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next_to_normalBoy, am I ever glad I don't have a Whedonesque account, because I'm pretty sure I'd get banned today. :) Instead, I will be channeling my rage into another really disappointing pile of crap. Read on for the review!
Fair warning - this entire book should come with a massive trigger warning stamped on the cover, which means the review is also potentially triggering.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson
Well, like pretty much every book that's been hyped beyond belief, this one doesn't live up to its reputation. I've heard it talked about in lots of extremes, both positive and negative, but honestly, I think the most damning thing about this book is that it's BORING. Seriously. I might've been willing to stomach the gratuitous violence against women if it were a compelling story, but it's not well-written at all. It's supposed to be a thriller, but the mystery is so tedious that it utterly fails as a "page-turner."
The problem is that the protagonist, financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist (who, by the way, is a shameless self-insert male fantasy character), is trying to solve a 40-year-old mystery that he doesn't really care that much about. Which means that the first half of the book is pages and pages of endless backstory as he goes over 40 years worth of case files and doesn't do any actual investigating of his own. Larsson seems to have assumed that the establishment of a mystery (a teenage girl who disappeared from an island with no access to the mainland) is compelling enough to entice readers, without providing any big developments in the case to convince them to keep reading. The first new evidence doesn't appear until almost 300 pages in, and Blomkvist doesn't team up with his sidekick (Lisbeth Salander, she of the dragon tattoo) until another 30 pages after that.
And then the mystery is resolved by page 500 - with, by the way, a confrontation with the killer that is only made possible by Blomkvist being a complete idiot. "I just realized this guy's a serial killer. Maybe I should go snoop around his house late at night all by myself when I know for a fact that he's home... hey, how did I end up in this torture chamber?" - leaving the rest of the book to deal with Blomkvist's revenge on a corrupt financier. In other words, in a 600-page book, the actual PLOT only takes up 200 pages. Now, I'm no professional author, but something about those numbers seems off.
Furthermore, the author relies heavily on info dumps for exposition. Three of the first four chapters involve one character telling a story to another character, broken up only by things like, "And then what happened?" or "Is that so?" - one-liners intended to disguise the fact that you've had one character ramble on virtually uninterrupted for ten pages. Exposition continues to be a problem as Blomkvist begins his "investigation," with long passages that detail the Vanger family's history (with a family tree so sprawling that a diagram is included in the book to help readers keep all the relatives straight) and the contents of the police reports on the disappearance. All of this is largely devoid of any action (though Blomkvist is certainly getting plenty of action, with his married longtime lover, a cousin of the missing girl, and eventually Salander, all of whom are madly in love with him and know about each other and mostly don't care. Did I mention this was a male fantasy?). There's also a painful amount of telling rather than showing in the character development, and inclusion of far too many unnecessary details, like the kind of sandwiches the characters are eating or the exact specifications of a character's computer.
And while we're on the subject of descriptions, let me say this. ANOREXIC IS NOT A SYNONYM FOR THIN, so can we please STOP using "anorexic" as a physical descriptor? Especially when the character is question is CLEARLY NOT ANOREXIC. Anorexia is a clinical disorder, not a physical body type. Not all anorexics are thin, and not all thin people are anorexic, so stop fucking using it that way. This seriously made me rage.
The other thing that made the book impossible to enjoy is (obviously) the gratuitous sexual violence. Larsson begins each section of the book with statistics about violence against women (which, presumably, are intended to be shocking, though I found myself thinking, "Yep, that sounds about right..." Damn my feminist sensibilities, making it hard to be shocked by statistics) to indicate that this book is Making a Statement. However, it seems more like sensationalizing violence against women under the guise of social awareness, given the apparent obsession with brutal sexual assault, rape, and torture. It's really too bad they changed the title, because the Swedish title - Men Who Hate Women - is pretty on-the-nose. The author portrays men as violently misogynistic, to the point that not one, but THREE separate characters are sadists who torture and rape women, and two of them mutilate and kill them afterward - all of which is described in gruesome detail. Oh, and in case it wasn't clear from the sadism, misogyny, incest, and murder that these men are evil, Larsson also makes the family neo-Nazis, because subtlety is for wimps, apparently.
But in doing so, he actually crafts a gigantic straw man argument that many reviewers seem to have mistaken for feminism. Let's be realistic here. Most men are NOT Nazi sadists who rape, torture, mutilate, and kill women just because they can. Yes, misogynist serial killers are very bad people, but in the larger context of gender issues? Serial killers are NOT THE PROBLEM. By pretending that they are, the author conveniently ignores the much more subtle sexism and misogyny that pervades society. For example, Salander has been deemed mentally incompetent and put under the care of a state-appointed guardian who abuses her. This could have been a telling portrayal of a man in a position of power exploiting a powerless young woman... but instead, it turns out the guy is a sadist who gets off on torture. And everybody can feel good about condemning his behavior without being forced to consider the men who use much more subtle and insidious means to exploit women.
