An oldie but a goodie – Victoria at Eve’s Alexandria reviews Girl with a Dragon Tattoo. Having read the book, I couldn’t agree more with the below –

“Perhaps that is what attracts readers to Larsson.  It is not his labyrinthine plotting or cunning, but his startling simplicity.  There is no mystery in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; there is just savage, terrifying, ordinary violence.  It is a revelation no more or less obvious than its other proposition,  that international corporations are exploitative and that financial markets are corrupt.  It is an idea we are familiar with, but it is a slumbering sort of idea.  It snoozes away in the back of our minds, and if prompted we repeat it without really confronting it.   The point Larsson makes is that we must confront it.  We are all like Blomkvist, in the midst of real crimes we spend our time reading crime novels.  We’re horrified by the fiction but ignorant of the realities (and thus implicated in its perpetuation).  Shame on us, he says, we should be more honest with ourselves – this isn’t fiction, its the real thing.  To write a novel with such a ‘message’ is both the height of irony and of moral outrage.” RT

Tagged: book review, books, crime fiction, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo review, Stieg Larsson, thrillers, violence against women