How Larsson's Style Sounds

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.  

Second Presentation Reflection

Good things I did:

• I made more of an effort to get the audience involved
• I tried to use more transitions and clarify the context of what I was presenting

Things that need work:

• I had less time to prepare for this presentation, and I think it's evident in the way I read my notes a bit more and sound less confident in some places.  
• I need more practice with using slides--putting the longer quote on the slide and reading it too didn't prove as effective as I had thought it might be
• My movements/nervous hand gestures are still a bit awkward.

Stieg Larsson's Influences

If you witnessed something gruesome happen to another person and did nothing to stop it, you’d probably be pretty affected by that.  It would probably stick with you.  In an article written by Kurdo Baski, a personal friend and business partner of Stieg Larsson’s, an event that stuck with Larsson was also revealed.

When Larsson was 15, he watched a group of his friends brutally gang rape a girl, and he did nothing to interfere.  A few days later, he tried to apologize to the girl.  She told him she would never forgive him.  That event haunted Larsson for the rest of his life.  His friend recalls that when Larsson heard news reports of deaths of other women at the hands of men, he would often tear up. 

Baski said that Larsson told him, “Every day, all over the world, women are mutilated, murdered, ill-treated or circumcised by men rich and poor.  It might happen in South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Norway, Mexico, Tibet or Iran. But the fact is that there's no such thing as soft or hard oppression of women: men want to own women, they want to control women, they are afraid of women. Men hate women. The oppression of women has nothing to do with religion or ethnicity.”

Book critic Sarah Weinman had this to say about  Larsson’s obvious inspiration: "The books reflect both Larsson's sense of righteous indignation about how women are treated in Swedish and overall society and his love of crime fiction.  It was clear to me how much his heart and soul comes through, even filtered through heavily edited translation, and you simply cannot fake that sort of wonder-filled enthusiasm about characters and knowledge. Readers know that and sense it."

So it’s pretty clear where the content of Larsson’s books was inspired from. But where does his style come from? 

Several sites list authors like Agatha Christie, Sara Paretsky, Elizabeth George, and Val McDermid as his favorite and most influential writers, and many of those claims are backed up by quotes from personal friends of Larsson.  Some of these writers are actually mentioned in his books. The blog for the book “The Tattooed Girl”, written as a backstory to Larsson’s series, offers some insight to why Larsson liked these writers.   One post suggests that “Larsson liked Paretsky for her fearlessness, her smart political point of view, and her tough female private investigator.”  There is a pattern to the type of writing he liked, and he applied that to his own writing. 

Many online articles also claim various influences on the main female character, Lisbeth.   She is a strong-willed person, an extremely skilled computer hacker, and a victim of sexual violence. Neil McDonald writes for Quadrant Online that Lisbeth is based off of Peter O’Donnel’s Modesty Blaise character, who, like Lisbeth, has some very specific skills and came from a rough childhood.  Others suggest Lisbeth was inspired by Carol O’Connell’s novels, where her character Mallory was also a heroine very similar to Lisbeth in her strength and gruesome childhood.   There are numerous examples of potential influences on the internet.  Larsson’s friend Baski claims there is a lot of Larsson himself in Lisbeth’s character, from their bad eating and smoking habits to their unwillingness to discuss their pasts.

Larsson himself claimed that the inspiration for Lisbeth was a grown up Pippy Longstocking, from the children’s books by Astrid Lindgren.  In the only interview Larsson ever gave about his series, he said “I considered Pippi Longstocking. What would she be like today? What would she be like as an adult? What would you call a person like that, a sociopath? Hyperactive? Wrong. She simply sees society in a different light. I’ll make her 25 years old and an outcast. She has no friends and is deficient in social skills. That was my original thought.”

I think it’s clear, through the research I’ve done and my own reading of the books, that Larsson put a lot of himself into these stories.   These authors that he liked obviously influenced him enough to include their names in his stories, so it’s likely that the writing itself was influenced too, especially through the characters.  

First Presentation Reflection

Good: 

• I didn't need to use my notes very much

Bad: 

• My hand gestures seemed more like nervous movements than deliberate ones
• I didn't sound very interested or enthusiastic about my topic (also, I hate my voice and was annoyed just watching myself talk...)

Stieg Larsson's Audience

Stieg Larsson is one of the bestselling authors in the world. In fact, according to AbeBooks.com, Larsson was the 2^nd bestselling author globally in 2008.  Naturally, he has a very large audience. However, as his books were published after his death, he may well have never anticipated the audience he actually has.  He might have imagined that his books would be translated to English for UK readers, maybe, but he managed to reach an American audience as well.  For me, figuring out the specifics of his audience was difficult, because I obviously don’t have Larsson’s input on the subject. 

It could be argued that most of Larsson’s audience was invoked because, at the time of his death, his only audience had been publishers.   He didn’t know many concrete facts about the entire audience he would eventually address, because it didn’t exist yet.  We can assume that is original audience addressed was Swedish adults, due to the mature and graphic content of the novels. I also believe Larsson clearly used positioning as a tactic to get people to receive his message.  He wanted to demonstrate the corruption of Sweden and the injustices of women at the hands of men, so the main point of view of the books is from a man.  The main male character is left-wing, investigates corruption, and sympathizes with the main female character (the victim of men) because he knows more about her than any other character in the novels. By making readers see Lisbeth’s story through a man’s eyes, Larsson positions his audience to agree to his message, almost from his own point of view.  Larsson himself was very much like his main male character; he was an investigative journalist and he witnessed the rape of a young woman, and he campaigns against right-wing extremism, so in a way, readers are positioned to receive his message through his own eyes.

