A Book, and Another Book

My mother gave me her copy of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo because, she said, it was too violent. After I'd read a chapter or so I discovered it was also a great bestseller. Many people I knew had heard of it, and some admitted they had read it.

I found myself stumbling. This is partly because my fractured daily life leaves me little time for reading and no time for extended reading. By the time I picked it up again, I had forgotten some of the who and the what. But it's also fair to assume that if it was well written, I wouldn't have left it alone for so long. So I developed an attitude, which its status as a bestseller only sharpened. Too many popular books are crap, their popularity due to factors quite apart from the writing or the story's fundamentals. Subconsciously I looked for flaws, and I readily found them.

The worst flaw is distraction. Anything a writer lets fall into his narrative that jolts me out of the narrative is a serious flaw. Suddenly I am out of the story and instead in my bed holding a book, wondering What the fuck? This first happened when the protagonist took note of the temperature.

For reasons never explained, he noticed that the temperature at the train station was exactly 0°F. Since the book was originally written in Swedish by a Swede and is set in Sweden, I thought the use of °F needed an explanation. There was none. Also, 0°F is a fairly random and meaningless temperature. 0°C is not, but 0°F is. So evidently there had been a translation error. Some damnfool translator had replaced the C's with F's. This annoyed me and pretty soon I was seeing °F throughout the book. It did not help when the area of a room was given in square feet.

Sins of the translator, sure. But dead or alive, an author is carried by his translator; and it wasn't the translator but Stieg Larsson who chose to plod along providing a truckload of completely meaningless details. It's enough to note the protagonist sets up his laptop and to have nothing interesting to say about it. It's well over the fence to make sure we know it is an iBook, thus forever placing the story in the early 2000s; well into the pasture to bother telling us the name of an application he is using; and a barefoot step in cow shit to give the web address where that application can be purchased.

I'm not kidding. It's right there on page 168 of the paperback Vintage Crime / Random House edition: The web address for "full-value products that two men at the Royal Technical College had created and distributed as shareware for a pittance on the internet." This is not only the mistake of a person in the first flush of excitement at having found technology, it's thoroughly unprofessional. Almost as bad as Michael Crichton's attempt at describing use of a Unix system in Jurassic Park.

I've gotten another fifteen pages or so since then, mainly because I want to know about the violence. I haven't read any online reviews, but my eyes have passed over a couple, and enough words have popped out of the blur to suggest tantalizingly horrific scenes of serial rape and murder. That probably explains the book's popularity. I'm not really big on that stuff; but I hate to miss such an author's one moment of creativity and want to see what happens.

But then something did happen. A friend of mine lent me a book.

It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. I realized somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn't sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it's all you've got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.

Hello? Have me met? No? We must correct this.

I was two-timing in no time. At every reading opportunity I had to decide which to read. One can be polyliterate, of course, and relate to many books in parallel; but it's not always possible to avoid comparisons. Not when one of the books simply does not deliver, and the other is so very, very enticing. Indeed, as this line of thought suggests, very soon I ran into somone I thought I knew.

The clue to everything a man should love and fear in her was there, right from the start, in the ironic smile that primed and swelled the archery of her full lips. There was pride in that smile, and confidence in the set of her fine nose. Without understanding why, I knew beyond question that a lot of people would mistake her pride for arrogance, and confuse her confidence with impassivity. I didn't make that mistake. My eyes were lost, swimming, floating free in the shimmering lagoon of her steady, even stare. Her eyes were large and spectacularly green. It was the green that trees are, in vivid dreams. It was the green that the sea would be, if the sea were perfect.

Tattoo girl still has potential, one must admit. But this one's for real, and I'm not sure I can really go back.