The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

In spite of an increasingly busy schedule, I got through Stieg Larsson's final installment of his Millenium trilogy (and the last book he ever wrote ever) in just about a week.

For those who've been waiting for the paperback edition: it comes out next month.

We pick up right where the last book left off, with Lisbeth Salander and her father hospitalized, and Ron Niedermann, the seemingly invincible giant, on the run from the cops. Salander's off the hook from the murders she was originally suspected of, but faces a plethora of criminal charges, including the attempted murder of her father. She accepts Mikael Blomkvist's sister, Annika Giannini, as her lawyer, and prepares for trial while in the hospital. Meanwhile, Blomkvist works together with Lisbeth's old boss, Armansky, to investigate what he dubs "the Zalachenko Club"--the group of men within the Secret Police who aided and abetted Zalachenko's crimes that went unpunished. They enlist the help of a division within the Secret Police after a time. Meanwhile, the remaining members of the Zalachenko Club plot to rid themselves of Salander and Blomkvist forever--and preserving their abhorrent secrets.

Since Hornet's Nest picks up from the second book, there's no need for a plot setup, and the story gets going right away. While most of the plot occurs within a hospital during the first and second parts, there's no shortage of intrigue taking place within and outside of the complex. The plot also moves breathlessly by, with sharp twists and turns throughout. It moves so fast you hardly know it's already the climax (which, by the way, is a little disappointing for fans of the last book's violent climax). My biggest issues with this final book lie in the ending--everything resolves itself much too quickly. For example, Niedermann disappears entirely in the second half of the book, only to finally turn up again in the epilogue and be defeated by Salander--all in the space of less than 20 pages. And maybe it's because I'm not sure what the differences between Swedish and American criminal law are, but I thought she was acquitted of all charges much too soon--she was released practically the same day.

The best part of this book was the immense focus on Salander--Larsson has finally conceded that she's the real star of the series. Unlike Blomkvist, she does grow and change as a result of her experiences: begrudgingly more accepting of authority (though not by much), a gradual (slight) rejection of violence as a means of solving problems, and a realization that there are people whom she in fact does care about.

Now that the series is over, I'd have to say the best part of the trilogy overall was Lisbeth Salander herself--she's a heroine unlike any other that's been seen before in the mystery/thriller genre that I know of--ruthless, righteous, and asocial. She's also the character that fully develops over the three books--most of the rest remain the same as always--and her strangeness invites us to root for her, even though she has brutally punished the men who have ruined her. In the end, she moves past these more vicious tendencies and moves on with her life.

Nevertheless, I think this may have been my favorite of the trilogy. I give it the same rating as the second: 4 out of 5 stars.

The Girl Who Played with Fire

First Catching Fire (The Hunger Games' second installment), now The Girl Who Played with Fire. There's something about Fire that makes it a great thematic element for a sequel, apparently.

We meet bad-girl Salander and the intrepid Blomkvist about a year after the first book ended; Salander has been traveling the world, spending the billions she stole from Wennerstrom, and Blomkvist has been enjoying his newfound fame. Shortly after Salander returns, and after Blomkvist has signed on to publish an expose about the sex trade in Sweden, its author and his wife are killed unexpectedly--and quite brutally mangled. Salander's prints are found on the weapon, which belonged to her former guardian (also found dead), so she becomes the prime suspect in the police investigation. Blomkvist of course launches his own investigation, as well as her former boss Armansky. What seemed like an open-and-shut case turns into an increasingly tangled web of intrigue involving the secret police and a motorcycle gang.

There actually isn't much to say about Stieg Larsson's sequel to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo that doesn't also apply to the first--especially not without giving a lot of the plot away. In many ways it's more exciting than the original. People are actually murdered and tortured in this one, and our protagonist narrowly escapes with her life in the climatic ending. It's also funnier--the police investigation and media blitz, involving people who know nothing about Salander, are at times farcical--they sometimes come to crazy conclusions, and the whole "lesbian satanist cult" thing is often brought up until things get serious. You will get angry at this book several times--not only because of the gross misperceptions of Salander as a cold-blooded psychopath (she's a righteous cold-blooded psychopath) and the horrible violence committed against her and her allies, but also because the immense number of jerks and assholes in this crop. 

