Why people love Stieg Larsson's Novels

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/01/10/110110crat_atlarge_acocella

by wow_sig • 16 years ago

26 21 16 years ago

cstuder• 16 years ago

Single page link: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/01/10/110...

berntb3• 16 years ago

The "funniest" part is that there really was a a scandal recently in Sweden about an upper class guy using his position for e.g. raping and abusing women.

He was a police chief which, despite police union criticism, got reinstated by the social democrat minister - because he was so politically correct...

Quite fun, considering the political leanings of Larsson.

hristov2• 16 years ago

Hmm source? I assume you mean Goran Lindberg, but there is nothing out there about him being reinstated to anything after being convicted. In fact wikipedia says he is in prison right now. How has he been reinstated?

I don't know what this has to do with Larsson at all.

berntb3• 16 years ago

Sorry for the late answer, I was busy today and didn't check hn until now, long after it went from the front page.

Lindberg was going to be fired because of complaints from the employees -- but he got reinstated, by Bodström himself! That was a few years before the big scandal.

That is well known and has been in the major media. Google gave me this link. IIRC, I originally read it in DN or SvD.

http://www.expressen.se/nyheter/1.1862998/lindberg-raddades-...

>>I december 2002 skickade polisfacket i Uppsala ett brev direkt till justitieminister Thomas Bodström där de krävde att Lindberg skulle avgå.

>>– Från justitieministern fick vi inget svar över huvud taget, säger Gunnar Elrud, som då var ordförande för polisfacket.

(And being at -3 in the original comment for posting well known facts, while that simple questioning got +11, is really funny...)

Muzza• 16 years ago

> (And that welfare state may soon be disabled by the recently elected conservative government.)

Uhuh. They've been in power since 2006 and the welfare state has not been "disabled".

dagw2• 16 years ago

That and the fact that the current government hardly classifies and 'conservative' in any meaningful international comparison. At best they're a "slightly less socialist" government.

kmfrk2• 16 years ago

To be fair, they have to have some (arbitrary) name for the coalitions.

The semantics of political parties and ideologies are one of the most confusing things. Both the Democratic and Republican party are to the right of most, if not all, Scandinavian political parties.

In a system with more than two parties, you have to name your party something that actually connotates the party's policies (Democrats and Republicans doesn't exactly mean anything to outsiders), and considering that many of these parties have existed for over 100 years, their policies have obviously changed since they got their names. (This makes it pretty awkward for the parties who deviate from their historic names. Consider the parties that were created when Communism was all the rave, but are still around. They need to distance themselves from the past without denouncing their party's raison d'etre. I'm sure that's why we have so many nebulous party names cropping up: "Freedom", "People's" parties and whatnot.)

You often hear people refer to American policians as liberal, progressive, conservative, libertarian and so forth, which are ideologies more so than something reflected by the party names. Democrats can also be conservative (Blue Dogs), and so on and so forth.

In a system that isn't (basically) a two-party system, people use their party name to characterize their policy: "Social-democratic, moderate, conservative, socialist, liberal, (which means something akin to libertarian on that side of the Atlantic)" as using other attribute would be a denouncement. Instead, silly buzz words like "welfare", "freedom", "fair", "tough", "rewarding", "equality", "Danish", "Swedish", "Norwegian", etc. crop up to frame their policies. This makes it an enormous clusterfuck to get a grasp of the - actual - politics in a political environment where basically all the parties are social-liberal.

You have to find some word to delineate the coalitions from each other, and there isn't any great way to do this. Sometimes, you use colours for the coalitions, but these make no sense to outsiders. (The left coalition in Denmark is red and the right blue, whereas Democrats are blue and the Republicans red. Is your head exploding yet?)

kmfrk2• 16 years ago

The Swedish economy is basically the envy of most countries in Europe at the moment.

loewenskind2• 16 years ago

You're probably wasting your time. The US has its own Steve Jobs-esque distortion field when it comes to politics. I'm not sure the majority of them could ever be educated what "left" and "right" actually mean and you'll certainly never convince them that both their main political parties are actually center right and far right.

forza• 16 years ago

What does that have to do with the state of welfare? If anything economics is usually used as a justification for not having a very inclusive welfare system.

Tichy2• 16 years ago

While I didn't care so much for the violence, I thoroughly enjoyed the novels. I thought they had a comparatively unusual plot and unusual characters. They are definitely much better written than, say, Dan Brown novels.

Funny to see the the NYT complain about 12 page long boring descriptions. Surely any regular reader of the NYT should have no problems to cope with those.

Also that article just quotes things out of context to make them sound silly.

mzl3• 16 years ago

Funny, I place Stieg Larsson and Dan Brown in the same section: writers who are good at constructing a compelling story, but not so good in actually writing it down.

With Stieg Larsson, I got really annoyed with the amount of boring expositions, pseudo-cliffhangers at the end of every other chapter, overuse of clichés ("and then they talked for X hours"), etc.. It reads like a very rough draft of a book, not as an edited text ready for publication.

That said, I've read both authors and enjoyed the books. I just feel that they could have been so much better with some serious rewrites (as apparently the English translation of Stieg Larsson had, I have to check that one out).

Tichy2• 16 years ago

Maybe the roughness was part of the charm for me. It gives it more of a reality feel. But also, I guess I am not that critical a reader, I care more for ideas than presentation.

dagw2• 16 years ago

It reads like a very rough draft of a book

Given that Larsson died before the final edits where completed, that is probably a quite accurate description.

Why people love Stieg Larsson's Novels

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