The Conical Glass: The Girl with the AltiVec Velocity Engine

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

The Girl with the AltiVec Velocity Engine

Since I love mysteries, and I love Sweden, you would think I'd spend all my free time reading Swedish crime novels -- and you'd be wrong. I have read works by most of the popular Swedish writers, but they are often just too depressing. Henning Mankell in particular makes me feel like slitting my wrists (I do enjoy the Swedish "Wallander" movies they show on KCSM, though). The only Swedish mystery writers I truly love are Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, whose brilliant Martin Beck series (published between 1965-75) combines brutal crimes with just enough comic relief and black humor; the books are still in print from Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Books, and I recommend them without reservation.

I put off reading the late Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for an entire year (I got a copy last summer) because I'd heard it was supposed to be spectacularly violent. However, it's become such a massive international bestseller, along with its sequel The Girl Who Played with Fire, that eventually it could not be denied. So I finally finished it, and... frankly, I'm not quite sure why it has become such a massive international bestseller.

The best part of the hefty (600 pages) book is the 40-year-old missing persons case that hero Mikael Blomkvist is assigned to investigate by an elderly, wealthy financier. I'm a sucker for books with cold cases, locked room mysteries and lots of shoe-leather procedural work, and on that count, Tattoo delivers.

However, that compelling story is wrapped in a lot of exposition about Mikael's job as a financial journalist and his conflict with Hans-Erik Wennerström, an industrialist/arms dealer. This paragraph, for instance, comes about 20 pages in:

"It sounds as though Wennerström frittered away a little money for AIA. But compared with the half billion that disappeared from Skanska or the CEO of ABB's golden parachute of more than a billion kronor -- which really upset people -- this doesn't seem to be much to write about," Blomkvist said. "Today's readers are pretty tired of stories about incompetent speculators, even if it's with public funds."

I happened to know that Skanska is a huge construction company. ABB is an engineering company (I had heard of it under its old name, ASEA). I don't know anything about the scandals mentioned. I guess the specifics don't matter too much, but the paragraph kind of stopped me in my tracks anyway; it doesn't seem like the stuff of thrillers.

If I had to guess why Dragon has become so popular, I'd say that it probably has more to do with Lisbeth Salander, the eponymous Girl who works with Blomkvist to help him solve his case. Lisbeth is a troubled punk hacker in her mid-20s whose computer expertise has led her to a job with a major security firm. Because of her genius, she gets to come and go as she wishes and only take assignments when she wants to. The Amazing Computer Expert Who Can Do Anything has become a stock character in many mystery novels and one I complain about a lot. But OK, Lisbeth is more interesting than most of them and a scene in which she extracts brutal revenge on a man who took advantage of her is violent yet undeniably compelling. (The original Swedish title of the book is Män som hatar kvinnor, that is, Men Who Hate Women.) There are several allusions made to horrifying incidents in Lisbeth's past, but apparently you have to read The Girl Who Played with Fire to find out about them.

Here is another clunky paragraph, this one about a new computer Lisbeth is buying:

Unsurprisingly she set her sights on the best available alternative: the new Apple PowerBook G4/1.0 GHz in an aluminium case with a Power-P.C. 7451 processor with an AltiVec Velocity Engine, 960 M.B. R.A.M. and a 60 G.B. hard drive. It had BlueTooth and built-in C.D. and D.V.D. burners. Best of all, it had the first 43-centimetre screen in the laptop world with N.V.I.D.I.A. graphics and a resolution of 1440x900 pixels...

I'm reading a mystery novel, not Computer Shopper.

Because I'd heard that the translation was not very good, I decided to read the English copy with a Swedish one open for reference. (My Swedish vocabulary is not quite advanced enough to allow me to get through such a long and difficult book.) Lee Goldberg, whom I linked to above, complained about all the cliches in the book, such as "dead as a door-nail." Here's an example from the English version: "Within twenty seconds he should be unconscious, and within a few minutes he would be dead as a door-nail." Swedish: "Inom tjugo sekunder skulle han vara medvetslös och inom några minuter stendöd." "Stendöd" would literally be translated as "stone-dead"; my Swedish-English dictionary does indeed list "dead as a door-nail" as a definition. Since "stone-dead" is an accepted idiom, I might have stuck with that if it had been my decision.

Here's another cliche that caught my eye: "Maybe he's just a square peg in a round hole who happens to be poisoning the atmosphere." Swedish: "Han kanske bara är en malplacerad skitstövel som sprider dålig stämning." Literally, "Maybe he's just an out-of-place shit-boot who spreads a bad atmosphere." "Skitstövlar" would be a pair of boots you wear to, say, muck out a stall (there's an informative illustration on this Wikipedia page), but "en skitstövel" is a term that's analogous to the English dick or asshole. So why not use the more forthright "asshole" instead of "square peg in a round hole"? I mean, there's plenty of swearing in the book already.

As with most works in translation, there are certain cultural references that can be hard to grasp unless you know the country in question. As they grew older, for instance, we are told that Lisbeth's punk friends began to buy clothes "more often from the H&M boutiques rather than from funky Myrorna." A check of the Swedish version shows that the translator added the modifier "funky." Swedes would know that Myrorna is a not a hip clothing shop but a thrift store akin to Goodwill or the Salvation Army. I would probably have written "rather than from the secondhand store."

In the translator's defense, Goldberg quoted the following note on his blog: "Sorry you didn't like the translation. I originally translated it into American English, but then the book was bought in the UK, and the Scottish editor really did a number on it -- hence my pseudonym. [NB: he chose not to use his real name on the book's cover.] I'm hoping Knopf's edition of books 2 & 3 will come out better." I don't know how much improved it would have been, but why the U.S. publisher (Knopf) didn't restore the original translation is a mystery to me. I have read some of the translator's other work and it flowed much better. The Mankell translations in particular are excellent.

I would say that Larsson, who wrote three books before dropping dead of a heart attack at the age of 50, is not a particularly great writer -- the paragraphs I quoted above aren't really any better in Swedish. He reminds me a little of Andrew Vachss, who has claimed that he "wouldn't write novels at all" were it not for the fact that he can use them to push his agenda (anti-child abuse, in his case). Larsson was an activist against racism and neo-Nazi movements in Sweden who lived under constant death threats; indeed, there was initial speculation that he was murdered. (In truth, his three-pack-a-day cigarette habit and workaholism were most likely what did him in; "he was warned again and again that he should look after himself," said his U.K. publisher.) The crusading, highly moral journalist Blomkvist is perhaps a bit of an alter ego. Amidst all of the "men who hate women" in the book, Blomkvist is a genuine good guy. And so, it seems, was Larsson.

posted by 125records @ 3:05 PM

4 Comments:

At 5:52 PM, yellojkt said…

I'm half way through it so I'm glad your post had no spoilers. So far I'm inclined to agree with you. It's good but not great and kinda slow. I think the Swedish background and the novelty of the author's backstory have been giving it a boost.

I've set it aside to read How I Became A Best Selling Novelist, which you recommended.
At 7:46 AM, jfruh said…

Speaking of things Swedish and kinda violent, have you seen (or read) Let The Right One In? I quite enjoyed it, and later found out that I got the version with the inferior subtitles, so I sort of want to re-see it now.
At 9:36 AM, Janet A said…

Great review. As were your added comments last night.
At 9:39 AM, 125records said…

Josh: I did see "Let the Right One In" during its theatrical run last year. I'm not a fan of vampires, or horror movies, but figured that I should check out any Swedish film that gets a wide(ish) release. I did think it was very well done. The theatrical version had the "good" subtitles; the "bad" ones were on the initial DVD pressing.