- Paperback: 160 pages
- Publisher: Faber and Faber (20 Aug 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0571208452
- ISBN-13: 978-0571208456
- Product Dimensions: 17 x 11.4 x 1.5 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 581,554 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
Product Description
Product Description
Thomas Harris is the great melodramatist of our time, author of the definitive thrillers of the last 20 years. The Silence of the Lambs alone has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide. And yet Harris's phenomenal success has been achieved without any personal publicity whatsoever. He has never given an interview. In this gripping - and sometimes chilling - profile, David Sexton exploits every possible source to get to the bottom of Harris's monstrous genius: who really is the man behind Hannibal Lecter?
From the Author
This brief study of Thomas Harris is intended for those (millions) who have already read the Hannibal Lecter novels and admired them enough to want to know a little more about the books and their creator. Thus I've made no attempt to avoid disclosing the plots - not that I can imagine anybody wanting to read this before reading Harris himself.
Thomas Harris gives no interviews, heroically, and there's not much information about him in the public domain. He has always been determined to let his work speak for itself. It does. I've tried to assist in this process, rather than to discover some alternative "real story". Yet, though literature is not to be reduced to the life of the author, there are always intriguing connections to be found.
I think Harris such a good novelist, by any standard, that it is well worth investigating his career and attempting to formulate the nature of his achievement. This book is for readers who already feel the same or might yet be persuaded to do so.
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organise and find favourite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
With all the films released and yet to be released concerning Hannibal; all the websites devoted to his dastardly ways and all the jokes created out of his existence, we forget that when Harris wrote about this infamous character he was being serious.
To Harris, as this book explains, Hannibal's perception and his evil are not light issues. The former shows an intelligent account of life today. The latter is of true, natural, human evil.
This book's greatest achievement is it's tour of the childhood, etc of Harris. People always say that characters don't just come out of thin air. The authors invariably base them upon personal experience. It is not too difficult to see, through this book, where in life Harris picked up on the multitude of issues he writes about.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
This short book was featured in the Observer Literary Supplement in August 2001. In substance it's little more than an extended lit crit essay, with a bit of speculative history thrown in (as he reminds us time and again, Harris talks to no man).
By and large this work does what Sexton wants it to - that is, to open the reader's eyes to a deeper, more sophisticated Thomas Harris than one might expect from the melodramatic (Sexton's term) serial thriller genre that Harris seems happy to sit in. Sexton certainly succeeds in that - I'm going to start re-reading Red Dragon tonight, in fact - and the strands he draws out of Poe, Stoker, Conan Doyle are compelling.
BUT ... having said that, Sexton's range of references is pretty eclectic - in its literary tradition, Hannibal apparently derives from the three said potboilers and - um - Baudelaire!! (and the inevitable dash if Nietzsche, if I recall) but no-one else. And some of the links to these antecedents are pretty tenuous, which makes you wonder exactly how much homework Sexton did do - what, for example, might he have discovered if he'd done a compare and contrast on the Marquis de Sade as well? Or the Brothers Grimm?
Sexton's fervent defence of Harris against all comers - especially in re the Hannibal instalment - smacks a little of untempered admiration: Having heard Sexton out, I'm still not convinced that Harris wasn't trying too hard, that Hannibal wasn't actually a flat out clunker, as its many detractors suggest. Harris may be a literary genius but the same evidence may just mean he's a sociopathic saddo - and Sexton's arguments for the former aren't especially persuasive.
Finally, Sexton's suggestion that Harris is the only decent writer of gothic melodrama (or any other popular fiction today, really) is a bit rough on the likes of Iain Banks and James Ellroy, to name just two...
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
2 reviews
19 of 22 people found the following review helpful
Initially enticing, but a bit shallow...
17 Sep 2001
This short book was featured in the Observer (a UK Sunday Newspaper) Literary Supplement in August 2001. In substance it's little more than an extended lit crit essay, with a bit of speculative history thrown in (as the author reminds us time and again, Harris talks to no man, and he is no exception).
By and large this work does what Sexton wants it to - that is, to open the reader's eyes to a deeper, more sophisticated Thomas Harris than one might expect from the melodramatic (Sexton's term) serial thriller genre that Harris seems happy to sit in. Sexton certainly succeeds in that and the strands he draws out of Poe, Stoker, Conan Doyle are fascinating, if not totally compelling.
BUT ... having said that, Sexton's range of references is pretty eclectic - in its literary tradition, Hannibal apparently derives from the three said potboilers and - um - Baudelaire!! (and the inevitable dash if Nietzsche, if I recall) but no-one else. Some of the links to these antecedents are pretty tenuous, which makes you wonder exactly how much homework Sexton did do - what, for example, might he have discovered if he'd done a compare and contrast on the Marquis de Sade as well? Or the Brothers Grimm? He makes great reference to the "Hannotations" website, where some poor obsessive has gone through Harris' latest (Hannibal) line by line uncovering obscure and extraordinary cross references in the text. This may be a worthwhile enterprise (after all, Harris spent ten years writing the book, so maybe he did concentrate on the text at this level) but I doubt it. Rather surprisingly there's not much in Sexton's book which doesn't appear on the web site - read from that what you will about the depth of Sexton's research.