It also moves a hella lot more quickly--whereas in Dragon Tattoo it took 300 pages before it became sustainably interesting (rather than a brief burst of excitement for like 5 pages followed by over 50 pages of boring), it took less than 200 in Fire. As expected, we learn a lot more about Lisbeth Salander's past, including "all the Evil" that remains as a gap in her record. With every new revelation there's a new twist, as both Blomkvist and Salander try to solve the murders separately, and with little help from one another. When it ends, with no denouement, there are still questions to be answered. In a lot of ways, this sequel was like a lot of other second-chapters in trilogies: it gets to the action more quickly since we don't need to be introduced to the main characters, we learn some new revelations about the most mysterious character, and we go down a rabbit hole of intrigue that unearths more mysteries than it solves. There's a big burst of action towards the very end, leaving little to no room for a resolution, hanging on a cliff. If you read and watch a lot of trilogies (as I have), they tend to contain these peculiarities of structure that differ from a one-shot. Some movie trilogies make a lame attempt at a resolution, but there's still something left unresolved at the end.

That said, The Girl Who Played with Fire does some things right that many sequels get wrong. The characters are consistent (Salander is still her lovably ruthless self, Blomkvist still insufferably diligent and brown-nosy), there's nothing that comes up that directly contradicts something that happened in the first book (and I HATE that), and while Salander's survival at the end is highly improbable (probably impossible), most of the escalating action isn't. I daresay it's an improvement to the original: more exciting, more Salander, less romance, more mystery. I got through this in much less time, too: while Dragon Tattoo took me 3 weeks, Fire took only 10 days. 4 out of 5 stars.

Now, on to the final installment!

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Or, as the Swedish title translates, Men Who Hate Women.

I'm a latecomer to this one, as the English translation to this Swedish thriller came out like three years ago. But I've never been big on mystery and crime fiction--the likes of Grisham, Patterson, and JD Robb don't interest me at all. So, although Dragon Tattoo was a bestseller, the fact that it was crime fiction in fact turned me off a little. There are two fiction genres that I can't really get into, for many reasons: romance and mystery/crime. I like a good romance, and I like a good thriller, but if they take place in the so-called "real world," with all their formulas and conventions, I have a hard time suspending my disbelief. I like Law and Order as much as the next person, but READING that shit is so BORING!

I changed my mind about Dragon Tattoo when I first saw the trailer for David Fincher's adaptation. Suffice to say, it looked really cool. So I decided to read the book.

And, well, I liked it, but it certainly didn't get me as obsessed as Harry Potter or even the Hunger Games, which was 100 times more violent than this adult novel. Though the violence depicted is no less horrifying.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson, for those of you who don't already know, follows the story of investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist shortly after his conviction of libel. Wanting to get back at the man who slammed him with the suit and restore his reputation, he agrees to work for the wealthy retired businessman Henrik Vanger, writing a family chronicle and searching for new evidence regarding Harriet Vanger's disappearance, if any can be found. While he thinks this is a cold case, he does stumble upon new evidence, leading him to ever-more dangerous territory, and he eventually enlists the help of Lisbeth Salander, a rebellious idiot savant of sorts, an expert hacker and possessor of great intelligence, even if her social skills are lacking. Though Blomkvist is the ostensible protagonist, Salander is the real star, with her distinctive look, smarts, and mysterious past. She's the one with real secrets, which we learn precious little of in the first installment of the trilogy, and the real reason why anyone has bothered to read the next two--her story is the one left unfinished at the end.

The story is easy enough to follow, and the language dryly straightforward--almost excruciatingly so; Larsson often goes through the mundane details of a character's day with bland precision, summarizing unimportant events in whole pages, and getting vague when it comes to a foreshadowy event--for example, deliberately withholding the identity of a particular place or target until the end. The only bits remotely confusing were the strange ubiquitousness of certain British-sounding terms (such as "blanched" and "draughty") and the consistent use of characters' last names to identify them (which, as an American used to identifying characters by first name, was tough to get used to). While Blomkvist and Salander don't meet until Chapter 18, there are plenty of developments that perk up the story as it chugs along those first 300 pages. I was certainly intrigued and entertaining enough to finish and even pick up the next book.

However, I had a few problems with Dragon Tattoo. For one, it took a while to get to the meat of the story (see mention of painfully detailed unimportant events above). And for another, the sexual exploits of the characters, including Blomkvist and Salander's affair, kind of grossed me out. Of course I anticipated sex, even violent sex (as the books focus on violence against women--though of course this sex is shown as abhorrent), to be depicted in an adult novel, I was weirded out by the fact that Salander and Blomkvist in particular viewed just about everyone of the opposite sex as a potential sex partner, regardless of age. While this may be because Swedish culture and European culture in general is more liberal about sex than the States, I just don't get the thinking about sex so much. I also am weirded out by relationships that feature a big age difference (like Salander and Blomkvist's), and their relationship started out randomly--almost arbitrarily. I also take offense to the assumption that any two characters of the opposite sex who work together will ultimately sleep together (which seems to be the case in Dragon Tattoo) regardless of whether they would even be attracted to each other in real life. The resulting breakup of Salander and Blomkvist didn't move me at all, since I didn't see them staying together anyway. Most importantly, I didn't read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for a love story. I wanted thrills, not sexual tension. Thankfully, it didn't overshadow the real story (though I'm not so sure about the final book, when most of these romances resolve).

On the other hand, like many good mysteries, I didn't see the ending coming--though I did suspect that Harriet was in fact alive somewhere. The climatic chapters were the ones in which I just couldn't put the book down, and the bad guys are sort-of beaten--though perhaps not in the ideal way. And of course, a few live to see another day--and bring our heroes grief in the next two volumes, for sure. While I don't give a shit about the romantic subplots, I'm interested in what the next two books have in store for Blomkvist and Salander--and what Salander's past looked like. Three out of five stars.

Movie Review: Young Adult

Now, I don't usually go to the movies very often, but for some reason I went a lot this year. I've seen a total of five movies in theatres this year--NEW movies, too. I haven't seen that many new movies in theatres since I was a kid. Maybe not even then: come to think of it, this is probably a new record for me. Anyway, a lot of the movies I saw garnered a lot of hype--Black Swan, Harry Potter, 50/50, and Melancholia were all much-talked-about. I liked them all--with Melancholia being the unequivocally best one of the bunch--but none had surprised me quite like Young Adult did.

Young Adult is the second collaboration between screenwriter Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman, their first being Juno. Juno was cute and quirky, occupying a hyperrealistic world of ultra-hip jargon and unconventional romance. Young Adult, on the other hand, ventures into much more sobering (pun intended) territory. The protagonist of Young Adult, Mavis Gary is a recently divorced (and apparently depressed) thirtysomething woman struggling to write the final novel in the young-adult series that she took over as author. While procrastinating, she comes across an invitation to her high school boyfriend's baby's naming ceremony, and after thinking about it all day, she decides to head back to her hometown to win him back.

It's pretty plain that Mavis is destined for failure early on: in her early encounters with Buddy, he's cheerful and kinda hokey, and while she keeps on discussing the past as if things haven't changed, he clearly has changed, accepting responsibility as a husband and father in what seems to be a pretty solid, egalitarian relationship. As much as the laughingstock nerd-turned-confidante in Patton Oswalt's character warns that she is making a big mistake, Mavis continues down into this marriage-destroying mission until it ends in tears--that being her own.

Mavis' reputation as a Queen Bee is evident through her blindly selfish pursuit of her high school sweetheart, and she's pretty mean to just about everyone but Buddy Slade--unless she's pretending to be nice. Yet she's become a pitiful character, slaving over a YA series that she can't even call her own, drinking heavily almost every night and spending her days watching TV (or else getting done up to see Buddy). It's obvious that she is suffering from depression, alcoholism, or (most likely) both. However, no one but Patton Oswalt's character, even her parents (in a telling scene, Mavis admits outright that she's an alcoholic, with her mother only responding "No you're not"--and not in a nice way), recognizes this. As much of a trainwreck her life becomes, it's hard not to hope that she does learn and grow from the experience. In the end it appears that she gets back on her feet--the novel, at least, is finished--but it's otherwise ambiguous.

Young Adult contrasts sharply with Juno, not only in the darker tone and heightened drama, but also in its realism. Music played a minimal role in creating atmosphere, though one song did serve as a crucial forewarning to Mavis sometime during the film. The dialogue is more natural than clever. Images, which are a large part of the film medium, are repeated and emphasized (such as Mavis lying in bed the morning after with a sleeping shirtless guy, unimpressed). The dialogue was very spot-on for real life, and of course the acting was great--especially by Charlize Theron and Patton Oswalt. Buddy and Beth Slade seemed a little too content and cheerful (at least until towards the end), though perhaps they were exaggerating their contentedness on purpose, as some are wont to do in the presence of exes. The scenes leading up to the final one are painful to watch, especially for those sensitive to secondhand embarrassment. Nor does the ending tie itself up nicely. This is not a typical comedy--in fact, it's more of a comedy-drama (or, as I prefer it, a "tragicomedy"). Which was not what I at all expected.

