Mannen die vrouwen haten (Millennium, #1) in Read a book from each country

Jan 18, 2010 Amy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I was completely unprepared for this novel. I had seen it on bestseller lists and read magazines where the reviewers were completely wild over it. I thought the book couldn’t possibly live up to the hype. I even thought, with dread, that it may just be some sort of Twilight hysteria thing. As usual, I was completely wrong.

This novel is set in Sweden and you jump in to an immediately fast paced plot, with lots of twists and surprises. It’s a mainstream novel now, but is surprisingly deep. It tou

I was completely unprepared for this novel. I had seen it on bestseller lists and read magazines where the reviewers were completely wild over it. I thought the book couldn’t possibly live up to the hype. I even thought, with dread, that it may just be some sort of Twilight hysteria thing. As usual, I was completely wrong.

This novel is set in Sweden and you jump in to an immediately fast paced plot, with lots of twists and surprises. It’s a mainstream novel now, but is surprisingly deep. It touches on journalism and ethics, business and economic theories, and then builds in an in-depth family mystery with a huge cast of characters. You can trust no one, and you can’t even pretend to know what happens next.

Great plot aside, the novel introduces two very intriguing characters. Most people seem to love Lisbeth, and she is unique, sassy, resourceful and tough. But I actually found the journalist Mikael even more interesting and deep. He’s not your typical “lead” male detective: while he is an obvious ladies man, he is also a good friend. He can keep a secret, and he isn’t pushy or demanding. He sets up situations in order to see how a character responds, and is still shocked and distressed by the horrors that occur. In some ways he is almost child-like in his innocence, and yet by way of his business history he is not naïve. He appears to have money and status but needs neither to exist: he’s simple and direct without having any affectations.

Part of the genius (yes, I said genius!) is that the novel works from both of their viewpoints, and lets each of their personalities exist, rather than one character simply assessing the other and defining them to the reader.

That being said, I was surprised at some of the turns the novel took in that some main characters that are referred to heavily are never fleshed out, and some of the situations that took place (mostly involving illegal wiretapping and computer hacking) were so easily done without incident, too easily and quickly to be believable. Some of the precursors to extraordinary events unfolded with crisp writing and suspense, but the denouement seemed choppy.

My suggestion to any reader of it would be to turn the pages slowly and savor it, because you’ll be so sorry to see it end. You’ll also want to be sure to install heavy duty encryption on your computer as soon as possible, and you’ll never read another article in The Economist in the same way again.
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Feb 20, 2010 Mary rated it liked it · review of another edition

I read the first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and actually read it for a book club. The thing that struck us the most was the entire perception of sexuality - only choices seemed to be sadism or a totally consensual, no strings attached approach - i.e., the way the lead character easily slept with several women and vice versa, especially his co-publisher, and both seemed to think nothing of the fact that she was married to someone else. There seemed to be no room for sexuality as part I read the first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and actually read it for a book club. The thing that struck us the most was the entire perception of sexuality - only choices seemed to be sadism or a totally consensual, no strings attached approach - i.e., the way the lead character easily slept with several women and vice versa, especially his co-publisher, and both seemed to think nothing of the fact that she was married to someone else. There seemed to be no room for sexuality as part of a greater relationship. We also were bothered that in both of the sadism cases that there was not a greater resolution - the girl with the dragon tattoo gets her freedom, but who knows what happens to the next woman, and the families of the women who were tortured and killed over decades are not informed, because there seems to be no point to disrupting Martin's family since he is now dead.

I do wonder how much of the interest in this series is just voyeurism. While I do think this was much better written than most whodunits, I don't think I will bother with the two sequels.

We were also interested in the title change - in Swedish the title of the book is something like Men Who Hate Women. We do think The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is much more appealing, even though the book is largely not about her. Overall the positioning seemed to be well-placed for the summer beach book crowd. Incidentally, just about the time we were reading this another book came out, review pasted in below. Sweden is sounding like an unsavory place, and/or sick sex sells (by the seashore?)

