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Rating: Only the gluttonous gorge themselves without considering the quality of the food.
How many of us have ever collected the complete works of an author we know nothing about? Well, this might not be normal behavior, at least not rational, but if the author is Stieg Larsson? Could it become more understandable?
Spring of 2009: "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest", the final installment of the Millennium Trilogy, had just arrived in Italy; the author was already deceased, he couldn't have done more, and that was enough for me to decide to buy all three volumes: but what kind of reason is that? Let's be honest, I was seized by an irrational, yet urgent and inescapable need to "possess" those books, immediately, all three: simply the behavior of a small selfish child, the firstborn and only child...
The physical pleasure of owning the entire work and being able to dispose of it at my leisure gave way to the amazement of discovering the "Larsson method", as I called it: intricate stories flow from the pen like tributaries that swell a river and accompany it to the sea, each with its own water volume and path, but all united to reach the same goal.
This happens in the first two books: stories and characters apparently solitary tributaries, coming together to give rise to the third volume, a raging river, with tumultuous and dangerous rapids that overwhelm you and leave you breathless, with time jumps that increase the speed of the narrative current and you, reader, find yourself rowing strenuously to maintain the course and reach calmer waters.
Mikael Blomkvist the journalist-investigator, Erika Berger the editor-in-chief, Dragan Armanskij director of Milton Security, Holger Palmgren beloved guardian of Lisbeth, the deluded secret police, honest cops, revolve around the life, turned into hell, of Lisbeth Salander: a young woman, an expert hacker, never a child, who hides a terrible secret she wants to free herself from, but to do so she will risk her life and will have to bring down the House of Cards of which she is the unwilling Queen.
The attention to detail, the precision in describing landscapes and settings where the story unfolds, the psychological portrait of individual characters, is spectacular: you are immersed in those turbulent waters and like Lisbeth, Mikael, and company, you must heal the traumas, bruises, and pains that the struggle for survival has also left on you.
I don't know if the plot can be better specified, but I don't think you can summarize over 800 pages rich in twists and unimaginable intrigues.
To the undecided, I can only assure you that here "quantity" does not at all come at the expense of "quality".
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