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Zusatztext “There are images of morbid beauty here.... Harris' handling of the wartime violence is also impressive! as swift and vicious as the blitzkrieg itself.”— Los Angeles Times “Gripping detail.... [Harris] moves the story along at an impressively fast clip.”— Boston Globe Informationen zum Autor Thomas Harris began his writing career covering crime in the United States and Mexico, and was a reporter and editor for the Associated Press in New York City. His first novel, Black Sunday , was published in 1975, followed by Red Dragon in 1981, The Silence of the Lambs in 1988, and Hannibal in 1999. Klappentext He is one of the most haunting characters in all of literature. At last the evolution of his evil is revealed. Hannibal Lecter emerges from the nightmare of the Eastern Front, a boy in the snow, mute, with a chain around his neck. He seems utterly alone, but he has brought his demons with him. Hannibal's uncle, a noted painter, finds him in a Soviet orphanage and brings him to France, where Hannibal will live with his uncle and his uncle's beautiful and exotic wife, Lady Murasaki. Lady Murasaki helps Hannibal to heal. With her help he flourishes, becoming the youngest person ever admitted to medical school in France. But Hannibal's demons visit him and torment him. When he is old enough, he visits them in turn. He discovers he has gifts beyond the academic, and in that epiphany, Hannibal Lecter becomes death's prodigy. Prologue The door to Dr. Hannibal Lecter's memory palace is in the darkness at the center of his mind and it has a latch that can be found by touch alone. This curious portal opens on immense and well-lit spaces, early baroque, and corridors and chambers rivaling in number those of the Topkapi Museum. Everywhere there are exhibits, well-spaced and lighted, each keyed to memories that lead to other memories in geometric progression. Spaces devoted to Hannibal Lecter’s earliest years differ from the other archives in being incomplete. Some are static scenes, fragmentary, like painted Attic shards held together by blank plaster. Other rooms hold sound and motion, great snakes wrestling and heaving in the dark and lit in flashes. Pleas and screaming fill some places on the grounds where Hannibal himself cannot go. But the corridors do not echo screaming, and there is music if you like. The palace is a construction begun early in Hannibal’s student life. In his years of confinement he improved and enlarged his palace, and its riches sustained him for long periods while warders denied him his books. Here in the hot darkness of his mind, let us feel together for the latch. Finding it, let us elect for music in the corridors and, looking neither left nor right, go to the Hall of the Beginning where the displays are most fragmentary. We will add to them what we have learned elsewhere, in war records and police records, from interviews and forensics and the mute postures of the dead. Robert Lecter’s letters, recently unearthed, may help us establish the vital statistics of Hannibal, who altered dates freely to confound the authorities and his chroniclers. By our efforts we may watch as the beast within turns from the teat and, working upwind, enters the world. Chapter 6 "Do you know what today is?" Hannibal asked over his breakfast gruel at the lodge. "It's the day the sun reaches Uncle Elgar's window." "What time will it appear?" Mr. Jakov asked, as though he didn't know. "It will peep around the tower at ten-thirty," Hannibal said. "That was in 1941," Mr. Jakov said. "Do you mean to say the moment of arrival will be the same?" "Yes." "But the year is more than 365 days long." "But, Mr. Jakov, this is the year after leap year. So wasl941,...
