Stockholm and New York

The arm­chair trav­el­ler. — first to Stock­holm and South­ern Sweden with Stieg Larsson and his amaz­ing tri­logy start­ing with “The Girl with the Dragon Tat­too.”  Clearly the work of an obsess­ive — every jour­ney is lov­ingly detailed, street by street, bus by bus, tun­nel­bana by tun­nel­bana, and we are always told what a main char­ac­ter is wear­ing — also a lot of com­puter detail which is way bey­ond my ken– but the story is fant­astic, per­haps lit­er­ally so, though Larsson would have you believe oth­er­wise.  Very tightly plot­ted, the viol­ence quite extreme in places but kept in pro­por­tion to the invest­ig­at­ive busi­ness. And Lis­beth Salander, the main female char­ac­ter, is unique.  Abso­lutely brilliant !

Unlike the first of two New York nov­els: “The Believ­ers” by Zoe Heller.  A fam­ily drama where none of the char­ac­ters excites much interest or sym­pathy, poorly writ­ten, lots of cliches and which doesn’t enhance one’s under­stand­ing of the world or human nature.  It might pass as a couple of epis­odes of a tv sitcom.

“Neth­er­land” on the other hand, with it’s cricket-playing Dutch exile in New York, a pass­ive man to whom things mostly just hap­pen, is well worth the read. Chuck Ramkissoon, the cricket-playing, scam-promoting West Indian is the real hero, along with all the other exiles who make up most of the pop­u­la­tion of New York and bring their own local cus­toms with them.  The shadow of 9/11 is there in the back­ground — saps the dutchman’s will.  Some nice pen pic­tures of The Hague, incid­ental to the New York stuff.