Obviously, Larsson couldn’t anticipate the wide audience his books would eventually reach, as they were all published after his death, so it was up to his translator, Steven Murray, to make sure the translations were audience appropriate.  In an article on ReaderVeiws.com, editor Irene Watson basically says that texts translated for American audiences need to be simplified and Americanized to make them readable.  The article itself misspells some foreign words she tries using to make a point, so I have a hard time taking her advice seriously.  Apparently, Steven Murray did not believe his audience needed to be babied like this.  The translation is not incredibly “dumbed down.”  There are still many very Swedish elements, such as specific locations and names that Watson would consider too confusing for an American audience, but then, the audience is a mature one. 

As far as the relationship Larsson (and through his translation, Murray) has with his audience, he doesn’t lecture them or argue with them, or give a sarcastic or overly opinionated narration.  It’s almost as if he’s just feeding his audience the story through the characters.  The closest relationship Larsson had with his audience was that he put much of himself into his main male character.  Because the author died before his works reached the massive audience he has now, we don’t have his own comments on his audience; we can only assume what he knew about them from how he placed his own views in the stories.

Amanda Baggs and her audience

Through reading Amanda Baggs’ blog posts and watching her video, I can definitely see a difference in the way she treats her audience compared to most other writers.  Not every writer is out there to be best buddies with their readers, but I usually find it more common in blogs for writers to try to relate to their audience.  Amanda doesn’t waste time on that.  She’s not writing so that her readers will develop an emotional connection to her, or so that they’ll feel like they’re reading something from a friend; she’s not even crusading.  She’s writing to get her point across.

Baggs’ writing is a bit shocking at first.  She is clearly angry about the way she and other disabled people are treated, and she’s not pulling any punches.  She doesn’t sugar coat it; she wants her readers to see the bare truth.  If that makes her readers uncomfortable, disgusted, outraged, or frustrated, then she’s done her job.  People should feel all these things when they read about the inequalities that people with disabilities face just because they do things differently. 

One thing about Baggs’ writing that is especially confrontational is the way she groups her audience with the people who mistreat her.  Some of the things she writes are directly addressed to her tormentors, so that her readers, who may or may not include the people she’s addressing, face the brunt of that. It makes her readers question their own actions toward those with disabilities.  Have they ever made someone this uncomfortable before? Why have they never thought of things this way?

The reason why this approach can be useful is because Baggs knows that her audience wouldn’t take her as seriously if she were just blogging nice stories about cats (which she does, but she keeps it to a separate blog).  Not everything she posts is as bitter as others, but that’s just because she’s speaking the truth. Some things make her angry and some don’t.  She posts the truth of what she’s feeling and thinking, and if that makes her readers uncomfortable, then she’s making them see how she feels.

Author proposal

To find a place to start with this project, I basically began asking myself a lot of questions.  First things first, who am I studying?  I chose to study the novels of Stieg Larsson, but why am I interested?  His novels are a huge international hit.  A lot of times, really big bestsellers don’t always have notable style other than that they’re easy to read.  Larsson’s novels aren’t super easy to read, but they’re still immensely popular.  There is something about this style that intrigues me.  One thing I like about it is that he uses techniques that would normally bother me from other writers, so I'm interested to see why they work.  He writes a lot of long, specifically detailed descriptive paragraphs that might normally be hard to get through from some writers but seem to work coming from Larsson.  He also switches character points of view rather quickly, without indication and often times without even having introduced the character beforehand.

Being interested doesn't make this a simple project, however.  There are a few big things that will complicate my work.  First, his novels were written in Swedish, so they were obviously translated by the point when I read them.  Second, Larsson is dead and his works were published posthumously, so he has never commented on his writing style in the way a writer with his fame and success normally would have.

So, what is my big question?  What am I hoping to learn more about?  I want to look at this project from the angle of the translation.  How does the translation of Stieg Larsson’s work affect his style, voice and ethos?

It will take a lot of work to answer a question like that, though.  First things first, I'll need to get myself a little more acquainted with the crime novel genre.  I've read other crime novels, but I don't stick to a particular genre when reading, so I do need some background information.  Where do Larsson's books fit in the genre?  His writing definitely has political and social motivation.  Is that normal for the genre, especially to the extent Larsson takes it?

Once I figure more out about the genre, I need to start looking at the translation.  Basically, I need to discover how much of the translator himself gets mixed into the work during translation.  I need to find out what Steven Murray, the translator of the novels, says about his work and technique.  Does he believe he takes part in the creative process?  (He claims he does.  Do other translators agree?)  I also need to discover some basic knowledge about translating.  What does it take to become a translator, and what kind of work goes into translating a novel?  Understanding this will help me get into some more detailed questions.  

I'll need to discover what kind of attempts are usually made to preserve style while translating.  I want to know what kinds of cultural factors are lost or preserved.  Does the translator make stylistic choices to appeal to the new target audience, or does he/she make an effort to preserve the original intended style?  What affect does this have on ethos?

In addition, because Larsson is dead, I plan to do some research on other translated novels so I can get more insight from both the author’s point of view and the translator’s.  Their commentary will help me discover what might have happened in the translation of these novels.  Some comments I found online indicated that the translation seemed rushed in order to make the novel available to be turned into a screenplay.  Is this a common opinion?  How does that change things?

Looking at the novels from the angle of their translation will help me better understand Larsson's style of writing by identifying how much of it might have been changed by the translation.  It will also help me better understand how ethos could be affected in a situation like this.