Reviewing a much-praised book

Maybe I'm just a contrarian by nature, but I refuse to praise a novel just because others like it. Everyone has raved over The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but I cannot rave over it. In fact, I can't even figure out why others like it so well. Is it because the author died after writing only three novels (a so-called trilogy, but I haven't read the other two)? Is it because it was written in Swedish, so it's "foreign" and exotic, somehow?

One of the things I've realized is that I do not like books written by men who have as their protagonists middle-aged men wantonly having sex with girls half their ages. And that is what the protagonist does in this novel. He has sex and "friendship" with this mentally ill girl who has been used and abused by a lot of other people. Supposedly, he treats her better than others do, but that wouldn't take much. The author includes a lot of scenes of sadism that have me wondering if maybe he somehow got a kick out of writing those scenes. It seems odd to me that so much of the novel is rushed through, with narrative/exposition that somehow bites off, chews, and digests large hunks of time and numerous events, with "he said that" and "they did that" when developing those segments into scenes would be much more interesting--but then, he turns around and has as dialogue these interminable conversations between people about really boring stuff: So-and-so is someone's brother, etc., or the endless financial machinations that might be interesting to people with degrees in economics. I am reminded of the biblical geneologies that go on forever: So-and-so begat so-and-so, etc.

I did not like the protagonist. I did not like how he treated fatherhood. The daughter serves a function in the novel to educate her father about some obscure religious text, but the guy doesn't love her, miss her, or want to spend time with her. I also did not like how he slept so casually with his business partner (who was married to such an "understanding" man who did not mind sharing his wife with this guy). I did not like how he screwed around with one of the other characters in the book, an older woman whose on-again, off-again desires for him were inexplicable. And of course, the protagonist himself is never the pursuer, only the pursued. Isn't that every guy's idea of a "zipless fuck"?

This novel is some middle-aged man's sado-masochistic wet dream. It isn't written well, or at least, it isn't translated well. (Since I don't read Swedish, I can hardly know how it reads in the original.) It offends me on so many levels. I don't even like the picture of the author. Next to the phrase "royal prick" in the dictionary would be this guy's picture.

In short, if I were to have a ranking system like the thumbs-up, thumbs-down system, I'd have a thumb pointed so far down that it would be pointing at Stieg Larson's nonexistent moral structure. Misogynistic. Sadistic. Child porn in literary clothing. I feel like this novel is the Lolita of our decade. Except that novel was better written.