The Girl Who Got Let Down By A Translator

The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The second installment in Larsson's Millennium trilogy is a disappointment. It's partly not his fault: the English translation is sloppy and unreadable in parts - probably a rush job due to the success of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in the Anglo market.

Larsson widens his cast of characters for the continuing adventures of hacker extraordinaire Lisbeth Salander and journalist Mikael Blomkvist, retaining most of the ones introduced in the first book while introducing new ones - police officers and members of a gang involved in sexual exploitation. Larsson just isn't very good in juggling so many characters and the plotting turns contrived and reliant on deus ex machina to keep it moving - a let down from the tight storyline in Dragon Tattoo. At over 500 pages, it feels like a stop gap for whatever is to come in the 3rd book.

One thing that also struck me in this second book is Larsson's lack of style. He's a great storyteller and very good at creating memorable characters (like Salander), but his writing is bland and unliterary (maybe a good thing for crime novels?) The language is quite cliché in parts, but again it could be the translator's fault. His subject matter is always fascinating though. He explores the growth of the extreme-right in Europe, racism, crime that reaches all the way to the top. His two main characters - the journalist Blomkvist who is almost a self-insertion and the intriguing and messed up hacker Salander - are the perfect companions to lead the reader into these dark worlds.

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