The man who created The Girl Who ...

You knew this was coming. A new book about Stieg Larsson includes an exchange of e-mails between the author of the Millennium trilogy and his editor, two of which the Wall Street Journal has published (a hat tip to Loren Eaton for calling the article to my attention).

One of the e-mails reveals disarming humility from Larsson on points his detractors have singled out:

"I am not altogether confident of my ability to put my thoughts into words: My texts are usually better after an editor has hacked away at them, and I am used to both editing and being edited. ... I think the first few chapters are a bit long-winded, and it's a while before the plot gets under way."

Elsewhere he is less humble. "I have used some techniques that are normally outlawed," he writes, according to Laurie Thompson's translation from the Swedish. That sounds to me like a man a little too proud of what he thinks he's doing.

Some of that pride comes from Larsson's handling of gender roles.

"I have also deliberately changed the sex roles," he writes. "In many ways Blomkvist acts like a typical `bimbo,' while Lisbeth Salander has stereotypical `male' characteristics and values."

Fair enough, if rather rough, elementary and schematic. Contrast Larsson with Megan Abbott, a better writer by orders of magnitude, talking about her novel Queenpin in a 2008 interview with Detectives Beyond Borders:

"The men are in there primarily to mediate the two women's relationship with each other, much as female characters function so often in classic noir triangles. Ultimately, though, the gender switch changed everything and nothing. On the one hand, it struck me how little difference it made; that mentor/protégé relationships are always about power and ambition, and this was no different. On the other hand, the particular complexities in relationships between women really interest me, as do the forms female power can take, forms that may be different from male power."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

One more thing about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

I've just finished The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and I think things remain to be said about Stieg Larsson's much-discussed first novel. I won't say them now, though, except to note that the last few pages contain two of the most endearingly self-deprecating bits of self-reference in all of crime fiction — unless one regards the bits as self-justification, grimly ironic or not self-referential at all.

I won't give away much if I reveal that the references concern a book written by protagonist Mikael Blomkvist.

(Stieg Larsson's English translator, Steven T. Murray [a.k.a. Reg Keeland], will be a member of my panel on crime fiction and translation at Bouchercon 2009.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Modesty Blaise: The original girl who played with fire

I've reached the stage in Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo where Lisbeth Salander is starting to come to the fore. So far she reminds me strongly of another young fictional woman with mysterious origins, a horrible past, a quiet demeanor, and wide-ranging and dangerous talents: Peter O'Donnell's Modesty Blaise.

The affinity is so strong and so obvious that someone else must have remarked on it. Who else has noticed the similarities?

(Stieg Larsson's English translator, Steven T. Murray [a.k.a. Reg Keeland], will be a member of my panel on crime fiction and translation at Bouchercon 2009.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Stieg Larsson — debut novelist

Two of the rare measured comments I've read about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo suggested that Stieg Larsson wrote too much like the journalist he was and that, like many another first-time novelist, he wrote long.

I liked the comments because they humanized the man behind the astonishing Larsson phenomenon. Once you start becoming the focus of conspiracy theories and notorious court cases (in Europe) and once your books start getting displayed next to volumes about Michael Jackson (in Philadelphia), calm discussion starts looking for its coat, making its excuses, and glancing nervously at the door.

So I regard with affection what I take to be traces of the first-time novelist in the first two hundred or so pages of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. One such trace is the occasional wordiness in routine exposition. Ordinarily I don't like that sort of thing; here, it made Larsson seem more human.

But I especially liked co-protagonist Mikael Blomkvist's rants against his fellow financial journalists, and I take Blomkvist as a stand-in for Larsson. Here are two examples:

"In the last 20 years, Swedish financial journalists had developed into a group of incompetent lackeys who were puffed up with self-importance and who had no record of thinking critically."

and

"The article was written by a columnist who had previously worked for Monopoly Financial Magazine ... who cheerfully ridiculed anyone who felt passionate about any issue or who stuck their neck out. ... The writer was not known for espousing a single conviction of his own."

If that's a first-time novelist failing to separate himself from his character, so be it. Those passages are fun, and that's what reading is for.

(Stieg Larsson's English translator, Steven T. Murray [a.k.a. Reg Keeland], will be a member of my panel on crime fiction and translation at Bouchercon 2009.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Have you read Stieg Larsson's "Men Who Hate Women"?

Yes, you likely have, though you may not know it. That's the literal translation of Larsson's original Swedish title (Män Som Hatar Kvinnor) for the much-honored novel known to English readers as The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

The title of the book's Italian translation is a literal rendering of the Swedish: Uomini che odiano le donne. So are the Danish, Norwegian and Dutch titles, and the French is virtually literal: Les hommes qui n'aimaient pas les femmes. (The German title goes in a different direction, but that's a matter for another post, unless Bernd or Lars wishes to weigh in here.)

For now, why do you think English-language publishers decided not to translate the novel's harsh title? This is not a trick question. I have read or heard nothing on the subject, so educated guesses, provocative polemics, informed speculation and inside dope are all welcome.

P.S. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the first and only book of Larsson's Millennium trilogy to have been translated into English. All three books have been translated into French and German and two into Dutch. That's one area in which English does not lead the way.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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"The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" has been won

I learned something today about Detectives Beyond Borders readers: They get up earlier in the morning than I do.

The old mail bag was filled with correct answers by the time I brushed my teeth and got to work. The first three correct respondents, and thus the winners of a copy of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo courtesy of Alfred A. Knopf, were:

Don in Oak Harbor, Washington
Carol in Columbia, Maryland

and

Sandra in Uniondale, Pennsylvania.

Congratulations to all three, and thanks to all who entered.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Win "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo"

Few crime novels come as widely praised as Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Never mind Henning Mankell, he to whom all Swedish crime writers will be compared; Larsson's Milennium Triology, of which this novel is the first part, has been compared to no less than War and Peace.

The good people at Alfred A. Knopf have graciously agreed to donate three copies to Detectives Beyond Borders for awarding to U.S. readers. Here is one of the many raves for the novel. Read it for a clue to this skill-testing question:

The novel's protagonist, Mikael Blomkvist, is a disgraced member of which profession?

Be one of the first three U.S. residents to send the correct answer to detectivesbeyondborders(at)earthlink(dot)net, and win a copy of this "genuinely complex and unique contribution to crime fiction."

© Peter Rozovsky 2008