La fille qui rêvait d’un bidon d’essence et d’une allumette

French translation of Stieg Larsson's 2nd Millenium book

At exactly 1AM last night, I finished Les hommes qui n’aimaient pas les femmes, the first part of Stieg Larsson’s Millenium triolgy. There are many things I like about this book and there are a few questions that I have. Mainly, I have a hard time understanding why this series of books is so popular. The books are good, I’ve just started La fille qui rêvait d’un bidon d’essence et d’une allumette and I’ve read about 100 pages. I like reading it in French. It’s hard to find French books abroad, especially in Asia. I found that I was a bit rusty and reading a 574-page French book took me about double what an English language book of the same length would have taken me, which was about 7 hours.

The English translation was just released in January ’09. The French translation first appeared in 2006. I got up this morning, checked my feeds and then got dressed, before making sure that the local library, Le Comptoir du Livre, had the book in stock and was open. It was about 10:45AM. I also bought La reine dans le palais des courants d’air, the 3rd tome of the Millenium trilogy, which will be available in English only in January ’10.

The books tell the story of Mikael Bloomkvist and Lisbeth Salander and their quest to right wrongs. In the first book, the intrigue was financial and economic before rapidly evolving into the hunt of a killer. I’m a fan of the Wallander series that Yellow Bird produced last year for the BBC. I was happy to find out that the first movie of the series was released early this year. It won’t be long before the DVDs come out and an English subtitled version comes out. I don’t think the Hollywood version will be any good.

The books are good. They aren’t superb, but they are entertaining and intriguing. The pacing is interesting and the way that Larsson tells the story is good. I can enumerate dozens of books that I liked more. There is something about them though. Something that made me read the first book in a day and buy the other volumes this morning. More on this later, when I write my review.

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Relevant posts

• Les hommes qui n’aimaient pas les femmes (Millenium 1)
• Wallander