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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Simon Vance, Stieg Larsson I'd already seen both movie versions, but as a translator I felt obliged to learn more directly what all the fuss is about.The book: There's a hell of a lot more stuff in here than in the movies and a lot of it's oddly compelling, though there's plenty of filler too, in the form of pointless technical and faux-historical detail. The gruesome violence of the movies (which you might be able to expect from the Swedish title, "Men Who Hate Women") is still here, but it's not rendered visually and it takes up proportionately much less time, so it's less disturbing (both physically and as a moral challenge to the reader). It doesn't strike me as a stunningly clever mystery or a particularly spine-tingling thriller, but then I'm not really an expert in either genre. It ain't Lee Child or John Le Carré or Ruth Rendell, but it's not bad.The translation: I was listening to this book, not reading, but I heard a few clunkers. It's workmanlike prose at best, and that's probably so in the original, but still, Stephen T. Murray probably published this translation under the pseudonym "Reg Keeland" for a reason.The audiobook: I'm not sure I'd ever heard a Simon Vance book before, which is a surprise since apparently women the world over swoon when he gets in their ears, and thus he's a very popular voice hire for audiobook publishers. And he's got a great voice and is good at giving each character a distinct and consistent sound. The catch is, he's English, and so all the Swedish characters have English regional accents—and there's nothing about my understanding of Lisbeth Salander that fits a Cockney voice. It looks like the only American-accented audiobook is abridged, and I don't do abridged, so I wonder how this has affected the book's reception here? I got used to it, but I was always still aware.