I recently watched the movie adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo with Xiaoqin, and I thought it to be a very compelling movie which followed the book quite closely. I'd picked up the entire trilogy while it was on sale, so it was time to re-read it to see what it was like.
To begin with, it's clear that Stieg Larsson an avid reader. Lots of books get mentioned as part of the casual description of scenes in the novel, and some of them are even English novels. The movie and the book match nearly exactly, with the movie able to make the mystery of the swap between Cecilia Vanger and Anita Vanger much more of a visual clue than the book was. The final search for Harriet Vanger was much more described in the book than in the movie, which treated it as an off-camera coda than the book did.
What books manage to do better than movies is to let you get into the heads of the characters, and here Larsson does a great job of depicting Liz Salander's thought processes as well as Blomkvist's. What I really enjoyed is that Blomkvist is a male protagonist who's explicitly not a sexist asshole, unlike many of the male characters in the book.
This book deserved to be a best-seller for its time. It still withstands a reread and I will go on to read the rest of the series or maybe even watch the movies, given how closely the movies followed this first book.
No comments:
Post a Comment