Paying attention

If you've been paying attention to the sporadic things I write here, you know I've had a pile of books on my desk to write about. I managed to cut the pile in half and write about my current reading until I uncovered Åsa Larsson's The Second Deadly Sin. Well, you didn't know about that last bit since I haven't written about Larsson's book until now.

I picked up the book and looked at a fierce bear on the cover and tried to remember something about the book and my experience of reading it. Nothing. Had I really read the book? I must have, I told myself, or it wouldn't have gotten to the pile of books already read.

Okay, so I'll skim through the beginning and I'll remember. Nope. Okay, I'll read the first few chapters and it will come back to me. Nope, again. Had I read this book? So, I started over and read the book. It wasn't until I got to about page 350 (out of 375) that I remembered reading some of the book. If I'd paged my way through the book looking at the words, I hadn't read it. But there's a devastatingly awful scene near the end of the book involving a murderous assailant, a five-year-old child, a beloved dog, and a severely injured cop that I'll never forget, even if I forget where I read it. I won't forget again. I was paying attention this time.

Larsson tells at least three stories in this book. One of them is two or three generations back. Others are contemporary, one involving murder and another involving overreach by an overly ambitious detective. When I paid attention to the stories this time, I was able to keep track of the stories and understand most of the complex connections Larsson weaves among them.

The first half of the book seemed a bit slow. Maybe that was getting started and introducing all the characters and scenes (all in Sweden, by the way). The story telling in the second half of the book moved right along. I wondered how I could not have paid attention. Where was I? What was I preoccupied with? I have no clue. I wasn't paying attention.

I liked the book this time. I was paying attention this time. I remember admonishing my students to do more than "look at the words" when reading. I need to remind myself of the same thing.

Have you read The Second Deadly Sin by Åsa Larsson? Were you paying attention enough to tell us what you thought of it? Write. Tell this little bit of the world what you thought.

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• Barry Forshaw's review in The Independent
• Sarah Ward's review at CrimePieces
• Åsa Larsson at Wikipedia

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Dead woman talking

As usual, I approached the fiction section of the Northfield Public Library with my reading list in hand. The list is alphabetical by author, so I intentionally look at things that are not at the top or bottom. No sense favoring Sarah Andrews over Qiu Xiaolong.

What I came across first was Åsa Larsson's Until Thy Wrath Be Past. A cop and a prosecuting attorney in a remote place in northern Sweden are starring characters. They both have histories (some of it told in earlier books) and they're both interesting and attractive characters. The Swedish author is a former attorney, so I assume she knows what she's talking about when it comes to the law and order part of things and her references to Scandinavian mythology.

However, I'm not so sure about other things. The book opens with a woman narrating her own murder. Almost the next thing I recall is that the dead woman appears to the prosecutor in a dream, offering important information about the crime. Give me a break! Give me Sherlock Holmes!

Last time I read a book narrated by a dead person, it was pretty awful. It was a best seller for quite awhile, but I was not a fan. So, I was put off by the beginning of Larsson's book, but I kept reading.

I discover that I can skip the supernatural messages (that thankfully are in italics) and still follow the investigation and the characters. The story really revolves around an old woman and her middle aged sons. There are links to Swedish cooperation with occupying Nazis during World War II, a Steinbeck-like pair of brothers, and an extreme case of school yard bullying that didn't stop at the school yard fence.

Except for the unnecessary messages from beyond the grave, it's an integrated story that's well-told. You might even like the voice of the dead helping to narrate things. Oh, and one of the murderers is set up as a figure like the Biblical Job. Well, I can see how Larsson frames that, but I really thought that a key element of the story of Job was that his suffering was unearned. The suffering shlub in this story is anything but innocent.

Well, if I can ignore voice of a dead woman and resist insisting on a more accurate Biblical analogy, I liked reading the book. I'd like to suggest that an unintentional witness, unknown to either the criminals or the police would be a better vehicle for moving the story along or adding details than the ghostly whispers of a dead woman. A dead woman who is ushered off this earthly stage at the end of the book by the equally dead spirit of her grandmother.

So, have you read Until Thy Wrath Be Past? Did you like it? How did you react to the spirits? How did you react to the plot and the story telling? Write and tell this little bit of the world how you reacted.

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• An unsigned review at Scandinavian Crime Fiction
• Another unsigned review at Reactions to Reading
• Barry Forshaw's review of Until Thy Wrath Be Past and The Hidden Child in The Independent

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Stieg Larsson, political reporter

In the shadow of the terrorist attack in Oslo, Joan Acocella posted a bit in the New Yorker, "Stieg Larsson and the Scandinavian Right."

