Stieg Larsson - Millenium trilogy
Throughout my parents' and sister's visit the last month, I've been reading the Millenium trilogy by Stieg Larsson (Män som hatar kvinnor, Flickan som lekte med elden, & Luftslottet som sprängdes, aka The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, & The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest) in the background.
Millenium has a couple of my mystery plot pet peeves: first, the preponderance of what my dad calls Bestseller Style (for books) and what I call Victim/Villain/Random Bystander Cam (in tv/movies): that is, a sprinkling of individual scenes from the point of view of non-protagonists who are antagonists, victims, or peripheral characters; and second, plot points, particularly dramatic irony, contingent entirely on the POV characters making difficult-to-justify foolish decisions while the audience is privy, through Villain Cam, to the exact reasons why said decisions suck. Both of these features are storytelling tricks designed solely to increase suspense, which is why I consider them gimmicks.
But these are easily outweighed by two things:
Unsurprisingly, I'm a little depressed about having run out of them.
Of course, Stieg Larsson is dead, and somewhat ironically, if you've read the books, his father and brother have recently finished shutting his life partner out of any control over or profit from his posthumous megabestsellers after she refused the settlements they first offered. (Sweden doesn't give her the kinds of common law protections she'd have had if they'd been married.) It's too late for us since we already paid money for the books, but I hope anyone else intending to read/watch them will make sure to borrow them or buy them secondhand or (cough) whatever to avoid giving them money.
Millenium has a couple of my mystery plot pet peeves: first, the preponderance of what my dad calls Bestseller Style (for books) and what I call Victim/Villain/Random Bystander Cam (in tv/movies): that is, a sprinkling of individual scenes from the point of view of non-protagonists who are antagonists, victims, or peripheral characters; and second, plot points, particularly dramatic irony, contingent entirely on the POV characters making difficult-to-justify foolish decisions while the audience is privy, through Villain Cam, to the exact reasons why said decisions suck. Both of these features are storytelling tricks designed solely to increase suspense, which is why I consider them gimmicks.
But these are easily outweighed by two things:
- It's so extraordinarily well-written for a crime/mystery story, combining a smooth and impressive narrative voice with Un-Put-Downableness, and
- it contains a diverse array of strong, awesome, kick-ass, utterly unique, well-rounded women characters. These pass the Bechdel test on a number of occasions and in different ways, and meanwhile, their lives are independent and mostly not focused on men even when they're not interacting with each other. This in spite of the whole Well-Meaning Womanizer element in the main male protagonist which sees him go through ~affairs with at least five of them over the course of the trilogy.
Unsurprisingly, I'm a little depressed about having run out of them.
Of course, Stieg Larsson is dead, and somewhat ironically, if you've read the books, his father and brother have recently finished shutting his life partner out of any control over or profit from his posthumous megabestsellers after she refused the settlements they first offered. (Sweden doesn't give her the kinds of common law protections she'd have had if they'd been married.) It's too late for us since we already paid money for the books, but I hope anyone else intending to read/watch them will make sure to borrow them or buy them secondhand or (cough) whatever to avoid giving them money.
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I keep being really annoyed by the way the books are talked about the in English-language media - most of all US media stuff that I've seen, but I think UK media as well (lost track a bit at this stage). The Tiger Beatdown article was no exception at all, and I'm moderately fond of them a lot of the time. It felt as though about a dozen points had been missed by a wide margin...
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I was blissfully unaware of there being anything to be irritated about, having only heard by word-of-mouth about how mega-bestselling they were until I read the articles linked in the Wikipedia article. They were mostly very annoying, with the Daily Fail's being the least annoying, astonishingly enough. Vanity Fair's article was also wrong in almost everything it said even though it didn't seem especially hostile to the series, even. But the Tiger Beatdown article just had me frothy with rage, really. Oh, joy, it's the "he who smelt it dealt it" approach to violence against women! True feminism doesn't mention crime against women when it writes about crime, apparently. That would just be too prurient! I lost a few days to fuming and Wax got to audience several rants on the subject.
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