‘The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest’ by Stieg Larsson
Monday, 28 June 2010
I read the second half of this book this afternoon, in the sun in Priory Park. This spate of gorgeous weather we’re having is not great for my writing as I cannot bear to be indoors when it’s so beautiful outside. There’s always the evenings and the time trapped on trains I suppose! This is the third and final book in the Millennium Trilogy. I’ve read some rumours about an unfinished fourth manuscript but it seems unlikely that this will appear even if it exists, given the complications around Larsson’s estate. I found the first half of it a little difficult, mainly because Lizbeth Salander, the central, most intriguing character, is stuck in a hospital bed. But the scenes towards the end where she is on trial really gripped me. At times the translation felt a little clunky, more so than the others, but even though this is a very big book (nearly 750 pages) you can race through it. I’ve enjoyed all of these very much and am looking forward to the film adaptations – the first one, ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ which came out early this year was excellent – Salander is such an interesting character.
No. 1 — June 29th, 2010 at 15:35
I thought the trilogy became progressively less interesting (although the first one set the bar extremely high). Salander was always compelling, though.
Blomqvist I found less appealing: http://timstretton.blogspot.com/2010/05/some-characters-have-lot-of-sex-this-is.html
No. 2 — June 30th, 2010 at 21:46
*Giggles* I just read your post – so true! He does calm down a bit on the bedding after the first one – I think he only has the one lover in this last one. And despite promising her NOTHING in typical cad style it looks like it might be getting serious. I don’t know if you’ve read Solar yet but it also suffers somewhat from this affliction. In my slight TS Spivet-ness I’m thinking a table or graph might be kind of interesting (although probably impossible to be absolutely sure about). In column one we would have the name of the author, column two their number of lovers, and three onwards the number of lovers their protagonists bed in each of their books. What would further complicate this would be that not all novels (few in fact?) are concerned with the entire life span of the protagonist so we might have to try and calculate the number of lovers an author had in the same timespan at the same age as their protagonist. I’m getting carried away now.