This particular subplot is also the worst of the gratuitous digressions into graphic sexual violence, because it bears absolutely no relevance to the plot. In two extremely disturbing scenes, Salander is handcuffed to a bed, anally raped, and then left there for hours, so she decides to take revenge by doing the same to her sadistic guardian. For the record, when a woman has been raped and tortured, she may react in a number of ways, all of which are completely valid. You know what is NOT an appropriate response? Torturing and raping someone in return. This is not what empowerment looks like.
At this point, you're probably wondering why on earth I bothered to finish the book. Honestly, I wondered the same thing at times. I did it for two reasons - first, because a friend who read it told me that he thought it was good, but that it took until 2/3 of the way through to get good, and second (and more importantly), because I had a feeling I was going to rip it apart in a review, and I wanted to be fair. I wanted to give the author a chance to redeem himself, to give the graphic violence a literary purpose and to make whatever statement he was trying to make about misogyny. But here we are at the end of it, and the graphic violence is still gratuitous and the message, such as it is, is lost in a sea of rape fantasies and torture porn. Needless to say, I will not be reading the rest of the series.
Fair warning - this entire book should come with a massive trigger warning stamped on the cover, which means the review is also potentially triggering.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson
Well, like pretty much every book that's been hyped beyond belief, this one doesn't live up to its reputation. I've heard it talked about in lots of extremes, both positive and negative, but honestly, I think the most damning thing about this book is that it's BORING. Seriously. I might've been willing to stomach the gratuitous violence against women if it were a compelling story, but it's not well-written at all. It's supposed to be a thriller, but the mystery is so tedious that it utterly fails as a "page-turner."
The problem is that the protagonist, financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist (who, by the way, is a shameless self-insert male fantasy character), is trying to solve a 40-year-old mystery that he doesn't really care that much about. Which means that the first half of the book is pages and pages of endless backstory as he goes over 40 years worth of case files and doesn't do any actual investigating of his own. Larsson seems to have assumed that the establishment of a mystery (a teenage girl who disappeared from an island with no access to the mainland) is compelling enough to entice readers, without providing any big developments in the case to convince them to keep reading. The first new evidence doesn't appear until almost 300 pages in, and Blomkvist doesn't team up with his sidekick (Lisbeth Salander, she of the dragon tattoo) until another 30 pages after that.
And then the mystery is resolved by page 500 - with, by the way, a confrontation with the killer that is only made possible by Blomkvist being a complete idiot. "I just realized this guy's a serial killer. Maybe I should go snoop around his house late at night all by myself when I know for a fact that he's home... hey, how did I end up in this torture chamber?" - leaving the rest of the book to deal with Blomkvist's revenge on a corrupt financier. In other words, in a 600-page book, the actual PLOT only takes up 200 pages. Now, I'm no professional author, but something about those numbers seems off.
Furthermore, the author relies heavily on info dumps for exposition. Three of the first four chapters involve one character telling a story to another character, broken up only by things like, "And then what happened?" or "Is that so?" - one-liners intended to disguise the fact that you've had one character ramble on virtually uninterrupted for ten pages. Exposition continues to be a problem as Blomkvist begins his "investigation," with long passages that detail the Vanger family's history (with a family tree so sprawling that a diagram is included in the book to help readers keep all the relatives straight) and the contents of the police reports on the disappearance. All of this is largely devoid of any action (though Blomkvist is certainly getting plenty of action, with his married longtime lover, a cousin of the missing girl, and eventually Salander, all of whom are madly in love with him and know about each other and mostly don't care. Did I mention this was a male fantasy?). There's also a painful amount of telling rather than showing in the character development, and inclusion of far too many unnecessary details, like the kind of sandwiches the characters are eating or the exact specifications of a character's computer.
And while we're on the subject of descriptions, let me say this. ANOREXIC IS NOT A SYNONYM FOR THIN, so can we please STOP using "anorexic" as a physical descriptor? Especially when the character is question is CLEARLY NOT ANOREXIC. Anorexia is a clinical disorder, not a physical body type. Not all anorexics are thin, and not all thin people are anorexic, so stop fucking using it that way. This seriously made me rage.
