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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Very slow start, but once the book picked up, it was impossible to put down! Not for the faint of heart, as a warning there are some disturbing scenes, but the story as a whole was fantastic! I cannot wait to read the next two! (  ) Alie | Nov 26, 2009 |  What I've learned so far:1. Every Swedish conversation includes at least one person stating the obvious.2. Bachelors eat a lot of sandwiches.3. Leviticus is creepy.LATER...Finished this today. Not my favorite mystery. Has a bit of Dan Brown Syndrome... symptoms include an enlarged plot and atrophied characters. (  ) catalogthis | Nov 24, 2009 | Great mystery and suspense. Got a little hung up on the language. (  ) courtb | Nov 23, 2009 | For the first 400 pages this was a fasinating mystery. Seemed muddled and petered out in the end. (  ) eembooks | Nov 23, 2009 | pretty good. i listened to it and couldn't remember the minor characters. ( ) mahallett | Nov 21, 2009 | 
 [Richman reviews several Scandinavian novels, including Larsson's.] Why have readers taken to these writers? The novels are not formally innovative: With a few exceptions, these are straightforward whodunits, hewing closely to conventional models from the English tradition. Nor does their appeal depend on a "relentlessly bleak view of the world," as a writer for the London Times has put it. Bleak worldviews are not particularly hard to come by in crime novels, no matter what country they come from. What distinguishes these books is not some element of Nordic grimness but their evocation of an almost sublime tranquility. When a crime occurs, it is shocking exactly because it disrupts a world that, at least to an American reader, seems utopian in its peacefulness, happiness, and orderliness.  The novel offers a thoroughly ugly view of human nature, especially when it comes to the way Swedish men treat Swedish women. In Larsson’s world, sadism, murder and suicide are commonplace — as is lots of casual sex. (Sweden isn’t all bad.) The first-time author's excitement at his creation is palpable, strangely, in the book's sometimes amateurish construction. There are frequent long digressions in this big book (more than 500 pages) in which he laboriously fills in back-story details. Then there is the Vanger family; what might have seemed like a bit of fun gets out of hand as easily more than 20 people with the surname Vanger are mixed into the story. To his credit, though, he always regains control and restores momentum.
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| Book description |
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A sensation across Europe—millions of copies sold
A spellbinding amalgam of murder mystery, family saga, love story, and financial intrigue.
It’s about the disappearance forty years ago of Harriet Vanger, a young scion of one of the wealthiest families in Sweden . . . and about her octogenarian uncle, determined to know the truth about what he believes was her murder.
It’s about Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist recently at the wrong end of a libel case, hired to get to the bottom of Harriet’s disappearance . . . and about Lisbeth Salander, a twenty-four-year-old pierced and tattooed genius hacker possessed of the hard-earned wisdom of someone twice her age—and a terrifying capacity for ruthlessness to go with it—who assists Blomkvist with the investigation. This unlikely team discovers a vein of nearly unfathomable iniquity running through the Vanger family, astonishing corruption in the highest echelons of Swedish industrialism—and an unexpected connection between themselves.
It’s a contagiously exciting, stunningly intelligent novel about society at its most hidden, and about the intimate lives of a brilliantly realized cast of characters, all of them forced to face the darker aspects of their world and of their own lives.
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:52 -0400)
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