You say I’m blind, I say you’re hallucinating.
Lumpy,
Is the book good though? I have been looking for some reading that isn’t written by Stephen King or Robin Cook…
Shadowfox
“The dead have risen, and they’re voting Republican!” - Bart Simpson
Lumpy – you have a good point.
I think the “banquet” scene can be tastefully done (ooooh, a pun). The director just needs to suggest what’s going on.
Although “Hannibal” wasn’t as good as the other Lecter books, it doesn’t deserve the all-out realism of a slice and dice treatment.
Is Jodie still out of the picture? Coward.
Is it a good book? Not really. For one thing, the end truly is disgusting. I felt like wringing out my brain in Clorox bleach after reading it. But mostly the book does a disservice to the characters from the original. Clarice Starling is flat out betrayed, and even Hannibal is given a fairly bogus history to “justify” his psychopathic nature.
Finally, I wish authors would just drop the notion of the super-brilliant, practically omniscient, superhuman psychopathic killer. The Silence of the Lambs was an intense procedural thriller; Hannibal read more like one of the Halloween movies.
I can only suggest, if you read Hannibal, forget SOTL. They are two utterly different stories.
Spoiler Alert
I got the idea that Hannibal was sort of post-Waco and Ruby Ridge. The stupid FBI chewed up Clarice and spat her out. Then apparently she and Lector were more of-a-kind than she had thought. The scene between him and the kid, en route to Canada, is funny and touching, utterly unthinkable in connection with SOTL’s Lector.
Also, I don’t think Foster or Moore fit the book’s description of Clarice. She’s supposed to be very cute and sweet-looking, causing others constantly to underestimate her and patronize her. I see her more as Winona Ryder; remember the waiflike character in Alien IV.
I really didn’t have a problem with the end, at all. both of my parents read it before me and went on and on about how disturbing the end was, so maybe they just had me worked past the point.
if wishes were fishes, we could walk on the ocean.
without even considering the disturbing ending, the book was a big disappointment. The character of Starling was completely distorted, which, as I understand it, was why Jodie Foster declined to play the role again. I for one applaud her decision.
I listened to it on audio. It just didn’t wash that Starling and Lecter wound up all buddy-buddy at the end, no matter how badly she was treated by the agency. The “dinner” at the end was thrown in for pure shock value and served no other purpose. Grade B all the way.
I also didn’t buy the ending. I don’t believe Starling would do that.
Techchick, The book is a decent quick read. I enjoyed reading it even though I didn’t agree with the ending.
John
Then he got up on top
With a tip of his hat.
“I call this game FUN-IN- A-BOX”
Said the cat.
-The Cat in the Hat
That’s like reading Dashiell Hammett and saying “I wish authors would drop the notion of hard-boiled private investigators already.”
The success of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS started the superhuman psychopath subgenre. Losers like John Sandford and James Petterson (okay, they’re bestselling authors, but you ever try to READ their shit?) burn a candle daily in front of icons of Thomas Harris.
Uke
Be sure to read Red Dragon, where Lecter makes his initial appearance. It’ll scare the socks off of you, but you can still eat afterwards.
The super brilliant criminal bit was waaaayyyy overdone - it became impossible to suspend belief. That someone could be a world class expert on Renaissance art, and literature, and medicine, and psychology, and wine, and food, and crime, and languages to the degree that Harris portrayed Lector was just too much. Even when he tried to provide a background for our friend Hannibal it breaks down. He was his little sister’s teeth in a pile of excrement? What did they do - eat her jawbone? Even given that he drugged Clarice heavily, how much could he have changed her personality so that she would go with him? I am sorry that I bought the book and didn’t wait to get it out of the library. I think he may have resented being pressured into writing this book. Red Dragon was far superior - and was a pretty good movie - I think the title was Manhunter.
what?
In defense of the dinner scene, stomach turning as it was, it had a point at least if you buy into the logic of the story.
If you can buy that Lector had some discernable “reason” for eating people, it would be something like this: People don’t eat other people. People don’t even eat animals that they feel an emotional attachment to. To eat someone means that you are totally and completely disregarding them. They don’t count, they are nothing. When someone makes the mistake of pissing off Lector, eating them is his way of denying that they hurt him.
The dinner scene explains this by transplanting the sentiment into the now-brainwashed Starling, who engages in cannibalism to show her utter dismissal of the superior who had persecuted her. Sort of the ultimate “Fuck You”, if you will.
You say I’m blind, I say you’re hallucinating.
The only thing that disappointed me was that Will Graham from Red Dragon wasn’t in the book. He was the guy who caught Lecter.
The reason Jody Foster passed on the movie, as told by the director, is because she has finally gotten a chance to do a movie that she has been trying to produce for years. She originally really wanted to do the movie, but passed because of the other one.
I really enjoyed this book actually. I agree that the characters have changed, but I didn’t want the exact same book as SOTL. The characters have evolved. I think the main reason people are upset about Starling’s character is because some people thought of her as an icon. But she starts out the book a fallen hero. Also, Hannibal’s character has changed mainly because he motive is revealed. Some of his mystery is gone, but other horrors are revealed. What’s really amazing about this book is that Hannibal is sometimes not as frightening as other monsters in the book.
You had to expect something like this coming. Compare Red Dragon to SOTL. Dragon was a much better book, in my opinion, but that’s because of how his writing has changed. Thomas Harris has gotten campier and experimented more with each book. Not that that’s a bad thing, but each book is a very different book because of that. I wouldn’t consider this a true “sequel”, it would have been easy to do a SOTL 2, but Harris has forgone that. The violence was extreme, but compare that to how far he could have gone. Think American Psycho. The end seen is only shocking because it describes what we know Hannibal has been doing all along, he’s a cannibal. Also, come on, the super-smart criminal thing has been done just as much in the other movies/books. He commits crimes that immitates autopsy photos in medical books (Red Dragon), he does charcoals of Florence & of masterpieces (SOTL), he’s a very good cook, he was able to evade police before captured in Dragon. If you’re tired of the the brilliant criminal, you must have hated Lecter in every one of Harris’ books. What would someone like Lecter do if he got out? What he does in Hannibal.
Now, I admit that it gets a bit crazy and hard to believe, but for a book that focuses on such an eccentric character as Hannibal Lecter, it had to be expected to some degree.
I have to agree with Finagle on this one. I didn’t find the book as intense and suspenceful as the first one. By rationalizing Hannibal’s character by giving him a motive and attempting to make him more a symapthetic character, we lost the fear he caused in us the first time. He was scary before because we didn’t understand him, there was no reason for his madness; he was crazy, he was violent, and fear of the unknown took over from there.
And I don’t care how badly Clarice was hurt at the end of the book. She seemed too smart to be taken in by Lecter, she knew what he was and what he was capable of to let her guard down like that.
And what was the deal with the whole Mason character? Did the author want to throw in as many gross images as possible? And man-eating pigs? Ooooh scary! I can’t believe it took him 7 years to finally produce that many pages of crap. I was not impressed with the book, I don’t blame Jodie Foster for not wanting to do the film, and I probably won’t see the film - if I do at all I’ll wait for video.