The other thing that made the book impossible to enjoy is (obviously) the gratuitous sexual violence. Larsson begins each section of the book with statistics about violence against women (which, presumably, are intended to be shocking, though I found myself thinking, "Yep, that sounds about right..." Damn my feminist sensibilities, making it hard to be shocked by statistics) to indicate that this book is Making a Statement. However, it seems more like sensationalizing violence against women under the guise of social awareness, given the apparent obsession with brutal sexual assault, rape, and torture. It's really too bad they changed the title, because the Swedish title - Men Who Hate Women - is pretty on-the-nose. The author portrays men as violently misogynistic, to the point that not one, but THREE separate characters are sadists who torture and rape women, and two of them mutilate and kill them afterward - all of which is described in gruesome detail. Oh, and in case it wasn't clear from the sadism, misogyny, incest, and murder that these men are evil, Larsson also makes the family neo-Nazis, because subtlety is for wimps, apparently.
But in doing so, he actually crafts a gigantic straw man argument that many reviewers seem to have mistaken for feminism. Let's be realistic here. Most men are NOT Nazi sadists who rape, torture, mutilate, and kill women just because they can. Yes, misogynist serial killers are very bad people, but in the larger context of gender issues? Serial killers are NOT THE PROBLEM. By pretending that they are, the author conveniently ignores the much more subtle sexism and misogyny that pervades society. For example, Salander has been deemed mentally incompetent and put under the care of a state-appointed guardian who abuses her. This could have been a telling portrayal of a man in a position of power exploiting a powerless young woman... but instead, it turns out the guy is a sadist who gets off on torture. And everybody can feel good about condemning his behavior without being forced to consider the men who use much more subtle and insidious means to exploit women.
This particular subplot is also the worst of the gratuitous digressions into graphic sexual violence, because it bears absolutely no relevance to the plot. In two extremely disturbing scenes, Salander is handcuffed to a bed, anally raped, and then left there for hours, so she decides to take revenge by doing the same to her sadistic guardian. For the record, when a woman has been raped and tortured, she may react in a number of ways, all of which are completely valid. You know what is NOT an appropriate response? Torturing and raping someone in return. This is not what empowerment looks like.
At this point, you're probably wondering why on earth I bothered to finish the book. Honestly, I wondered the same thing at times. I did it for two reasons - first, because a friend who read it told me that he thought it was good, but that it took until 2/3 of the way through to get good, and second (and more importantly), because I had a feeling I was going to rip it apart in a review, and I wanted to be fair. I wanted to give the author a chance to redeem himself, to give the graphic violence a literary purpose and to make whatever statement he was trying to make about misogyny. But here we are at the end of it, and the graphic violence is still gratuitous and the message, such as it is, is lost in a sea of rape fantasies and torture porn. Needless to say, I will not be reading the rest of the series.
no subject
Date: Sep. 1st, 2010 06:52 pm (UTC)But I've read very polar opinions about it, as well. Meh. I guess I'll see soon enough which camp I fall into.
no subject
Date: Sep. 2nd, 2010 01:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Sep. 1st, 2010 06:58 pm (UTC)I saw the movie of that book and later took a look into the book, only to be surprized that the movie was so much better, since this is so rarely the case.
In the movie Blomkvist is not quite that much of a Mary Sue and not everyone falls madly in love with him, which I found very annoying in the books.
Also the actress that played Salander did a terrific job, though she too is different from the book.
I'm not sure if I agree with you about the violence. On one hand, yes the unsubtelty is kind of eyeroll inducing, but then everything is larger than life and highly unrealistic in those books.
On the other hand, the rapes and the violence in this books is really ugly. I don't think it read like torture porn, because it was horrible every second of the way, I don't know if anyone could actually react other than repulsed by it, which I think is what the author wanted to induce.
Rape is something that's sexied up a lot and that is not here was one of the better things I had to say about the books.
The bluntness of the would be feminism is another story. I think the authore fails there completely. The raping right back is such a typically male revenge fantasy. Not that those stories (Kill Bill and also Buffy in some ways) don't have an appeal, but they just never end up feeling real to me.
I read "Privilege of the sword" shortly after, which looks at misogyny, gender roles and also violence against women and the way the world reacts in a so much more real, varried and subtle way. It was like a culture shock from male to female feminism.
no subject
Date: Sep. 2nd, 2010 01:25 am (UTC)I've never seen Kill Bill, but I think the huge difference between this and BtVS is that Buffy didn't get her power from being a victim, and doesn't use it for revenge. She fights to protect others, not herself. Salander is portrayed as being incredibly passive for most of her life - the only time she acts is in reaction to being victimized. And if victimization is a prerequisite to empowerment, that's pretty shitty empowerment.
no subject
Date: Sep. 2nd, 2010 05:56 am (UTC)Buffy thanks god got a more complex over the years but the starting premise Joss bases her own is the screaming blond female victim of horror movies. Buffy is the victim that hits back and fortuantely she grew to be more than that, but it's still this Pippy Longstocking like motive of a girl just being strong enough not to have to take all the shit.
