The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo--Book

Photo: Original Swedish book cover, from its Wikipedia page

I suppose you already know the sordid background of the author: how he died climbing up seven floors because his lift wasn't working; because he'd been at least a three to four pack a day smoker for a long time.  You probably know that his real job was as an editor of magazines that exposed things that the bad guys would rather have left alone; that he didn't get married to his long-time partner because he'd been getting death threats and so didn't want his address in the public records; about how, since there was no will, his partner was legally entitled to nothing, including the royalties to the mega-selling books; about how his father and brother--whom he was estranged from--have therefore made millions of dollars (and kronen) from his work.  She has since sued them; supposedly they have offered her a few million to go away.  About how millions more are coming in for royalties to the movies, and about how she's basically blackmailing everybody by saying that she has the manuscripts for most of the fourth (about three-quarters) and some of the fifth installments of the series (there might have been ten had he lived to write them all).  And, finally, about how she says she has all of his notes and outlines for the fourth book, and therefore should be the one to finish it.  (You can bet that someone will; much like how Robert B. Parker finished Raymond Chandler's Poodle Springs, and how others are now writing his many series.)

Well, if you didn't know all that, there you are.  Sounds like a murder-mystery in of itself.

I'd rather write about how this book sort of breaks the mold.  It essentially does everything that many agents and publishers say they don't want: shifting 3rd person POV (if you want to say that Lisbeth is a co- major character, remember that the other intrusively tells us what Frode, Martin, and other minor characters are thinking, often in snippets); waiting 50 or so pages before the main mystery is established; titling the book after a minor character (admittedly, Larsson chose the first book's title, and maybe the second, but definitely not the third.  They're published in his home country under very different titles); carrying on the book for over 100 pages after the main mystery has been solved.  Many examples of author intrusion, especially when he has to step in to tell us how a magazine office runs.  You get the idea.

All no-nos.  But Larsson does them all, and manages to pull it off.

Partly this is because he digs so deeply into the characters that they themselves, rather than the plot, carry the novel.  The writing tone is consistent throughout, regardless as to who's being focused on.  The detail is super, from the weather, to the towns, to the characters.  (He hedges a bit on how all the hacking and financial disbursements are accomplished.)  The dialogue is mostly good (though all the characters talk in compound sentences, with a "," followed by an "and."  Lisbeth especially would not do this, and it makes all the characters sound somewhat alike; I'll bet Larsson used to talk the same way).

The themes and issues are there, most notably the ill-treatment towards females in Swedish society.  It's apparently just as pandemic as Henning Mankell's assertion about how immigrants are treated in Sweden, as well.  (One wonders with a shudder how the female immigrants are treated.)

But, most importantly, once the staples of the mystery come out--the pictures, tracking down the onlookers who took them, the interviews and the research--he runs with them, even while acknowledging that the plot is essentially a locked-room mystery on an island (like Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None), and that women, regardless of age, apparently can't keep their clothes on around the major character.  The pace picks up and you turn the pages.  It takes awhile to pick up, and there's a long descent, but there's obviously a story arc, just like every writing teacher has ever told you to do.

And so he unconventionally connected the dots, I guess you might say.  And he did it well.  It's too bad he couldn't complete all ten.  Someone else will undoubtedly (and probably later, rather than sooner, because of the courtroom drama) run with it, but it won't be the same.  No other writer, for example, would have littered the book's landscape with mystery writer allusions--and even make a character hide under the name of Victor Fleming, the director of most of The Wizard of Oz and of Gone with the Wind!  We won't see that audacity again.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo--Movie

Photo: Rooney Mara, from her Wikipedia page.  She and Lisbeth Salander look nothing alike.  I mean that in a positive way, for both.

The blog for the book will come soon.  Just finished it.

But first the movie.

The movie was a must-see on many levels: the genre of the movie and book (as you should know by now, I dig the murder/mystery thing); the positive hype of both; and, perhaps most importantly, David Fincher, the director.

First, a word about him.  Impressive credits, especially Zodiac.  I know he directed Se7en, a good movie but very overrated.  The Social Network was a great film, about technology that has undoubtedly changed many lives (except mine; still don't have a Facebook account)--but, still, a movie about a nerdy, ingenious, socially inept guy, who may or may not have stolen the idea, the rights, and who knows what else.  Not my cup of tea for a subject, but an admittedly great film.  I believe Zodiac and now this movie will push him into the upper-echelon of movie buffs (Fincher's been there for the pros for some time now).  I like Fincher's directing style and the intensity of his films: The Social Network was intense for its genre.  The others are just...intense.  Fight Club, for instance.  (Good, not great.)  Haven't seen Benjamin Button or Panic Room.  They're on my list of things to do.

I also wanted to see this because Steven Zaillian wrote it.  He penned the 'plays for Schindler's List (one of the all-time great screenplays) and for Gangs of New York, also a great screenplay (Daniel Day-Lewis should've won the Oscar for that one).  Of course, he also wrote American Gangster, which was okay, but I'll pass, and Hannibal, which was just bad.  But I'm a return customer for Schindler and Gangs.

Daniel Craig is always good, and it's good to see him do something well besides James Bond.  (Speaking of which, it's about time for another, yes?)  He's a good actor who has not, and will not, get the credit he deserves.  Women swoon over him.  While he's essentially a non-violent Bond in this film, he still played it well.  He's got the Bond charm and charisma going, but he still had other facets going on that went over well.  (Those shots where he's learning something, and the camera stays on his thoughtful and learning face--well, rumor has it that he was simply counting to ten all that time.  He says he counts to ten when he's told he needs to show understanding and learning on film.)