The un-Stockholm syndrome: a sex slave's revenge
By Patrick Anderson
Monday, October 19, 2009
BOX 21
By Anders Roslund and
Börge Hellström
Sarah Crichton/Farrar Straus Giroux. 393 pp. $26
At the start of this gripping Swedish novel, two 17-year-old Lithuanian girls, Lydia and Alena, fall into an insidious but widely practiced trap: They agree to journey to Stockholm to accept what they're told are high-paying jobs. Instead, they are kidnapped, repeatedly raped and beaten, imprisoned and forced into prostitution. An early scene shows Lydia, after three years of captivity, greeting a customer who demands his weekly ritual of sadistic sex. She submits -- she even smiles -- because to do otherwise is to be beaten once again. Required to serve 12 customers each day, she survives because "she was not there, she had absented herself. Here she was just a face with no body." She imagines herself elsewhere, singing a song she learned as a child.
In recent years, a good deal of media attention has been focused on sex slavery, and international human-rights organizations have condemned the practice, but it has rarely been more graphically portrayed than in this novel. The Swedish brothel-keepers pay the kidnappers "three thousand euros [$4,500:] for every teenage girl shipped from east to west." The customers pay 500 kronor, about $70, for sex, which means that each woman brings in about $840 a day, or $25,000 a month. The painful question the reader asks, as the novel begins, is whether Lydia and Alena can possibly escape their hellish fate.
In fact, they do escape, whereupon the story takes a number of surprising twists. Alena wants only to return home to Lithuania, but Lydia is obsessed with taking revenge on the Swedish man she holds most responsible for their ordeal. Although badly beaten, she carries out an elaborate scheme that involves taking hostages and using them to lure her enemy into a trap. We readers don't know exactly how to respond as the young victim is reborn as a terrorist, but it's an exciting sequence, even if rather improbable. To Lydia, her actions have a simple logic: "When someone has been kicked around for long enough, there comes a time when she has to kick back."
The story carries us into Stockholm's dark underbelly, where we meet, among others, a professional hit man and a heroin addict he's been hired to kill. But mostly we get to know the veteran detective Ewert Grens, for this is his story as much as it is Lydia's. Grens is first seen visiting an institutionalized woman who was his lover before she was attacked by a criminal and left in a coma. He's been celibate since, visiting her weekly and otherwise dedicating himself to his work. His only other pleasure comes in playing tapes of the popular Swedish singer Siw Malmkvist and imagining that he is dancing with her and holding her close.
Grens and other officials are well aware of the sex slavery in Stockholm and frustrated by their inability to do much about it because the crimes take place behind locked doors, the women are so easily obtained and the brothel-keepers often buy police protection. A Lithuanian diplomat tells Grens: "Several thousand young women. . . . From Eastern Europe. Hundreds of thousands of lives! That was the extent of it, the illegal sex trade with the West. Bought and sold as we speak. More and more. Our girls! Our women!" The diplomat continues: "In my country, in Lithuania, trading in narcotics, say, is a serious crime. Heavy sentences are passed. Long, harsh punishments are meted out. But trading in people, in young women, that's risk-free. In Lithuania, pimps are hardly ever punished. No one is sentenced; no one gets a spell in prison." Before the novel ends, Grens will suffer a crisis of conscience that arises from secrets he learns about the sex trade.
"Box 21" (the title refers to a storage locker where Lydia hides valuables) is no sermon, but the authors make their outrage clear. Theirs is an unusual partnership. Roslund is a television newsman, and Hellström is an ex-criminal who now works with young offenders. They've written five books together. This one was a bestseller in Europe, as was another recent Swedish thriller, Stieg Larsson's "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo"; the publisher no doubt hopes that "Box 21" can equal that novel's great success in this country.
Both are fine novels, but they're quite different. There's an elegance to "Dragon Tattoo" that concerns not so much a crime as a mystery: Was a long-missing girl dead, or had she run away? "Box 21" is a grittier novel and contains ugly scenes of forced sex. "Tattoo" managed a happy ending; this one ends mostly in despair. But if the nasty realities of the sex trade don't scare you off, "Box 21" is a harsh but vivid reminder of just how brutal men can be.
Anderson can be reached at mondaythrillers@aol.com. ...more

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Nov 11, 2010 Diana rated it liked it · review of another edition

Couldn't wait to get my hands on this book to find out what all the buzz was about. However, it was way too violent and immoral for my taste. It did haunt me so I have to give it kudos for that. I did like the character of the young female hacker. ...more

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