The killer in Oslo was exactly the kind of guy who Stieg Larsson spent his pre-novelist career trying to warn the Scandinavian people about. Maybe they should have listened before Larsson created Lisbeth Salander.

In the Times' heavy coverage of the killings in Norway... the name of Stieg Larsson has not come up. That is curious. The major subplot of the stories on the massacre is what many people are now describing as the indifference of the government and press corps in Norway... to native right-wing movements and their potential for violence... [H]omegrown fundamentalist movements have been gaining power in Scandinavia since, decades ago, the citizens of those countries began to lose faith in the benevolence of their vaunted welfare states...

Larsson had an unglamorous job as the Swedish correspondent for a magazine, Searchlight, that was English journalism’s watchdog against right-wing movements in Europe. In his articles for Searchlight he describes the car bombings, the rallies, the magazines of Sweden’s extreme right. He has only one message: fascism is on the rise. “For too long,” he writes, “Nazis, in the eyes of society, have been simplistically and credulously equated with a few dozen skinheads on a Saturday-night stampede.” That’s not the case any more, he writes. They are men in suits and ties, and they are getting elected to office...

Larsson’s main concern was the abuse of women, immigrants, and Jews... Eventually he turned his attention primarily to women...

The summer camp that Anders Breivik invaded last week, a hatchery for the children of the liberal ruling class, included young people whose parents and grandparents came from Africa and Asia.

Such inclusion—or, from another perspective, infiltration—is what the Scandinavian right wing opposes, and political parties ruled by that refusal are gaining power...

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Swedish crime novel

And here's another view of Sweden to fracture your stereotypes (well, at least the stereotypes of the descendants of Swedish immigrants in Minnesota). Leif GW Persson’s novel also jostled the images of reviewer Katherine Powers, writing in The Boston Post. Persson's description of Sweden's police and intelligence organizations give credence to the cabals in Stieg Larsson's series of "The Girl Who..." stories. Powers also adds a reference to Arnaldur's Arctic Chill, something I read and wrote about just over a year ago.

From Nordic climes, come chilling thrillers

[H]ere before me is Leif GW Persson’s Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End: The Story of a Crime, unquestionably the best Swedish crime novel I’ve read so far.

In it, Persson takes up the 1986 assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, a crime that has never been solved. Aside from that event, the specific goings-on, as well as the characters, motives, involvements, and actions are fictional, but they are also completely believable. The novel consists of two chronologies and a fraught history. Sweden’s geo-political predicament is the backdrop, especially the years that spanned the end of World War II as it segued into the Cold War up to the mid-1950s. In Sweden this was the time during which “wherever you turned you only saw the Russian bear with his mighty paws, ready to deliver the final embrace.’’...

But be warned: This is a novel to read with your cerebral capacity at its highest setting and with, perhaps, a little notebook at your side. Most of the book’s characters are members of the Stockholm police force or of the country’s security organizations. They are numerous, and their names and official titles are nothing but trouble...

The Swedish security organization in place here is made up of a number of bodies: a central organization... a smaller “external group,’’ camouflaged as a management consulting firm established for the purpose of pursuing the most secret operations; a special “threat group,’’... and a further group, whose task is to spy on everyone else in the organization....

As I'll explain at a later date, my dance card for reading is pretty full right now, but I'm going to keep Persson's book on my waiting list.

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From the far north

I had three books to write about, and I wrote about one. Now, I still have three books to write about because I've read another. It's time to write.

The other book I bought at West Yellowstone's Bookworm was The Black Path by Åsa Larsson. (She's no relation to Stieg Larsson.)

Three years ago, about the time I was beginning to read Scandinavian mysteries, I read her book Sun Storm. I liked that book enough for the vague memories to encourage me to pick up The Black Path while in Montana.

The book has echoes of the crooked business people that Stieg Larsson's character Mikael Blomkvist was writing about at the beginning and end of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The story here is about a trio of successful Swedish entrepreneurs who reach too far and not too well.

The stars of the story are the same police detective (Anna-Maria Mella) and lawyer (Rebecka Martinsson) who were featured in Sun Storm. The story is convoluted and overly-complex. It's full of flashbacks and asides. I found it quite difficult to follow the story in the first half of the book before I got to know who the characters were.

This is evidently the third book featuring this cop-lawyer pair. (I missed one, I guess.) Maybe that's why I don't have a very good impression of who these women are. Maybe Larsson has never done much revelation about the characters. Too bad, there's potential.

