That novel was totally ridiculous. The girl-genius hero was the least plausible character imaginable.

For good thrillers with a political twist, Robert Harris' Fatherland and Archangel are fun and really well-written.

John LeCarre has continued to publish terrific page-turners and has become increasingly critical of the power structure and its brutality. The Mission Song and Our Kind of Terrorist are exciting, wrenching novels with keen moral insight.

i thought u were reading The Old Man and the Sea, to see what it feels like to be a dictator- i mean, a populist president- or, crap, i forgot which is which

I thought that the film, at least the Swedish version, was a masterpiece. Implausible characters? Memorable characters often are "implausible."

At least in the world of fiction.

I may have met Ted Bundy, or someone like him, but I am pretty sure I have never met Hannibal Lector.

OT: As per Trayvon Martin: In Florida, Black people should carry guns too. Because if YOU ARE BLACK, in Florida, the police and authorities will NOT protect or help YOU.

Seth was right. Harris s very, very good.
His "The Ghost" is a great picture of Blair.

here in sweden, the Larsson books are seen as cheap mass-market crime fiction, something with just enough sex and violence to be worth hauling along for the summer holiday or a boring commute. i have no idea why they're being treated like serious literature everywhere else - they're bound to disappoint if you come looking for piercing insights or skilful writing.

A Heart-Breaking Work of Staggering Meh

And some dumbass doctors decided that Cheney was worthy of a heart transplant.

Susan: Scratch one chinese political prisoner. Two or three nights ago I was listening to the BBC talk about how China was moving away from parting out deathrow prisoners for organs. They're just now looking into an all volunteer program. It seems that the culture is for a buried whole situation which makes the problem uphill.
To be fair, The Cheneys claim to not know who the donor is.

To begin with it is an oddity that any work that contains such ideas gained popularity at all. If Larsen had centered on these themes directly thoughout, instead of just setting the stage with them I am certain the books would not have taken off.

In a pro forma way many Americans hold a bit of animus towards those holding economic power in large corporations but several lifetimes of propaganda has blunted this natural and very AAmerican sentiment so they don't want to look too long or closely at it. So better to make the story aabout a fight between a few lone individuals and strip away the broader context.

I think it's fair to say that of the hundreds of thousands of people who were foreclosed upon by the use of forged and false documents would agree that in the end they deserved it.

To be fair, The Cheneys claim to not know who the donor is.

Or care.

I follow (well, point-and-laugh at) Megan McArdle's career and The Atlantic has an entire machinery in motion to support her lifestyle in exchange for her avid support of the rich. The Koch Foundation, the Aspen Institute, Pete Peterson's foundation, New America Foundation--they all keep her in Thermomixes and Victorian rowhouses so she can lie about Elizabeth Warren, "Obamacare," and anthing else that might threaten her ascent to wealth.

As for Cheney's heart--Snow White's stepmother the Queen should have had it so easy.

Perceptive!

You know Stieg Larsson was not just a middle-mind novelist--that came years after he was a communist muck-raking reporter who was charged with giving the USSR access to Swedish intelligence? If you want the juicy meat from Larsson, try to find his earlier journalistic work.

"Girl with a Dragon Tattoo" is way less powerful than it even seems reading it, because--inasmuch as it's always exciting to the Anglo world to hear that social democratic Swedes are corrupt too--the book does little more than essentially dramatize every major social democratic state-sponsored public education campaign that dominated the past 20 years.

None of that expose or analysis cut to any bone. It was Larsson's smooth retirement coast as a writer. It rehashed the safe social democratic consensus construction of social problems--when Sweden had far bigger conservative threats to labor institutions that they were ignoring. Now recognize again, how the middlebrow, suburban, state-sponsored social democratic consensus is our idea of radical and raw.

Well, if you want a preposterous, ridiculous, great, exciting, massively popular novel about the world we're living in (well, it was about the 1970s, but history, while it doesn't repeat, does stutter) check out Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! Trilogy, or his Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy. Sure there's sex and drugs and Hollywood and anarchy and quantum mechanics and conspiracy theories and absurdism -- I told you it's about the world we're living in. :-P

He wrote plays, not novels, but perhaps Arthur Miller's remarks are nevertheless somewhat relevant. I shamelessly copy these remarks from a little-known blog whose author conceals his real identity.

Arthur Miller

To my mind the essential difference, and the precise difference, between tragedy and pathos is that tragedy brings us not only sadness, sympathy, identification and even fear; it also, unlike pathos, brings us knowledge or enlightenment.

As Aristotle said, the poet is greater than the historian because he presents not only things as they were, but foreshadows what they might have been. We forsake literature when we are content to chronicle disaster. Tragedy, therefore, is inseparable from a certain modest hope regarding the human animal. And it is the glimpse of this brighter possibility that raises sadness out of the pathetic toward the tragic...

The possibility of victory must be there in tragedy. Where pathos rules, where pathos is finally derived, a character has fought a battle he could not possibly have won. The pathetic is achieved when the protagonist is, by virtue of his witlessness, his insensitivity or the very air he gives off, incapable of grappling with a much superior force.

Pathos truly is the mode for the pessimist. But tragedy requires a nicer balance between what is possible and what is impossible.

-- From “The Tragedy of the Common Man”, and “The Name of Tragedy”; New York Herald-Tribune, 1949

There have been about 500 police/detective/mystery novels written over the last 20 years about how corrupt and oligarchic and xenophobic and unfriendly the seemingly utopianic Nordic lands are. Henning Mankell, Ake Edwardson, Arnaldur Indridason, Asa Larsson, Karin Fossum, Jo Nesbo, etc. etc. The all-time classics of depression and pessimism by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo were written in what most liberals view as the most politically awesome society in world history, Sweden circa 1970.

Don't give up just because this author has ridiculous plot and characters.

It's one thing to participate in a public culture in which denouncing capitalist elite corruption vigorously is the norm.

It's quite another thing to fetishize the denunciations from afar, as if such a culture of assiduous watchfulness and readiness to critique simply confirmed that that society was worse than or as corrupt as your own.

Gotta disagree They ain't great literature but were very readable and absorbing. Also - the girl-genius was just as believable as Harry Potter and I don't see anyone getting on his case.

Because Harry Potter was set in an alternate world involving FUCKING WIZARDS.

Eh, lots of fiction involves superhuman abilities that wouldn't fly in the real world. They make the characters, you know, heroic. It's also common to temper this heroism with a tragic flaw. Holmes, though a genius, was a cocaine addict. The girl with the dragon tattoo is apparently involved in a very boring plot. Etc.

Lisbeth Sander is a Mary Sue: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MarySue

There is a reason there the trope category "Mary Sue" exists: because it's a very common gimmick in dime-store and DIY lit.