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Fiction
Project Hail Mary
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Narration ★5
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Stieg Larsson wrote the Millennium trilogy at night after work as a magazine editor; he died before any of it was published; the books sold eighty million copies. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the first volume, and the one most likely to lose you in the first two hours if you go in without warning, and the one most likely to become your reference point for thriller fiction if you make it through. Simon Vance's narration is the best reason to give it the time it needs.
The book is doing two things simultaneously, and they only become one story about a third of the way in. Mikael Blomkvist, investigative journalist, is hired by an elderly industrialist to investigate the forty-year-old disappearance of his niece within his own family. Lisbeth Salander, hacker and research analyst for a security firm, exists in a parallel narrative about surveillance, guardianship, and justice. When these two characters meet, the book becomes something else. Salander is the reason the series has the cultural footprint it does; she is one of the most original protagonists in crime fiction.
Simon Vance narrates this series with the controlled, intelligent authority he brought to Man's Search for Meaning, adapted here for the Swedish procedural's cool, observational register. His Salander is the performance's most remarkable element: he conveys her extreme economy of expression, the flatness, the precision, the sudden intensity, through vocal compression rather than drama. His Blomkvist is warmer, and the contrast between them gives the audio a structural tension the print can only imply. At sixteen hours the pacing is slow by thriller standards; Vance's restraint is why it stays listenable.
We want to be explicit: the book contains scenes of sexual violence that are explicit and graphic. Larsson's treatment of these scenes is deliberate and the book does not aestheticise them, the original Swedish title was Men Who Hate Women, which is more accurate than the international title, but listeners who find such content intolerable in audio (where it is harder to skim) should approach with full knowledge.
Well narrated? Vance gives this long, demanding thriller exactly the control it needs. Worth the sixteen hours if you want to understand what made Lisbeth Salander a cultural landmark, and willing to take the content warning seriously.
The Silent Patient, the contemporary psychological heir to Larsson's architecture of misdirection, at half the length.
If you are interested in crime fiction and the character of Lisbeth Salander specifically, yes. If you want a tight, fast thriller, this may test your patience in the first three hours, the book's slow setup is a deliberate structural choice that pays off significantly. We would suggest deciding by the end of hour three whether to continue.
Simon Vance narrates the Random House Audio English edition, a veteran with an extensive catalog who delivers the Swedish procedural's cool register with controlled authority.
Yes, the book contains explicit scenes of sexual violence. These are handled without gratuitousness but with directness; they are more confronting in audio than in print. Listeners who need to avoid this content should do so.
They complement each other well. The Swedish film is excellent and faithful. The audiobook contains considerably more of the journalism and corporate-investigation subplot that the film compressed. The audiobook gives you more of Larsson's world.
You can hear The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo free with an Audible trial. (Affiliate link, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.)
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