When I first started
thinking about what Stieg Larsson’s writing sounds like, I thought that it was
pretty descriptive writing. He often
goes into lengthy descriptions of things, such as types of flowers or step by
step explanations of how someone hacks a computer. Here’s an excerpt from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: “The plant was native to the Australian bush
and uplands, where it was to be found among tussocks of grass. There it was
called Desert Snow. Someone at the botanical gardens in Uppsala would later
confirm that it was a plant seldom cultivated in Sweden. The botanist wrote in
her report that it was related to the tea tree and that it was sometimes
confused with its more common cousin Leptospermum scoparium, which grew in
abundance in New Zealand. What distinguished them, she pointed out, was that
rubinette had a small number of microscopic pink dots at the tips of the
petals, giving the flower a faint pinkish tinge.”
I hadn’t really spent
much time thinking about how exactly to describe Larsson’s writing until this
assignment, but when I did, I changed my mind a bit. Here is another example from Larsson’s
books. This is much less specific, but
it’s how Larsson generally describes surroundings.
“Salander put her book
down on her lap and sipped her iced coffee before reaching for a pack of
cigarettes. Without turning her head she shifted her gaze to the horizon. She
could just see the Caribbean through a group of palm trees and the
rhododendrons in front of the hotel. A yacht was on its way north towards St
Lucia or Dominica. Further out, she could see the outline of a grey freighter
heading south in the direction of Guyana. A breeze made the morning heat
bearable, but she felt a drop of sweat trickling into her eyebrow. Salander did
not care for sunbathing. She had spent her days as far as possible in shade,
and even now was under the awning on the terrace. And yet she was as brown as a
nut. She had on khaki shorts and a black top.”
After evaluating the
parts of speech in this paragraph, I decided that maybe “descriptive” wasn't a very accurate way to describe Larsson’s writing. There are actually very few adjectives
compared to the amount of nouns and verbs, and the ones that are used, like “grey”
and “khaki,” are very simple. The verbs
are also pretty easy, and the sentences aren't extremely complex. It certainly isn’t pretentious writing. When I realized that, I started thinking
about what else Larsson’s writing isn’t.
A quick Google gave me
a list of words that describe writing style and definitions to go along with
them. Combined with the list we made in
class, I quickly crossed a few things off the list. This style is not rhythmic or lyrical. It’s not ornate or prim or stately, and it’s not
incoherent or humorous or sarcastic.
Mostly, I found the style to be kind of plain. It offers a lot of details, but not with
super specific adjectives and adverbs. It’s
orderly, coherent and clear. It’s almost
journalistic, as though he’s reporting what’s happening and what’s going on
around the characters.
A lot of this could
come from the translation of the text.
Maybe the translator chose the simplest translation instead of the most
accurate. However, my own experience with
translation makes me doubt this, at least to the extent that it would
completely change the writing style. The
English language has an incredibly expansive lexicon, so it’s not usually very
hard to find a good word or phrase to express something.
I think that overall,
Larson’s style is straightforward, journalistic and detailed. He
spends a lot of time talking about surroundings and specific actions, but he
does so in a straightforward way. Sometimes
the information might be complex, but the writing isn’t.
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