Man of Mystery
by Joan Acocella in The New Yorker, January 10, 2011
Having got American readers to buy more than fourteen million copies, collectively, of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy books—“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (2008, American edition), “The Girl Who Played with Fire” (2009), and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (2010)—the management at Knopf has decided that it would like them to buy some more. So the company has issued a boxed set: the three crime novels, plus a new book, “On Stieg Larsson,” containing background materials on the late Swedish writer.
If you have been in a coma, say, for the past two years, and have not read the Millennium trilogy, about a crusading journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, and a computer hacker, Lisbeth Salander, battling right-wing forces in Sweden, the set, at ninety-nine dollars, is not a bad bargain. But if you decided to pass on the novels your resolve should not be shaken by this offer.
As for “On Stieg Larsson,” don’t worry. It is a small thing—eighty-five pages—and nothing in it solves the central mystery of the Millennium trilogy: why it is so popular.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/01/10/110110crat_atlarge_acocella#ixzz1B3eWpYqA
1 comment:
It's a puzzle..... I thoroughly enjoyed the first one - gripping etc but felt I didn't need to read the others [partly as my time is limited and I wanted to experience other authors], and friends have said the 2nd and 3rd ones are interminable and a bit tedious - and the third movie on at the moment is only getting 2 1/2 stars from the Herald reviewer who also refers to it as tedious! Someone tell us what compels you to read more than one.
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