I
read through the resolution of Berger’s stalker subplot, which managed to involve
Salander if not be directly related to her story. Again the hacker genius, with
minimal resources and the help of her friend Plague, manages to do what no one
else could, figure out who was stalking Berger and sending her all those nasty
emails. The final resolution was rather dull. Nothing too original or
enlightening here. And Salander’s skills with computers and information
networks have a magical Deus Ex Machina
quality that defies reality. We are told that she (or one of her compatriots)
hacked into a computer and retrieved, or deleted or otherwise meddled with the
data stored there, but the specifics of how this is done is rather vague. Of course
we don’t really want to complicate an irrelevant subplot by adding exposition
on the exact methods of the hack, but for the sake of reality these efforts
might on occasion fail, or require more work and time than they appear to. And
again, with this particular subplot, involving Salander does not make it relevant
to the main plot. Sure the connection with Berger allowed her to
warn Blomkvist about a secret meeting between the psychiatrist Teleborian and
an intelligence operative, but that’s too weak a connection to justify padding
such a long novel with a generally pointless subplot.
Currently
Reading (nonfiction): Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie LeDuff
LeDuff
continues his examination of the physical, psychological and political decline
of Detroit in a manner that remains very personal (for the author). He rides along with on a fire truck through a
city that many of the residents seem eager to burn down, observing firefighters
who do their best to extinguish fires with dilapidated equipment and little
support from the city’s leaders. He continues to examine the corruption of
local elected officials, many who come off as cartoon characters. They are
almost as incompetent at being corrupt as they are running the city. He
observes a coffin being removed from a cemetery, because even the dead are
moving out of the city and into the suburbs, something he calls ‘dead flight’. Yet
somehow, even as the facts presented point only to inevitable doom, there is a
tone of optimism in the narrative, as if both the author and the people he
writes about believe that there is still hope for the city. Then again, you don’t
complete an autopsy on something that still has a chance to live.
No comments:
Post a Comment