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The Girl With The Cliched Tattoo, amirite

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Having gone to see the film last month after it finally got its Japan release - including a sex scene complete with a fuzzed-out/mosaic'd general crotch area; thanks, Japanese censorship! - I finally read The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

The story is supposed to be set on Hedeby Island. Oh really? Are you sure it isn't CLICHE ISLAND? (Yeah~)

"Dead as a doornail", "grasping at straws", "like a venomous snake", "fed up to the back teeth"... and that was all in the first few chapters, and all in the authorial exposition (ie. not the dialogue, where cliches are more forgiveable).

Here are two of my favourites, which I actually wrote down due to their sheer awfulness.


"You didn't have to be a rocket scientist to see that these events were somehow related. There had to be a skeleton in one of their cupboards."

"The source was literally scared to death, so we had to meet him in secret."

Did this book even have an editor?

The frustrating thing is that since I do not and never will read fluent Swedish, I will never know if it was the translator's fault (Reg Keeland, who by the way is blaming his Scottish editor for "localizing" the book from US English into UK English - is there some kind of style rule I wasn't aware of wherein UK English must contain three times the number of tired cliches than US English?), or whether Stieg Larsson was just a shitty writer.

In other news, here's today's bento, made in approximately 13 minutes after we both overslept. ・ヾ(。>д<)シ It includes many of the leftover okazu from yesterday's bento, but I won't tell if you don't...


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