A parody of the strangely popular Nordic murder mysteries. Of course parodies are exempt from copyright and libel actions, hence the insistence of the word in the title by the publishers.The novel covers most of the Nordic stereotypes : the cold, the obsession with fish (partcularly herring), Nordic Dullness Syndrome, mobile phones, animal rights, open marriages and women's rights, creepy Nordic xenophobia, the buckets of coffee sold in cafes, and of course IKEA.The novel is about the mysterious slaying of reindeer and the decapitation of two novellists, one a successful author of a book about sturgeons, the other an unsuccessful writer of pot boilers. A very entertaining parody. But to get the most out of it, you should have read the Millennium trilogy (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo etc); not seeing them as a movie is not enough. I love Stieg Larsson's writing style. It's detailed, and you can follow the story from the point of view of many of the protagonists. Lars Arffssen takes his writing style to a new level.There is also an hour + long documentary about Stieg Larssen and the Millennium trilogy (the only place I've seen that in the US was in a Scandinavian movie festival in Austin - I even tried to buy a copy somehow to show to some friends who couldn't make it to Austin that weekend, without success). You should also have seen that to get more of the story. And you should 'get' a lot of things Swedish and Scandinavian to get the rest.Instead of staying only on where the Girl with a Dragon Tattoo stayed, this story happens after all that stuff in the Millennium trilogy has happened. Mikael Blomberg (who has recently discovered his Jewish roots) tries to help Lizzy Salamander to get cleared of murder charges once again. There's some video footage of apparently her killing Twig, the only unpublished author in Sweden, yet that doesn't ring true. On the same time Svenjamin Bubbles is investigating vicious serial killings of raindeer. Well, without spoiling more than that, there's a lot of laughter in 200 pages. Lots of laughter and lots of fried eel, UKEA's corporate secrets, herring and rollmop and so on.I enjoyed all the poking fun of the Millennium stuff and having fun with all the Swedish stuff AND especially with the Swedish stereotypes. There's plenty to that. I love what he'd done with most of the characters, and of course, as a nerd, I also liked Lizzy's Powerbook replacement in this book. Plus he'd managed to bring to life some characters that were mentioned in the Millennium but never really part of the story.On the same time, some things started to get a bit tiring, like the c-word abused by some of the characters, and Lizzy's calling Kalle F-ing Blomberg, but those were all to some degree even in the Millennium books. But maybe when the amount of those were spread in 1500 pages it seemed a bit less intense than reading the same curses in 200 pages. And the ABC kaffebar, frequented by some or other. But those were only minor annoyances, and I just had to see how the raindeer serial killings would fit to the girl with a sturgeon tattoo.
What do You think about Verarschung: Die Parodie (2011)?
The first few chapters were funny, but the parody was too much like the original.
—wendyzh
Had some funny parts to it and was sorta entertaining easy read, but not great.
—alinuta83
Beware of this book - very coarse language. Funny take on "...dragon tattoo"
—nadimpalli
I like parodies. (I'm not judging you.)
—sugarplum
