Hannibal by Thomas Harris
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Until about the middle of the book, Hannibal is just a silly fairy tale for adults about the fight between evil but omnipotent Dr. Lecter and Clarice Starling, the brave and intrepid warrior for the side of good. This struggle takes place on the backdrop of dirty politics in Washington, D.C. But then the author switches gears and tries to dazzle the reader with an orgy of torture and death. For instance, we can learn how to feed a living human being to hungry feral pigs in order to maximize the spectators' enjoyment.

In a spectacularly silly passage, the author attempts to impress the reader with the indomitable Dr. Lecter's knowledge of math and physics; we learn that he is using string theory trying to defeat the second law of thermodynamics and have entropy decrease with time!

One of the early parts of the novel is set in Florence, Italy. The prose in that part is quite good and vivid, and the author even includes some of Dante's poetry in Italian. Yet the overall silliness of the story, the fascination with torture, and the stunning, truly stunning asininity of the ending place the novel firmly among the worst books I have ever read.

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