R.I.P. Stieg Larsson

So I have sat beside a woman on the GO train for the last two days and she is enthralled with her book "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo".  I now know two things about this woman.  First, she likes to audibly gasp in surprise while reading.  Second, she has shitty taste in books.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a horrible book.  But it is not the author's fault.

First, the writing is horrible.  It is awkward and just reads badly.  This is not the author's fault.  The book was originally written in Swedish so whoever translated it did a noticeably bad job.

Second, the beginning and ending of the book are boring.  They both deal with of all things a corporate takeover.  It was the opposite of riveting.  The one thing I love when reading is having to struggle to get into a book and then at the end having to wade through 50 pages of dry as sand details of a corporate takeover which has absolutely nothing to do with anything.   Page turning!  But this is also not the author's fault.   The manuscript was discovered fully completed after the author died. I suspect that there was a lack of editing of this work and the result shows.  Any competent editor would have hacked the ending and beginning to threads.

Third, the sex in the book is oddly personal.  The book is boring and then suddenly there is a scene of intense sexual imagery where a character gets raped or tortured.  It is oddly unsettling.  There is a scene in the book where there is literally a torture/sex dungeon in the basement of a quiet house in a little town in Sweden.  These scenes just pop out of nowhere. 

It also does not help that the main character (the man) is a cardboard cut out of the character whose only purpose seems to be to sleep with whatever female character is in the story.  It is hard not to think that if I had known Stieg Larsson I would have seen a lot of him in this character.  He literally wrote himself into the book - to have sex with imaginary characters he created.  Creepy!

Again this is not his fault.  A little snooping on the wikipedia site for the author shows that he witnessed the gang rape of a young girl when he was 15.  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is him literally trying to work out his feelings about this. 

The problems is that we have decided that his personal writings should be a bestseller and have lauded it as great fiction... when it clearly is not.

None of this is Stieg Larsson's fault, but unfortunately it is now his legacy.