The bluntness and the need for unrealistic powers to overcome the victim role is something I don't like about that way of depicting empowerment.
no subject
Date: Sep. 1st, 2010 07:01 pm (UTC)I never even heard of this book until it was all over the airport when I flew a few weeks ago. I guess that's what comes of not watching TV. Did Oprah pick it up or something? (Not that it really sounds like an Oprah kind of book...)
no subject
Date: Sep. 2nd, 2010 01:53 am (UTC)First things first, don't be fooled by the title - she isn't the main protagonist of the book. Maybe she plays a larger role in the series overall, but this is definitely Blomkvist's story, and she's the sidekick. As I mentioned, she isn't even brought into the mystery plot until over 300 pages into the book. (She's too busy being raped and revenge-raping in a completely meaningless subplot.)
It's mentioned at the end of the book that she may have Asperger's - she is socially inept, but she's a brilliant (unrealistically so) computer hacker with a photographic memory. She tends to react by being either utterly passive (she was deemed mentally incompetent because she refused to answer any questions) or excessively violent. (One major continuity flaw - she is a genius with computers and can hack into just about anything, but she can't seem to manage to erase her name from the database where she is listed as mentally incompetent...?) She has suffered lots of abuse, of which the incident in the book is only the most recent, and generally is distrustful of everyone. She is utterly incapable of forming healthy relationships, but of course has some sort of emotional breakthrough and falls in love with Blomkvist (who doesn't?), only to have her heart broken when she realizes that he's never going to give up his longtime lover (whom she had known about all along).
A lot of people seem to want to call her a feminist because she "fights back" and because she's sexually liberal and doesn't adhere to a conventional beauty ideal. However, what they don't mention is that she has totally bought into that conventional ideal - she thinks her skinny, childlike body is "repulsive," her small breasts are "pathetic," and she "doesn't have much to offer" a man. I have read that she gets a boob job and in the second book, she claims that her quality of life has gone up because of it. That certainly doesn't sound feminist to me.
And while she's openly bisexual and has no problem initiating sex when she wants it, she also is extremely damaged from prior abuse. She dresses in her goth punk style, with multiple tattoos and piercings, in order to project zero sex appeal - because she thinks that will deter men and protect her from being raped.
And, of course, there is her attitude toward abusers and victims, which is what really made her unredeemable to me. See my comment above about her reaction to being raped - I don't find that to be feminist AT ALL. Furthermore, she engages in a shocking amount of victim-blaming, actually going so far as to blame a girl who was raped by her father and brother for fleeing the country in fear instead of reporting them to the police and therefore it was HER fault her brother continued to rape and murder women. o_O
no subject
Date: Sep. 2nd, 2010 01:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Sep. 2nd, 2010 02:04 am (UTC)Fortunately, I read a review that mentioned the graphic violence and the total unfeminism of Salander, so I was prepared - though, oddly, the people who recommended the book to me described it simply as a really great mystery/thriller.
no subject
Date: Sep. 1st, 2010 07:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Sep. 2nd, 2010 01:58 am (UTC)Matching icons FTW!
no subject
Date: Sep. 2nd, 2010 02:06 am (UTC)Yay!
no subject
Date: Sep. 2nd, 2010 02:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Sep. 2nd, 2010 02:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Sep. 2nd, 2010 03:56 am (UTC)I'm afraid I'll still have to red it in order to refute friends' claims that I will love it. My reading list has so many more compelling books, but this one is triggery and is till discussed at Happy Hour. I hate homework.
no subject
Date: Sep. 3rd, 2010 04:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Sep. 2nd, 2010 06:36 pm (UTC)I watched the movie last night and if you hated the book you will hate the movie. As usual, the scenes which were added weren't good. The love life of MB in the book was left out, which was good. Some background info about Lisbeth is inserted, maybe from the second book.
I am not sure why the books have become such an international success.
no subject
Date: Sep. 3rd, 2010 04:12 am (UTC)From the reviews, I got the impression that the movie was better in some ways, as it streamlined things a bit, but also did some bad things to make up for it, lol.
I am baffled by its success. Truly baffled.
no subject
Date: Sep. 2nd, 2010 11:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Sep. 3rd, 2010 04:13 am (UTC)