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• Maxine Clarke's review at EuroCrime.co.uk
  
• A review from Complete Review
  
• A review by Uriah Robinson (Uriah Robinson is the blogname of a short, balding, retired health care professional) at Crime Scraps

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Reading Stieg Larsson while in South Dakota

Like Bird, I finished Stieg Larsson's trilogy while on vacation. But I'd read the first two books before I left home.

I was amazed that The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest began exactly where The Girl Who Played with Fire had ended. It was almost as if an editor had cut the manuscript at the end of a paragraph and declared the first part book 2. The section beginning with the next paragraph was thus declared to be book 3. If I'd been at home, I'd have gotten Fire off the shelf to remind myself exactly what was going on in the final pages. But I was in South Dakota.



The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is a coda to the story (and it is all one story). Bird likened the trilogy to Tolkein's epic. As I read the last book, I began to think of Larsson's story as a symphony. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the first movement which introduces the themes and characters; The Girl Who Played with Fire is a second movement in which those themes and characters are played out; The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is really two movements -- the first movement introduces new characters who part of one of the main themes and the second is the coda, or conclusion where all the themes and characters are resolved. (Pardon my musical ignorance, but that's how I understand symphonies. Corrections and instructions are welcome.)

After the heights of the second movement (Fire), the third and fourth movements of Hornet's Nest were a bit of a let down, but they're sort of supposed to be as the conflicts are resolved. By the time the really bad guys are introduced in the first part of Hornet's Nest, they are so vulnerable that their fate seems obvious. And the final resolutions are almost "Happily Ever After (sort of)."

I, too, was driven to read these books. I just didn't have them all during one vacation time. The characters are what really carried the story for me. The conspiracy was a little thin and a lot paranoid, but almost believable. (The Cold War can be a scapegoat for lots of terrible fictional things since it was the cause of so many terrors of real life. Remember the Cuban Missile Crisis?) But the story telling kept me going as well, though I don't know if it would have been as good without Salander and Blomkvist and the villains.

I leave it to some academics to point out the commonalities between Larsson's books, Tolkein's stories, Rowling's wizardry, and other immensely popular "must reads." I'd be interested in hearing their theories about what makes books so quickly and immensely popular.

But here's the deal: the three Larsson books are worth the time -- even if you only devote half an hour at bedtime for a couple months to them. But read them in order. I'll bet that those half hours become hours and then weekend afternoons pretty quickly.

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Katherine Dunn's review of Hornet's Nest in The Oregonian
Ed Siegel's review of Hornet's Nest in Newsday
Alicia Rancilio's review of Hornet's Nest in Taiwan News

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Racing through the Millennium Series

Bird Loomis wrote about the last Stieg Larsson book before I did. Here's his take.

For a mystery buff, I may have been the last person on earth to start reading Stieg Larsson's Girl With Dragon Tattoo from the “Millennium” series.

Jeesh, the Swedish Tattoo film came out, and I had to avoid it, knowing that I wanted to experience reading the books before I saw any of the films (the second one has been released in the US and a US director is working on an American version of Dragon Tattoo).

I wasn't really worried that I'd be disappointed. Everyone who has talked or written about the series has been pretty damned positive.

So, about two weeks ago, heading out to the Pacific Northwest for vacation, I took the first volume to begin on the plane.

It's always fun to be caught up in a book, racing ahead because you're compelled to. (It's also fun to savor books, but sometimes the narrative just requires that you put everything aside.) A couple hundred pages in by the time I got to Seattle, I luxuriated in the cool temperatures and just kept going. Luckily my in-laws had the remaining two books in the series (in hardback!).

I finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and plunged into The Girl Who Played with Fire. My brother-in-law offhandedly said he didn't think it was quite as good as the first and third, but you could have fooled me. And although I finished Fire at about 10:30 at night, I immediately started The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest that evening. Despite kayaking, biking, eating salmon, drinking beer, etc., I got through the last volume within another day or so - more or less 1700 pages in about a week.

A lot's been written about Larsson's's books, and I surely have no great, overarching take on them (well, actually I do, noted below, but it's scarcely all that well considered). But I am interested in why some books pull you in so completely that you just can't stop until you're completely done. For me, although the plotting is decent, it's the characters that are so compelling, even if Lisbeth Salander and Michael Blomkvist are, like many thriller characters, a bit beyond belief. Indeed, that's part of their charm. Many of the less central characters have their moments, a lot within the Vanger family.