Cody said in an interview with NPR that she had sought to turn several rom-com tropes on their head--and she accomplished just that. For one, it's just a comedy--I did not think of it as a rom-com in the slightest. The romantic arc is more of the subplot to the real story going on, which is Mavis' desperation to return to the time when she was happiest. The possibilities aren't tied up in a neat little knot at the end--instead, they spread out into the imagination of the audience. Naturally, as someone who has filled in the blanks in many a movie in my head countless times, I like ambiguity when it's done right. While I'm generally lukewarm towards Diablo Cody, I think she's outdone herself with Young Adult. Good on all involved, in fact. I give it a 4 out of 5 stars.

"Downtown Owl": the Humor of Small-Town Strangeness

I'm back! More or less...

Back at the Boston Book Festival, I picked up one of Chuck Klosterman's books (not the new one... you think I'm made out of money?): his first novel, Downtown Owl. The title and premise were intriguing. I started reading it over Thanksgiving, and went from enjoying it thoroughly to being very annoyed with it--though the annoyance lay with the characters and their disagreeable thoughts and actions. Really, the residents of Owl are quite a pathetic bunch. Not to mention that the typeface got on my nerves--which was the same one as his new book. (the REAL reason I didn't buy it; take note, Simon & Schuster!)

The novel mainly follows three characters in the months leading up to an apocalyptic blizzard in a small town in North Dakota: a high schooler named Mitch, a novice teacher, Julia; and an old man, Horace. The three never cross paths, nor do they all die in the deadly storm (only two of them do). Each has their own foibles--Mitch's is depression, Julia's alcoholism, and Horace, resignation--and through their circles we get a glimpse of the foibles of the other residents of Owl, which seem to be pretty much the same problems. While the story is delicately strung with humor, the overarching tone of the tale is one of hopelessness. Ironically enough, the only one left with any hope at the end is the old man, whose life is filled with real sorrow and regret. Perhaps this is why I liked him the most: even after all he'd been through, he still managed to go about life, and as much as he might like to die, he has the will (and wit) to live. Oh, and it takes place in 1983-84--though I don't think it makes much of a difference.

I didn't find Downtown Owl to be nearly as over-the-top as I expected it to be; for the most part, it was as realistic as you'd expect a small-town novel to be, for someone who has never lived in such an isolated area. The most fantastic thing was the intensity of the storm, and that it seemed to have been summoned by sociopathic high schooler Cubby Candy before a fight that was discussed so much its occurrence became an inevitability. And it had the humor of despair, a dark and desperate humor that rarely prompts one to laugh out loud (I did a few times). I was faintly reminded of David Foster Wallace, only less eloquent. Most of the narration came from the characters' minds, who often projected their ideas onto other people (Mitch being the most prominent example, with his animosity towards the football coach). Of the three, Julia was the most pathetic character, a woman who hadn't bothered trying to direct herself in life, and naturally wound up stuck in the middle of nowhere.

The last 40 pages, beginning with a brief glimpse into Cubby Candy's perspective, are when Klosterman really shines as a storyteller: in short increments, we learn the fates of Mitch, Julia, and Horace the night of the storm. In fact, I would have preferred that the novel's entire time progression crawled along that slowly--aside from football season, there was no reason not to start in the middle of winter. (plus the football could have been flashbacks--which it mostly was anyway). There's not much time for navel-gazing, and the events are jarring and idiosyncratically depicted. The old man is the only one who makes it out alive, in an ironic twist, but predictable. (As in: having the old man die at the end is predictable, as he's old, so to have him not die would not; and considering that most of the other characters are young, it's even ironic; and considering the ironic nature of much of the novel, it is therefore predictable--however, the predictability of plot-advancing events has no bearing on the quality of this novel)

In spite of that, the story ends with what I can only call a punchline--possibly. It ends with a fake news clipping about the death toll of the storm, focusing on the most prominent victim: a football player nicknamed "Grendel," and Cubby Candy's foe in the fight that had been so exhaustingly discussed throughout Mitch's part of the book. While the other victims are not named, so it's possible that Cubby died, too, it's also possible that he lived--and therefore won the hypothetical matchup between him and Grendel. He literally killed him. Needless to say, I cracked a smile upon that realization.

I was also reminded of Annie Proulx, though not so much in the writing than of the setting and that one story about the steer (or was it a deer?). Try as I might, I kept seeing the men in the bars Julia frequented as cowboys, even though they weren't. While Klosterman's prose is not similar to Proulx's, the similar settings makes Downtown Owl somewhat like a townie version of Close Range, focusing on the township part of isolated Midwestern life--and more depressing.  Oddly, though, I wasn't bored, certainly not as much as the other characters were, perhaps because of my spectator role in their suffering. Anyway, I commend Klosterman for presenting the dull and hopeless side of such a life, and injecting humor into it was in fact a necessity, and not a choice. I'd say.... 3 out of 5 stars. I'm pretty neutral on this one.

