughly compelling and well worth whatever wincing was necessary to get to the next paragraph.

For the third book, knowing there is no fourth, I would read a chapter on the train into or from work and then listen to my iPod. I didn't want to get to the end and had decided to limit myself to one chapter at a time. This has been going on for a few weeks. This week, because I was so close to the end, I gave myself permission to finish the story and series. I was just sitting out on the back deck in the sunshine reading the last pages.

Author Stieg Larsson had half-finished a fourth book, set in Canada, when he died in 2004. I'm not sure I look forward to Hollywood's version of his stories.

While I may not hear any more about Lisbeth, I will always be hoping that she's keeping out of trouble.

1 comment:

  1. Glad you enjoyed the series! As far as the movies are concerned, the Swedish adaptations of all three novels, while faithful to the books, aren't the greatest movies. The first film is great, but the other two don't quite do the books justice.

    Right now however David Fincher, and pretty much everyone that worked on The Social Network (with the exception of Aaron Sorkin) is filming an "American" adaptation of the first book. If anyone is capable of turning the book into an even better film than they did in Sweden, it's David Fincher.

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