And although there are numerous surprises, the overall arc of the story, especially in the last two books, leads one to believe that things will turn out well for the major characters and that, roughly speaking, justice will be done. About half way through the last book, it dawned on me that these three books were comparable to the Lord of the Rings, along with The Hobbit. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is like The Hobbit in that it introduces you to all the characters and the turf to be played on, but the real story doesn't start until the first book of the Rings trilogy. Larsson's first book is a great start, and we understand the world he's created, but the 2nd and 3rd books offer the real meat of one continuing story - not quite the same quest as Frodo's, but a quest (for revenge, sanity, justice?) nevertheless. Thus the seamless transition between Fire and Hornet's Nest.

In a recent post, Ken talked about putting down a Michael Connelly book because of some of the content. And these books are scarcely for the faint-hearted (nor is the first film, as I understand). Much of the talk about the books and Larsson revolves around victimhood, rape, and abuse in its many forms. But issues of gender and sex and violence are integral to these books - I'm not sure there's anything that is gratuitous (but that's probably a matter of opinion). And compared to some other thriller writers (Andrew Vachss comes most notably to mind), Larsson's not so hard edged.

And in the end, he has given us Lisbeth Salander, a truly remarkable invention of his mind (and apparently, his experience as a teenager). What a gift, and perhaps the most notable reason to hunker down and read these books without coming up for air.

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Katherine Dunn's review of Hornet's Nest in The Oregonian
Ed Siegel's review of Hornet's Nest in Newsday
Alicia Rancilio's review of Hornet's Nest in Taiwan News

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Movie review

Dan Conrad wrote last night after seeing the movie version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

"Just returned from watching The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

"Maybe the best way to describe it is that coming out of the theater I had to check my watch three times as I simply could not believe I had been in there for over two and a half hours. All with virtually no chases, no gun battles, no mind boggling special effects, and no English; just a well told story and actors that looked and performed like they had just walked off the pages of the Larsson book.

"Did I mention that I liked it?"

Here's a link to a trailer for the movie (what I always thought was a preview).

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Dan Conrad wrote

We apparently not the only ones who liked reading Stieg Larsson. I just checked where I was on the Hennepin County/Minneapolis reserve list and found I am now number 151 out of 679 requests for The Girl Who Played with Fire. The most I've ever seen before was like 150 or so reserve requests.

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Book of many stories

Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

I was standing in front of the "Best Sellers" rack of paperbacks while waiting for a prescription to be filled. I was next to a grocery store pharmacy.

Although the store now has some organic produce and a partial row of other organic products, it's still a middle/working class store that emphasizes thrift and large-sized cans of vegetables and Miracle Whip more than a wide selection of breads, cheeses, or sliced meats. Thirty years ago the store was called Erickson's. Then for a couple decades it was known as More 4. (The 4 was for four stores in one, but I could only ever count three. Maybe there was something out back I didn't know about.) Nowadays, it's called EconoFoods. Same corporate ownership all those years. Recently I noticed that a branch of the store in Hudson, Wisconsin, formerly called EconoFoods has a new name. I guess someone's still looking for corporate identity.

That's where I was when the eye-catching cover of Stieg Larsson's book caught my eye. It was in the #8 slot of best sellers, but the bar code sticker on the back said, "Best Seller #16 Expries July 30." However, the cash register receipt said I bought "Hanna Montana" in the "GM and Health Beauty" section. I guess someone's still looking for inventory and accounting identity.

In the back of my mind, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, rang a quiet bell. I'd read something about this book, but couldn't remember what I'd read or where I'd read it. The blurb on the back cover offered, "a murder mystery, family saga, love story, and a tale of financial ingtrigue wrapped into one satisfyingly complex and entertainingly atmospheric novel." I was headed for a quiet weekend at Sidetrack which everyone expected would be rainy, so I bought the book and some orange juice along with medication that promises to help me combat my hyper-lipidemia.

What an incredible luxury. Time to do nothing but read. Saturday was indeed a cool rainy day at the lake. Nancy and I were up early and headed to the neighborhood coffee shop (Cafe Wren in Luck), 15 miles up the road, for breakfast and an e-mail check-in.

When we got back to Little Blake, I opened up The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It's a 640-page book. By page 110, I told Nancy that I was hooked and wanted to finish the book. At the time, I didn't think I'd finish this weekend. There's usually a lot of competition for attention what with bald eagles, loons, kingfishers, garden flowers and weeds, and chores.

The rain persisted, off and on, most of Saturday. I was able to spend some time with neighbors during rainless interludes, but mostly I read. I watched the sun go down behind the clouds as I read. I got up to stretch after dark and discovered that it was 11:15PM.

I brushed my teeth, took my prescribed medication, and crawled into bed. Sometime later, I learned who one of the real bad guys was, I put the book down.