Announcement

Reader, for several reasons that I will not get into here, I have not had the time or the energy to create material that can thusly be posted here. Maybe if/when things work out I'll be back in business.

However, I am currently updating two tumblr blogs that can always use suggestions and contributors.

http://musicalmagical.tumblr.com/

http://reviewsashaikus.tumblr.com/

If you're on Tumblr, follow me! Maybe I'll follow you in return. :)

"After the Apocalypse": A Review

One of the books I bought at the Boston Book Fest was a new release from a local publisher of alternative fiction, Small Beer Press: After the Apocalypse by Maureen F. McHugh. Being a relatively short collection of stories, it was manageable with my busy schedule. Stories of the apocalypse--and the aftermath--always intrigue me, if in a morbid way, so I thought I'd enjoy it. And I must say, I've never read any science fiction like it.

The cover art's cool, too.

It's not just that it's short fiction (most of the sci-fi that I've read has been long-form). McHugh's stories focus on a very small social group of humans, whether it's fragments of a family or a group of diffident individuals, affected by a catastrophic event--an apocalypse of sorts, but more along the lines of Junot Diaz's definition in a Boston Review article published earlier this year. Not the kind of apocalypse you'd expect. In the zombie story, "The Naturalist," zombies have been confined to a small area in Ohio, where they send convicts to be punished. In another story, an avian flu epidemic in Asia decimates China's population, creating ripe conditions for capitalist greed to thrive, at the expense of survivors. In another, a dirty bomb goes off in Baltimore, killing countless civilians and triggering a teenager's dissociative personality disorder. Most of the stories take place in the aftermath of such events as a disease epidemic, economic crash, and terrorist attacks. These are only minor compared to the popular definition of apocalypse. In fact, the only story that comes close to such a definition is the title story, caused by a combo of terrorism, economic disaster, and sweeping electrical failures (all exacerbated by a corrupt and inefficient government, no doubt).

Most of the reader's knowledge of these events is confined to the characters, who are all everyday people, so they'd be hard-pressed to know the whole story behind what happened. They're mechanics, factory workers, store managers, and unemployed--the closest one gets to a career typical of the sci-fi genre is an entry-level computer programmer. In this way, McHugh's stories fit the sci-fi elements neatly into a microcosmic realism. Some stories, like the purely realistic "Honeymoon," are barely sci-fi at all, the events and time period only slightly out-of-sync with contemporary reality. The result is stories that are worthy of just about any literary tradition, challenging the conventional view of the sci-fi genre. These characters are among the most developed and diverse I've found in sci-fi, as  characterization in the genre often takes a back seat to concept. These stories are no more unrealistic than any other work of fiction--just because a deadly chicken disease or sweeping southwestern drought haven't happened, doesn't mean they won't. They certainly can happen, under certain circumstances. Needless to say, this realistic element (due in part to the character-driven nature of the stories and no need for world-building) made the stories incredibly moving and engaging, and I wished some of them were longer. "Special Economics" had nice pacing for the most part, then rushed through the plot towards the end, and I wanted to see more of what happened in "Going to France" (like, why were the flying people going to France, of all places?). Of course, not all the stories charmed me so. A couple of the stories, like "Kingdom of the Blind," got bogged down in nebulous technical jargon that strained my comprehension of the plot, and distracted me from the story. McHugh is sometimes gratuitous with exposition and character description in a way most good writers are not, baldly inserting brief character descriptions that disrupt the flow of the narrative. The averageness of the characters made them interesting, but frustrating for someone who's more interested in their world than they are. Still, I kept reading, interested in the circumstances and how it would all end. Hell, I even cared about some of the characters.

Though there probably should have been at least one other proofreader looking at it, since I found a few embarrassing errors in the text. But since the book's coming from a small indie publisher, it's an unfortunate side-effect of a small budget. Some of the stories I was hard-pressed to define as "apocalyptic"--though it's not just the end of the world. The most literary moment in the collection occurs in the last story, with a July's People-style conclusion. It also sums up all the preceding stories, too, in a way. These characters seek freedom from their suffering, like we all do; it's just that their circumstances compel them to take it up a notch. And that's how fiction makes life more interesting. The apocalypse, whatever its shape or form, is brought to us, as real as any 9/11-style disaster. And as profound.

Overall, I give it 3.5 out of 5 stars, with my favorite stories being "Special Economics," "Useless Things," "The Effect of Centrifugal Forces," and "After the Apocalypse."