Sexton's fervent defence of Harris against all comers - especially in re Hannibal - smacks of untempered adulation: Having heard him out, I'm still not convinced that Hannibal wasn't the flat out clunker its many detractors suggest. Harris may be a literary genius - but on the same evidence may just be a mildly sociopathic saddo - and Sexton's arguments for the former aren't especially persuasive.
Finally, Sexton's suggestion that Harris is the only decent writer of gothic melodrama (or any other popular fiction today, for that matter) is just silly - it leads one to wonder whether Sexton's shallow research isn't simply matched by the breadth of his holiday reading.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Interesting, But We're Still Left Wondering
8 Feb 2011
Amazon Verified Purchase
As the other reviewers here have suggested, those who come to this book looking for a lot of hard psychological information on Thomas Harris the man, will be disappointed. However, it can serve as a source of miscellaneous information on Harris's novels for those looking to be 'completists', as some of the information presented here does not appear in the other widely available print publications (such as the books 'Making Murder' and 'The Hannibal Files').
This small volume is drawn up in ten chapters, and covers the four novels (in order of publication) up through 'Hannibal'. Chapter 1, the introduction, consists of 10 pages. It gives a little information on the character, Hannibal Lecter. The success of Harris's novels is reviewed, along with that of their various 'copycats' (in both literature and film, an example of the latter being TV's 'The X-Files'). In Chapter 2 (7 pages), called "No Interviews", the author places what he considers to be Harris's apparent feeling about journalists within the context of the negatively-depicted and ill-fated Red Dragon character, Freddy Lounds. Chapter 3 (22 pages) goes over biographical information about Harris including what is known about his childhood.
Chapter 4 (9 pages in length) is about Harris's 1975 novel, Black Sunday. It reviews the plot line of the novel, and how some of Harris's later themes are evident in this his first novel. Chapter 5 (21 pages long) is called "Serial Killers and Red Dragon". To quote Sexton, "There are several new departures for crime fiction in 'Red Dragon'" This chapter includes information on Harris's study of workers and methods at the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, Virginia. Chapter 6, "Dr. Lecter" (22 pages) is somewhat of a search for the 'real person/people' that the character Hannibal Lecter is based on. It turns out that "Lecter's true antecedents are...to be found...in fable and fiction." Sexton mentions Poe and Conan Doyle as literary influences. Chapter 7, "The Silence of the Lambs" is 18 pages in length. This is the novel which, of the four from Harris, Sexton seems the most impressed with. He mentions Harris's use of strong women characters, and goes over what he considers to be some underlying themes of the novel.
Chapter 8 (15 pages) goes over what is known about Harris's current life and lifestyle. Chapter 9 (22 pages) goes over Harris's fourth novel, 'Hannibal'. Sexton seems quite impressed by it, though he points out that it was panned by many critics and Harris fans. Chapter 10 is a brief 6 pages in which the author places Thomas Harris in terms of genre.
This small volume is drawn up in ten chapters, and covers the four novels (in order of publication) up through 'Hannibal'. Chapter 1, the introduction, consists of 10 pages. It gives a little information on the character, Hannibal Lecter. The success of Harris's novels is reviewed, along with that of their various 'copycats' (in both literature and film, an example of the latter being TV's 'The X-Files'). In Chapter 2 (7 pages), called "No Interviews", the author places what he considers to be Harris's apparent feeling about journalists within the context of the negatively-depicted and ill-fated Red Dragon character, Freddy Lounds. Chapter 3 (22 pages) goes over biographical information about Harris including what is known about his childhood.
Chapter 4 (9 pages in length) is about Harris's 1975 novel, Black Sunday. It reviews the plot line of the novel, and how some of Harris's later themes are evident in this his first novel. Chapter 5 (21 pages long) is called "Serial Killers and Red Dragon". To quote Sexton, "There are several new departures for crime fiction in 'Red Dragon'" This chapter includes information on Harris's study of workers and methods at the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, Virginia. Chapter 6, "Dr. Lecter" (22 pages) is somewhat of a search for the 'real person/people' that the character Hannibal Lecter is based on. It turns out that "Lecter's true antecedents are...to be found...in fable and fiction." Sexton mentions Poe and Conan Doyle as literary influences. Chapter 7, "The Silence of the Lambs" is 18 pages in length. This is the novel which, of the four from Harris, Sexton seems the most impressed with. He mentions Harris's use of strong women characters, and goes over what he considers to be some underlying themes of the novel.
Chapter 8 (15 pages) goes over what is known about Harris's current life and lifestyle. Chapter 9 (22 pages) goes over Harris's fourth novel, 'Hannibal'. Sexton seems quite impressed by it, though he points out that it was panned by many critics and Harris fans. Chapter 10 is a brief 6 pages in which the author places Thomas Harris in terms of genre.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
