Monthly Archives: October 2017

Perfect victim: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Posted on by under Reviews

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (whose original Swedish title, Män som hatar kvinnor, translates to Men Who Hate Women) lives far beyond the confines of its nearly 600 pages because, as sensationalist as a few of Larsson’s scenes are, we know them to be real torments in this present world. Sadists exist. They hide their hobby well. The world goes on. Stieg Larsson’s thriller is a punch in the face that we understand that reality.

Girl with the Dragon TattooThe Girl with the Dragon Tattoo · Stieg Larsson · 2005
Reg Keeland translation · Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2011 · 590 pages, paperback

♠

Henrik Vanger, CEO of Vanger Corporation, hires Mikael Blomkvist, a reporter reeling from a recent libel conviction, to look into his niece Harriet’s disappearance. It’s a case that has tried the patience of the investigating cops (and others in the Vanger family) and that has become Henrik’s obsession for the past 40 years. Blomkvist pokes around in the Vanger family chronicle, at first merely indulging Henrik his obsession, but bit by bit he uncovers new evidence until everything just blows up toward the end and Larsson shows us what he’s capable of writing.

Harriet’s disappearance is only one part to the crime, and it’s a crime that just won’t quit.

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Interlude: end of Q3 at the Masthead

Posted on by under End of Quarter: books reviewed, Uncategorized

The Masthead is closing out its third quarter! A quick look at the past three months:

Books reviewed: 7
Translated fiction: 2 (from 2 languages: French and Spanish)
New-to-me authors: 4 (Forster, Benioff, Sijie and García Márquez)
Oldest book: Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905)
Newest book: Benioff’s City of Thieves (2009)
Longest book: King’s It (1153 pages)
Shortest book: García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold (120 pages)

A pithy recap of each book read and reviewed here since July 15:

A Room with a View
Deadeye Dick 2
City of Thieves

A Room with a View, EM Forster
Please, just say what you think, not what your friends think! A novel that lambasts with humor our need to be exactly like everyone else (bonus: excellent views of Italy)

Deadeye Dick, Kurt Vonnegut
Copious amounts of guilt for stupid mistakes and twists of fate. This one lacks in substance until the end – a patient read, but stick with it.

Where Angels Fear to Tread, EM Forster
Do you keep your in-law’s burdens even when the blood relation dies and the in-law takes a new (and reproachable) husband? Scandal, prejudice and rue grow out of a humble Italian town and creep their way across the Channel into upright English homes.

City of Thieves, David Benioff
A compact story of Leningrad; emotive and original, adventurous and brutal, but brought down a notch by its gratuitous sex jokes and off-the-mark diction.

It
Balzac and the Little Chines Seamstress
Chronicle of a Death Foretold

It, Stephen King
A tightrope walk along the “kid line” of horror and imagination

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie
Simple prose delivers the irony in China’s re-education program with a cute (not cutesy, but cute) love story to boot

Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel García Márquez
The townspeople – every last one of them it seemed – knew who was to be murdered and knew who the murderers were but not one of them did anything. A novel about passivity in the face of crime.

Q1 wrap-up
Q2 wrap-up
Browse the review archive

Wedding bells, they ring a death knell

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Santiago Nasar was already dead when they came for him. He was lost in the hubbub of one celebration melting into another. How could this murder have happened when everyone knew it would? Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold contains the death of a man, the guilt of a town and the machismo that celebrates one sin at the behest of another.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Chronicle of a Death Foretold · Gabriel García Márquez · 1982
Gregory Rabassa translation · Vintage, 2003 · 120 pages, paperback

♠

The revelries of the previous night’s nuptials pour into the wee hours of the morning like so much cane liquor, and the sex is a release, and the sex is without its agonies and now realization dawns and the flows of revelry and purity are stoppered by a mute pause.

There’s no blood on the bedsheet.

And it’s rage as Bayardo San Roman returns his deflowered virgin to the house of her parents. And now the noise is not wedding bells, but instead the clangor of the docks that travels inland as the five o’clock hour wanes. The whistles scream and the bishop’s arrival is sounded in the square and Santiago Nasar is dead.

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