The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson

I met this little number a while back for my birthday - or maybe Christmas actually hold on.... "To our dear Cait-... er I mean, To our dear Mrs Whittleby, Wishing you a very happy birthday and many happy returns, Love from Mummy and Daddy xx" Yep. Tharr be a birthday book. Mon Maman, la bibliothecaire - LIBRARIAN YOU PHILISTINE (and yes i can't work out how to do a stupid acute accent on this thing so for people out there who are SMARTY PANTSes, i am aware. shut your face.) picked this one out pour moi.

I actually quite enjoyed this book. Though let me say that I "quite enjoyed" all the other books I've reviewed so far- so let us all keep in mind that simply "liking" something has never diverted my attention from tearing the little bastard to shreds. And this simple philosophy I happily apply to all aspects of my life. Moving on.

The story starts out rather uninterestingly to be quite honest. Or rather, it is uninteresting for ME because I am only amused when a book contains explosions, sexual ambiguity (keeps me guessing) and tits. Oh yeah. Well not really I mean what heterosexual female wants to read about tits...actually I take that back. Tits it is. The tit-less reason I was uninterested by the beginning was because there they were just "ta-ta-ta-talkin' bout Blah, blah, blah" about industrial fraud. It was a concept I had no inclination to grasp at the time , only so much as to identify baddie versus goodie. Somehow the book then transitions into a completely unrelated crime drama. The main character- Somewhat Flawed Middle Aged Journalist (SFMAJ- pronounced as it's written) gets lured to a country estate by Eldery Decrepit (E-Dawg) in order to solve the mystery of his niece's death a million years ago in exchange for copious amounts of cash and sexual favours. So it then turns into a case not dissimilar to that crime show Cold Case but without the plastic surgery pin up girl detective. Instead there's an aspergery person (i think we're to assume she has an autism spectrum disorder) who goes about kickin' shit and doin' maths. Hardcore, baby. She's a hacker, so she's in the background just hackin' away. So SFMAJ starts investigating about. He looks at photos and just generally spends a lot of time lurking about, but all under the guise of writing E-Dawg's biography (he's like, a big deal) so that the family members WHO ARE ALL SUSPECTS don't find out and therefore gleefully pour their hearts out to complete strangers. Woo. So the crime takes hold and we spend the rest of the book romping about in the wilderness. Hacker has problems all of her own- she's been labelled by the government as mentally incapable or something and isn't allowed to have money or a job because then she might go on some sort of mental crime spree. Background is that she's apparently mentally unstable, but we actually get the impression that instead of being REALLY mentally unstable, she just had herself declared unfit for the fun of it. Hacker likes screwing with people, apparently. Hardcore.

Let's not kid ourselves. It isn't brilliant Dickenseque literature or anything of the sort. To be honest, it's another clever little Dan Brown. (Side note, I've only read 5/6th's of The Da Vinci Code. There weren't enough explosions or tits and everyone had a clearly defined gender role). But putting that unfortunate similarity aside, its a rollicking good time. It rambles about with the protagonist long enough to make you throw the book away in disgust, but is tricksy enough to make you want to pick it back up again. Then, the ending is both ludicrous and shockingly violent enough that the reader would never have been able to guess it. And I mean never, it's pretty ridiculous. In saying that, I do only feel that the ridiculous-ness is only part of it's charm, and there's a teensy part of me that believes that if the ending had been anything less than unbelievably outrageous, I would have been quite disappointed because I know this genre (trash-fiction, otherwise known as triction) and anything other than the standard plot line would have seen this book burning in little book hell. I didn't have to think too much about this one either. Unlike when I read The Good Earth, there are no lingering doubts in my mind about imagery or symbolism and I do not feel the need to whip out a text response.

In my own personal rating system I would give it a 9/10 for tram fiction and a 10/10 for blogging material but only a 1/10 for pretensious codswallop. There is, unfortunately, nothing pretensious here and you will, impress no one in stating that you've read this book. A black beret and a set of bongo drums would serve the purpose much better.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson, MacLehose Press, Great Britain, 2008

The Good Earth, Pearl Buck

Haven't posted in a while, busy with having a life, one could say. However, I shall grace you with my literary insights once more in order to distract myself from the battering of my poor little car from an onslaught of golf ball sized hail stones.

The Good Earth begins with this peasant dude, Wang Lung, living in a hut, getting ready to purchase himself a wife- in much the same fashion as you would purchase other family members- pigs, dogs, cows, waterbuffalo... He heads on down to the local self styled lord and is all, "Give me a wife, yo or I'll bust a cap in yo ass". And the local lord basically goes "Fuck you mother fucker fuckety fuckety fuckety ok here's a wife." But poor little Wang Lung can't have a pretty wife because he prefers his women STD free. So he gets himself this fugly chick who is sure to be clean and surely not hymen-ly-challenged because who else is going to touch her?

Then Wang Lung and his woman (who doesn't actually have a name for half the book) have babies and sow crops for the next three hundred pages. That's basically it. Oh sure, there are some things that happen in between like, they milk a cow or they eat some tofu, but pretty much they're fully obsessed with growing shit. There's also a famine, half the family dies blahblahblah but that all pales into comparison with the fact that "look, there's a crop, oh look, now it's growing". Wang Lung sure loves his crops. His sons? Yeah, crops don't hold the same fascination for them and they run off and spend their time visiting prositutes. Then Wang Lung buys himself another wife, a local prostitute, who then gets fat and refuses to bear him any children. Sigh. The trials of women, eh? He should have given them a good ol' fashioned beating. That would have learned them. Learned them good.

Now for the part where I write from the realms of reality, go:

This book is a thinking person's book (meaning unfortunately Edward the vampire doesn't make an appearance and there's no such thing as a "babysitter" let alone a "club" in peasant-land, China). The symbolism is there, but I'm too lazy to actually work out what the symbolism stands for, so maybe y'all should just read the book and tell me all about it. I'll give you a hint: water, land, crops- they're symbols for something. I'm going to say they're symbols of post modernist oppression in a post-Stalinist era. It's very well written, interesting; both simplistic and highly complex at the same time. There was apparently a touch of controversy upon it's publication in 1931 according to Wikipedia because Pearl S. Buck isn't actually Chinese and so what the hell would she know about Asians? Then there was some other controversy because Pearl S. Buck is a whitey and therefore sneaky and a liar. Or something. Whatever it was, my opinion is that the book is actually pretty darn accurate (from what I can gather, but how inaccurate can a person be when the entire book is basically: Mr and Mrs Peasant live in a hut and grow corn and eat corn") and seeing as she grew up in China (which in itself is interesting considering the period) yeah, I think she'd have an idea.

I would recommend this book and on my own personal scaling system, I would give it a "100,000 times better than Twilight" stamp of approval. "What does that even mean?" you ask? It means reading it didn't make me want to stab my eye with a fork, and despite the fact that the Wang Lung's wife spends the entire book without any sense of identity other than as free labour and as a baby-generating machine, it is probably less degrading to women and feminism on the whole than the entire Twilight enterprise.

The End.

The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck, Washington Square Press, 1931