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easolinas 's review for:
The Millennium Trilogy
by Stieg Larsson
Authors who are only published posthumously rarely get the attention they deserve', or any attention at all. Fortunately, such is not the case with the late Stieg Larsson's bestselling Millennium trilogy -- it starts off slow, and soon winds itself into a tight knot of tautly-written thriller and mystery elements. It's raw, bleak, intensely disturbing noir.
In "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo," take-no-prisoners journalist Mikael Blomkvist has just lost his reputation, his savings and his freedom (hello, jail sentence!) after a nasty libel suit from an executive named Wennerström.
Then he's unexpectedly contacted by aged industrialist Henrik Vanger, to discover what happened to the guy's grandniece. He's offering evidence on Wennerström, so Mikael has no choice but to accept -- and as he investigates the sinister Vanger family, he joins forces with Lisbeth Salander, an eccentric, abused computer hacker. And as Mikael unearths the clues to Harriet's disappearance, he also finds some skeletons long kept buried.
"The Girl Who Played With Fire" finds Mikael investigating sex trafficking in his own country, and young girls who are sold into it. Unknown to him, Lisbeth is keeping very close tabs on his work -- especially since she was abused as a child, and now plots revenge on the sex traffickers. But when she's accused of murder and ends up on the run, Mikael must discover what lies at the core of these crimes...
"The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest" takes place directly after the second book. Lisbeth has been shot in the head, her malevolent dad Zalachenko is in the same hospital, and some nasty government forces want her locked away, as she was as a child. Her only hope lies in Mikael, who must unravel a government conspiracy formed around the young hacker...
Finally, "On Stieg Larsson" is a solid accompaniment to this trilogy -- it's a nonfiction book that compiles four essays about him along with his email exchanges with his editor. Reading his own viewpoints on his characters and books really shines a spotlight on different facets of their stories, and why he wrote them the way he did.
Larsson's books are a unique blend of old and new -- he takes the usual mystery/thriller tropes (locked room mystery, government conspiracies) and enfolds it in a ruthless, blistering look at modern Swedish society and sexual aggression. It's a dark, dangerous, unfair world where the truth is quashed, powerful forces conspire against individuals, and women are treated horribly -- usually shown via the eccentric, punky "girl with the dragon tattoo."
His prose is rather bleak and often quite gritty, and a certain brand of understated passion shines through -- the kind that feels the need to express itself even though it takes place in fiction. And while most of the first book focuses in Mikael, in the second and third Larssen's style splits in half -- one half is the more staid, ordinary perspective of Mikael and others, and the other half is the wild nihilism of Lisbeth ("If death was the black emptiness from which she had just woken up, then death was nothing to worry about. She would hardly notice the difference").
Mikael and Salander make an intriguing odd couple. He starts world-weary and demoralized that he seems to care about nothing, but regains his passion for the truth; the only downside is that he's a bit Marty Stuish, since all women seem to adore him. And Salander is a mass of hurts and quirks -- she's a vibrant, wild genius who lashes out at those who hurt women, and has been constantly tortured by those around her since childhood (even as an adult, she's forced to have a legal guardian).
Take your average thriller/mysteries, smother them in disillusioned, morally-bankrupt noir... and you'll have something like the Millennium Trilogy. A hard read, but worth the journey.
In "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo," take-no-prisoners journalist Mikael Blomkvist has just lost his reputation, his savings and his freedom (hello, jail sentence!) after a nasty libel suit from an executive named Wennerström.
Then he's unexpectedly contacted by aged industrialist Henrik Vanger, to discover what happened to the guy's grandniece. He's offering evidence on Wennerström, so Mikael has no choice but to accept -- and as he investigates the sinister Vanger family, he joins forces with Lisbeth Salander, an eccentric, abused computer hacker. And as Mikael unearths the clues to Harriet's disappearance, he also finds some skeletons long kept buried.
"The Girl Who Played With Fire" finds Mikael investigating sex trafficking in his own country, and young girls who are sold into it. Unknown to him, Lisbeth is keeping very close tabs on his work -- especially since she was abused as a child, and now plots revenge on the sex traffickers. But when she's accused of murder and ends up on the run, Mikael must discover what lies at the core of these crimes...
"The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest" takes place directly after the second book. Lisbeth has been shot in the head, her malevolent dad Zalachenko is in the same hospital, and some nasty government forces want her locked away, as she was as a child. Her only hope lies in Mikael, who must unravel a government conspiracy formed around the young hacker...
Finally, "On Stieg Larsson" is a solid accompaniment to this trilogy -- it's a nonfiction book that compiles four essays about him along with his email exchanges with his editor. Reading his own viewpoints on his characters and books really shines a spotlight on different facets of their stories, and why he wrote them the way he did.
Larsson's books are a unique blend of old and new -- he takes the usual mystery/thriller tropes (locked room mystery, government conspiracies) and enfolds it in a ruthless, blistering look at modern Swedish society and sexual aggression. It's a dark, dangerous, unfair world where the truth is quashed, powerful forces conspire against individuals, and women are treated horribly -- usually shown via the eccentric, punky "girl with the dragon tattoo."
His prose is rather bleak and often quite gritty, and a certain brand of understated passion shines through -- the kind that feels the need to express itself even though it takes place in fiction. And while most of the first book focuses in Mikael, in the second and third Larssen's style splits in half -- one half is the more staid, ordinary perspective of Mikael and others, and the other half is the wild nihilism of Lisbeth ("If death was the black emptiness from which she had just woken up, then death was nothing to worry about. She would hardly notice the difference").
Mikael and Salander make an intriguing odd couple. He starts world-weary and demoralized that he seems to care about nothing, but regains his passion for the truth; the only downside is that he's a bit Marty Stuish, since all women seem to adore him. And Salander is a mass of hurts and quirks -- she's a vibrant, wild genius who lashes out at those who hurt women, and has been constantly tortured by those around her since childhood (even as an adult, she's forced to have a legal guardian).
Take your average thriller/mysteries, smother them in disillusioned, morally-bankrupt noir... and you'll have something like the Millennium Trilogy. A hard read, but worth the journey.