I have not written for a little time now, partly because the weather has not been good for photographing the garden recently, and progress on the greenhouse / potting shed has slowed by other garden tasks determined by the calendar as well as the weather, such as sowing seeds.
Recently I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo which started as an amazing tour de force, of complex plotting with themes and sub-themes without the principle theme being immediately apparent. Eventually, the story settles down and the major theme, plot becomes more conventional with its simplification. I have avoided giving detail as that would spoil an intriguing aspect of the book for anyone beginning it. The story commences with a disgraced financial journalist and magazine owning partner in Sweden being confined to prison for libeling a major industrialist. The girl with the dragon tattoo is introduced as a misfit who obtains a job working for a security firm, who quickly recognise she has major investigative talents and assign her in that line of work, freelance. These two themes become entwined in a mystery of the death of a girl some 30 years earlier which the journalist is hired to uncover... The book is part of the Millennium Trilogy, written shortly before the death of its author Sven Larsson, I have the second volume, but have not yet commenced reading that one as I started reading another book while waiting for the next volume, The Girl who Played with Fire to be delivered in the post.
I picked up Gabriel Garcia Marquez's wonderful book Love in the Time of Cholera that I bought many years ago. I had thought I had read this books, as I read many of Marquez's books while reading a large number of Latin American fiction over a good many years earlier. The last book if his I read was The Melancholy Whore, the last one he has written that is published. But, shortly after beginning Love in the Time of Cholera I discovered that I had read only the first 40 or so pages, where the book mark lay. Why I never finished this, is lost to my memory; as not finishing a book is an anathema to me, even when the books is not enjoyable or turns out not to be so good as expected... I can only guess that some major work, reading or writing project prevented me finishing the book and I simply forgot to pick it up again or put it away during removal of home.
The book is beautifully written, a thoroughly modernist work, with a sense of hope and redemption at the end... I will write more on this book later, now other duties call me as I expected to write shorter comments than this...
10 years ago