Sunday morning I paddled the canoe around the lake, poured myself a big glass of orange juice, made some coffee, and started reading again. I finished the book just after noon.

Recommendation enough?

How about that the author came from Sweden, but his attitude doesn't quite match the misanthropic perspective of that other Swede I've read recently, Henning Mankell. In fact, in spite of one of the main themes (in Sweden the book and the movie based on the book are titled, Men Who Hate Women), there's little in Larsson's book like the dyspeptic view of life that Mankell seems to live sourly with.

The translation by Reg Keeland is quite good and very much in American English. There are a few strange things in the translation and some things just don't translate well. ("After the meeting Blomkvist had coffee with Malm at Java on Horngatspuckeln.")

The mystery revolves around a teenager who disappeared 40 years before the story told in this book. The cast of characters includes a large Swedish clan descended from a very successful 19th century industrialist. The hired investigators are a discredited journalist and a self-taught, tattooed, pierced, punk polymath.

Larsson tells several side and back stories in this huge book, but the pace never lags. I didn't keep all the family names straight, but I never kept all the names in my own family straight either. I never got confused, but I also never felt I was being talked down to by the author or the characters.

If you have read other of my commentaries, you know I don't have a lot of patience with incredible things in realistic fiction. The last story Larsson tells in this book is incredible. I wish he'd left it out. Well, I wish his editor had dumped it. I'll buy a self-taught, neurotic polymath, but not one who does the things described in the last story. It's just too much.

In spite of that, I'm ready to read Larsson's next book (it's due out in hardcover now). I rather expected the discredited and rehabilitated journalist to be the main character of the second book. I'm not sure that's true. According to the chapter published in this volume, it's the punk polymath.

There won't be many books. Larsson died in 2004 after handing three manuscripts to his agent.

The paperback edition of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo came out in June 2009 in the U.S. The library might have a copy, but you'll probably have to hang out near the rack of paperback best sellers to find a copy. I think it will be worth it.

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See also:

• A Stieg Larsson web site
  
• Alex Berenson's review in the New York Times
  
• Kate's review at Kate's Book Blog
  
• Joan Smith's review at the Sunday Times

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Swedish mystery

Here's a continuation of the theme Dan Conrad and I discussed earlier: mystery novels from Scandanavia. This one's from Sweden and I found it in River City Books here in Northfield while I was shopping for birthday gifts for 2-year-old granddaughter Jaime. (I know, the mystery shelves are strange places to be looking for books for toddlers. Is there a rule against shopping for more than one thing at a time?)



This time the book is Sun Storm by Åsa Larsson [at left] who is a native of Kiruna, Sweden, an iron-mining town so far north in Sweden that Norway and Finland are probably visible from the highest nearby mountain (which is also the highest in Sweden). It's so far north that there's an astrophysics lab there that studies Martian climate. It's so far north that the aurora borealis is visible from the 1:00 PM sunset until the 10:00 AM sunrise.

All of that is to prepare you for the setting of Sun Storm. It's set in a mining town in the very northernmost part of Sweden called Kiruna. This place is so far north that Larsson's description of winter there makes Minnesota winter sound like warm vacation spot. On top of that the houses she describes don't seem to have central heating. And the cabin in the mountains -- the scene of a crucial event -- relies on snow drifts outside to seal the drafts.

Rebecka Martinsson, Stockholm tax attorney and Kiruna native (like author Larsson), gets drawn back to that northern town by the murder of a friend from her youth and the dead man's sister who is accused of the killing (unlike author Larsson). But there's more. The dead man was a central figure in the creation of a large Pentacostal church in that town of 20,000 on the glacier-swept landscape. It's a church that's grown wealthy from evangelism and the sales of books and videos of sermons. The killing and Martinsson's defense of her old friend threatens the church and the wealth of its movers and shakers.

There are powerful images here. Larsson is very good at descriptive writing. There's a complicated story and it's well told. Throughout the book I was sure I understood most of what was going on, but I had these nagging questions. Larsson answers most of them with dramatic flashbacks and conversations between old friends and acquaintances.

The ending is dramatic and suspensful. Larsson does action endings well too.

Oh, by the way, neither Martinsson nor her old chum are terribly attractive people. My favorite character in the book is not Martinsson, but a local detective, Anna-Maria Mella.

There are a couple things that don't fall together at the end, but they are not essential to this tale. I enjoyed reading this book. Larsson has a second book that's just been released in the US. I'm going to have to pester the library about loaning it to me.

I thought this was a good one. If you read it, let us know what you think.

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• Karen Chisholm's review of Sun Storm at EuroCrime
• Andy Plonka's review at Mystery Reader
• A reading group guide

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