But the cream of the crop here was Rooney Mara, as Lisbeth Salander.  According to Wikipedia, she beat out Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson for the role.  I like the first and am lukewarm by the latter, and they're both too hyped these days.  Mara came out of nowhere.  She played bit parts in several TV shows, a major part in the Nightmare on Elm Street remake (all good actors have to start with a bad horror film, apparently.  See Johnny Depp, Renee Zellweger and too many others to mention), and a small role in Fincher's Social Network.  (Both say that her part in his most recent film did not help her to get The Girl.)

Her character on film is even more realistic than the one on paper I have just finished reading.  That never happens, at least for me.  Without going into much detail, she absolutely nailed this role.  One of the things she did in the film (and possibly this is Fincher's and Zaillian's doing as well) that Salander didn't do in the book was to stay consistent with her mono-syllabic answers and otherwise clipped speech patterns--even to those she liked or cared for.  Frankly, she spoke too often (in spurts) in the book; I have known people (exactly) like Lisbeth Salander, and you'll have to take my word that such folks do not normally converse.  They staccato you, or they rant at you, but they don't converse.  Mara didn't in the movie, either.

In my life, I have seen a Lisbeth Salander many times.  I've seen the anorexia, the internal fury, the speech patterns, the behavior, the anger in the eyes, the massive insecurity, the abuse, the addictions--In short, I've seen it all.  She owned it.  This movie should be seen for her performance alone.  (I dare you to recognize the woman in the film as the one pictured above, but they are the same.)

Sweden itself gives a good performance, too, if you know what I mean.  (I know about 40% of the internal shots were filmed in L.A.)  It's obviously beautiful and cold there.  The free education intrigues me, but the violence and rape stats in this trilogy--and in the many books by Henning Mankell--do not paint a pretty picture.  Both authors (I know Larsson has died) try to say that the stats are horrific, possibly even worse than the U.S.'s.  For now, I'd like to visit there, but not live there.  Of course, I can say that about almost anywhere.

And the movie has a lot of nice touches not in the book, which I'll leave alone for now.  Suffice it to say that they involve the whereabouts of a missing woman and a car crash.  The movie also breaks a few rules; the big one is that the movie, like the book, continues on for quite awhile after the main mystery has been solved.  I approve, especially because it is done largely for the sake of characterization.  Rare, these days.

More on this, and the book, later.  Go see it, even if you've already read it.  And I'll be proactive and say that you should read it, too, even if you've already seen the movie.

Faceless Killers--Henning Mankell

Mankell is a writer of Swedish noir; he inspired Stieg Larsson, and, perhaps, me.  I've been purposely trying to learn as I read these days.  Not in an academic way--at least until I take my next Masters class--but in a way that I understand writing better so that my writing is also better.  I wrote a recent blog about this, using Dan Simmons' Drood as a primer, so I won't do that again here.

In short, here's what I liked about Faceless Killers (besides the title).  The thing that struck me first, by about page 20, was that if Raymond Carver wrote Swedish noir, it would turn out like this.  Carver was a writer of more depth than this novel, appropriately, shows, but the type of writing is the same.  Both writers make the very ordinary seem very important.  Carver would write, "He placed the bottle of champagne on the table," in exactly the same way several times in the same 12-page short story, and it would carry weight each time.  (I still don't understand how he was able to do that.)  Mankell does the same here, but, again, without the strange depth.  His words and sentences do have depth, just not the same emotional (or emotionless) as Carver's did.

Secondly, Mankell's Kurt Wallander has very real, gritty problems, shown in very gritty sentences.  For example, and pardon the lack of etiquette here, but Wallender has this gastro-intestinal problem--a combination of bad eating habits and lots of stress, caused by his job and his recent marriage break-up--and the novel shows twice that he eats a hotdog, or a pizza, too fast and has to rush to the bathroom with diarrhea.  And I'm not paraphrasing or inferring here.  It says that he ate too fast, that he had to run to the bathroom, and that he had diarrhea.  The first time, it also says that he realizes he has to change his underwear.  Now that's intense.  The short, clipped, Carver-esque sentences create a dreamy, distant, slowly re-awakening feeling in the character that really is what the novel is about.  That, and what is going wrong with Sweden in those days.  The two-headed theme is: What went wrong with my marriage?--and--What went wrong with Sweden?  They go hand-in-hand here.  The setting, as you'd might expect from Sweden, is a character in of itself in the same way that the same type of weather was for Fargo and Smilla's Sense of Snow.

Anyway, this novel got me to consider ditching the 1st person narration of one of my "finished" mystery mss. and allowing my writing style to show the main character's traits in ways that I thought only 1st person could.  And it also made me realize that although the mystery starts right away in my novel, the actual crime isn't shown until midway.  (Other crimes, including murders and other cases the character takes on, are shown much earlier, all starting on page 1.)  But this was a real eye-opener for me in that it shows that maybe the packaging of my novel is all wrong.

We'll see.  Anyway, Faceless Killers is highly recommended.  I just bought most of the Wallender series a few hours ago.  The supposed last one, A Troubled Man, comes out very soon, the first Wallender book in 10 years.  Mankell says it's definitely the last, but I'll bet he also said that 10 years ago.