The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo / The Girl Who Played With Fire

I can't boast that I hopped on the Larsson "Girl" bandwagon at the beginning, but I picked up the book about 3 months after it started having dedicated real estate at Borders. I slogged through the first 20 pages describing, in great detail, the corporate workings of the Wennerstrom dynasty and thinking "how the HELL is this book so popular?"

When Miss Marple  Mikael Blomkvist arrived on Hedeby island, the defined number and cast of characters introduced, the dark crime described, and the (metaphorical) storm clouds rolled in, I proceeded to read in 50 page chunks. The book is nearly as ubiquitous as The Da Vinci code at this point, so I'm saying nothing new when I say that Larsson created a classic mystery with at least one of the most memorable and fully realized characters ever committed to pop fiction in Lisbeth Salander.

Noomi Rapace, a.k.a. "The Girl"

So, the book is great. I then went to see the Swedish film adaptation, and was equally impressed. Of course the movie can never capture everything in the book, but I felt that the decisions that the screenwriters made around what to include and what to abandon were pretty spot-on. For example, I don't think that the philandering that was so prevalent in the book would have necessarily translated to the screen, it would have added bloat, and it would not have had a cultural impact here in the US (we don't as openly fess up to our wife-swapping). And being able to visualize what was in the mind's eye while reading the novel is always interesting (Martin's basement was much more sterile than I pictured).

So, as is often the case, I had a big case of the Diminishing Returns when I read The Girl Who Played With Fire. I didn't find the story nearly as compelling, and for a while after I closed the book I literally had a hard time remembering anything high-level about the plot. With the exception of a couple of memorable moments involving a large blonde man who can feel no pain, it felt like a sub-standard thriller riding on the purchase of the amazing characterization of Lisbeth.

The film version of Fire is quite apparently an inferior interpretation of an inferior sophomore novel. The actors seem to be going through the motions this time around, and seeing the villains has a weird dual let-down: on one hand, seeing them in the flesh takes the supernaturally evil quality away, but at the same time, some of their qualities are so broad-stroke and exaggerated that you don't really buy-in to the reality.

I've elected to not read the third book, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, and to experience the story wrap-up in the theater when the third film is released in a few months. I have hope: I hear the third book is great, but there may be issues translating the tech-heavy aspects to the screen. We shall see.