THE GIRL WHO POOPED HER PANTS

I am so tired of all this Stieg Larsson crap.

Jesus. The girl who did everything. I did like the first movie, "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo," but the first book, of the same name, was a horrible experience, slogging through miles of slow, boring, tedious exposition, telling us the boring back-story, and reporting the story rather than rendering it.

Not enough scenes, not enough imagery, not enough details so you can bring the story to life like a movie in your head. That's what any good fiction should do.

Now here I am trying to read book 2, "The Girl Who Played With Fire." It is scary at first, and disgusting, with Lisbeth being tortured, I guess by her father. Sick. The next 143 pages were a roller coaster for me. I liked it, then I loved the two or three actually rendered scenes, but the massive exposition finally wore me down.

The exposition is at least clear and relevant, which it isn't in the first book of the trilogy.

I don't see how people can read this crap. I can't do it anymore. I just can't. No fun, no reward, not even any real interest. Please, God, don't make me read any more.

I finally gave up in one of many scenes where the fake dialogue is really exposition for the reader. Nobody talks like this: "I've been so fucking angry that you vanished without a trace that I almost decided never to trust you again."

Sounds like a robot, R2D2, perhaps. In real conversation, people don't spell things out like this. They talk obliquely, revealing themselves and not the back-story. They already know the back-story. This book is full of expository dialogue, and I hate it.

In fact, good dialogue in fiction sounds like real people talking, but it isn't. It makes you think, and it makes you figure out the story while it reveals something about the characters.  

Anyway, I've given up. I was going to study the Dragon Tattoo books, to see what made them so popular. Then I was just going to read them, to see what they are like.

Not anymore. Never say never, but right now I just don't care. These books don't do what I want fiction to do.

My advice: Read a good book instead, Faulkner or Fitzgerald or Cormac McCarthy.

-- Roger


(Links:)
As I Lay Dying: The Corrected Text (Modern Library)
The Great Gatsby

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

STIEG LARSSON & THE BLOCKBUSTER NOVEL

To all us kulture vultures, the highest value in our lives would be to make a living doing the art we love.

For a serious writer, that is almost impossible. I don't know anyone who has done it successfully without compromising something.

Bend over, and you can be successful.

Cormac McCarthy, our greatest living American writer, hit it big only with a piece of schlock, "No Country For Old Men." It's pretty bad, a potboiler full of guns and drugs and unlikely events. But it made a fairly good movie that was commercially successful.

I don't want to talk trash about commerce. We all need money. We just don't want to sell our souls to get it.

Old Cormac came about as close as anyone to making real money off real literature. Not very close, not very literary.

That brings me to my subject today: the blockbuster novel, nowhere better represented than by Stieg Larsson.

In case you've been living under a rock in the Mojave Desert, Stieg Larsson is Swedish, rich, famous, and dead. Not a good combination. His brother and father, I hear, are scooping up the millions as they roll in.

But is Stieg's stuff literature? Is it art? (One of my favorite questions.)

To me, his first book, "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo," tried to be a good beach read and didn't succeed. Too much exposition, too boring, too hard to plow through. Not fun.

But there was a good story buried under all that crappy prose, and it made a damn good movie. Like the old Hollyood saying goes, "Bad novels make good movies."

But Stieg's second book, "The Girl Who Played With Fire," is much better, as a beach read. It's more fun, it's easier to read, and it has a stunningly intricate plot, so far. I'm about 115 pages in. I'll let you know what I think as I go along.

But is it art? Is it real literature?

Hmmm. That's a hard one.

It certainly is pop lit (popular literature). It has all the earmarks of a beach read: The characters are larger than life. Lisbeth Salander is quirkier than anyone I've ever met, and she was abused to an extreme I've never heard of in real life. 

Her male counterpart, sometime lover and co-hero, Mikael Blomkvist, is maybe a bit more realistic. He does bed every babe in sight, and he is extremely brave, and he does get rich writing for a magazine. That is all pretty far-fetched. 

So the characters are larger than life.  

And the stakes are high. Everything you can think of is at stake in both these novels. As my friend Adam would say, you have to do that in a big page-turner. These big, bestselling crime novels "have really high stakes -- outlandishly so, often, but it's your job to make the stakes high AND believable."

And the characters have to take both emotional and physical risks. Their hearts have to be on the table, and their heads have to be near the chopping block.

Old Stieg does all that, and he does it in spades.

But is it art?

No, I don't think so. But it sure is fun to read. And it takes virtually no effort, which is another sign of pop lit.

More later, as we go along.

Welcome to the first post of my new blog, Kulture Vulture.

-- Roger

Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle