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Summary
Summary
A twisted young medical student kidnaps the girl of his dreams and embarks on a dark and delirious road trip across Brazil in the English-language debut of Brazil's most celebrated young crime writer.
Teo Avelar is a loner. He lives with his paraplegic mother and her dog in Rio de Janeiro, he doesn't have many friends, and the only time he feels honest human emotion is in the presence of his medical school cadaver--that is, until he meets Clarice. She's almost his exact opposite: exotic, spontaneous, unafraid to speak her mind. An aspiring screenwriter, she's working on a screenplay called Perfect Days about three friends who go on a road trip across Brazil in search of romance. Teo is obsessed. He begins to stalk her, first following her to her university, then to her home, and when she ultimately rejects him, he kidnaps her and they embark upon their very own twisted odyssey across Brazil, tracing the same route outlined in her screenplay. Through it all, Teo is certain that time is all he needs to prove to Clarice that they are made for each other, that time is all he needs to make her fall in love with him. But as the journey progresses, he digs himself deeper and deeper into a pit that he can't get out of, stopping at nothing to ensure that no one gets in the way of their life together. Both tense and lurid, and brimming with suspense from the very first page, Perfect Days is a psychological thriller in the vein of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley --a chilling journey in the passenger seat with a psychopath, and the English language debut of one of Brazil's most deliciously dark young writers.
Author Notes
Raphael Montes was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1990. He is a lawyer and a writer. His short stories have appeared in Playboy and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. His debut novel, Suicides, was published in 2010 and was a finalist for the Sao Paolo Literature Prize. His English debut, Perfect Days, was published in 2016.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Brazilian author Montes (Suicides) makes his English-language debut with a nifty, albeit nasty little thriller. Teo Avelar, the wonderfully immoral hero at its pitch-black center, is studying to be a pathologist in Rio de Janeiro. His best friend is a corpse. Then he meets Clarice Lispector, a would-be screenwriter, and falls in love. Teo soon starts stalking Clarice, and in a bid to win her over and make her fall in love with him, he drugs and kidnaps her. Expected developments include Clarice's efforts to escape and the murder of someone who threatens Teo's plan to keep her captive. More unusual are a tense encounter Teo has with the police and his bouts of paranoia. When the tables finally turn, Montes pulls out the stops with a series of twists-one of which is not for the squeamish. Teo's criminal mischief may put off some readers, but others will enjoy the wild ride. Agent: Luciana Villas-Boas, Villas-Boas & Moss Literary Agency & Consultancy (Brazil). (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Teo, a medical student in Rio de Janeiro, lacks affect. His best friend is Gertrude, the cadaver he is dissecting. He dismisses everyone he comes into contact with: fellow students, even his mother, who is a paraplegic. Then, at a party, he talks briefly to Clarice and immediately becomes completely obsessed. He stalks her. He knows that she is writing a screenplay and that she is planning to go to a resort in Teresópolis to continue her writing. Clarice is a free spirit, very bright and far more worldly than Teo. She rebuffs his attempt to go with her to the resort, so he knocks her out with the book he has brought as a gift. Then he sedates her and visits a porn shop to buy restraints and gags. Teo just knows that she will see the light and fall in love with him, but the path is far darker and crazier than he or the reader expects. Montes is one of Brazil's rising crime novelists, and he has filled Perfect Days with suspense and jolting plot twists.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2016 Booklist
Guardian Review
John O'Connell on The Travelers by Chris Pavone, The Poison Artist by Jonathan Moore, Palace of Treason by Jason Matthews, Jonathan Dark or the Evidence of Ghosts by AK Benedict, Perfect Days by Raphael Montes Former publisher Chris Pavone continues his run of smart, elegant thrillers with The Travelers (Faber, [pound]12.99). Its hero Will Rhodes is a successful but jaded travel journalist on an upscale magazine (think Conde Nast Traveller) whose globe-trotting lifestyle turns into a cover for something more nefarious after he is seduced and blackmailed on a trip by a woman he mistakes for a rookie hack. Will is the archetypal Hitchcockian innocent -- naive, entitled, foolish -- and Pavone has great fun shuttling him between exotic locations while tugging the rug from beneath his feet. There are twists and scrapes aplenty, and arguably the journey is more interesting than the destination. But The Travelers is written with wit and charm as well as satirical brio: the homage it pays to the dying world of glossy magazines manages to be warmly nostalgic and cattily ironic. Jonathan Moore's The Poison Artist (Orion, [pound]7.99) is a solid psychological noir with postmodern flourishes, redolent of Paul Auster and Jonathan Lethem, though more straightforwardly generic. Seeking comfort after a relationship-ending row with his girlfriend, San Francisco-based toxicologist Caleb Maddox heads for a secluded bar where, all too briefly, he meets central-casting femme fatale Emmeline, with her slippery-silk dress and taste for absinthe. Caleb's day job is conducting research into pain thresholds. In his spare time he helps his mortician friend Henry by running tests on corpses the police have found in the bay. But then one of the dead turns out to have been seen last at the bar on the night Caleb was there ... With its crisp, vivid writing -- not a word is wasted -- and multi-layered plotting, The Poison Artist is as satisfying as it is deeply unsettling. Moore has conjured a disjointed but gorgeous absinthe dream that enfolds the reader like a deadly fog. Highly recommended. I was less convinced by Jason Matthews' Palace of Treason (Michael Joseph, [pound]10), one of those cake-and-eat-it thrillers that is so pleased with its hard, modern, resourceful, feminist heroine -- in this case a woman trained as a "sparrow" or sex spy -- that it can't resist banging on about how hot she is. If you can tolerate the fact that Dominika Egorova more or less exists to be objectified then Palace of Treason is pretty good, its breadth and menace the result of the 33 years its author spent as a CIA operations officer. Ostensibly a Russian intelligence service agent, Egorova is back in Moscow where, unbeknown to her psychotic boss, she is working for the CIA. (Her relationship with her CIA handler Nate Nash was established in Matthews' previous novel Red Sparrow, as yet unpublished in the UK.) Matthews does three audacious things in Palace of Treason : he includes Putin as a character; he gives Egorova synaesthesia and gets away with it; and he ends each chapter with a recipe. Like the world it describes, Palace of Treason is brutal and unforgiving, and for all its alleged authenticity it feels closer to Ludlum than Le Carre. AK Benedict follows up her debut The Beauty of Murder with Jonathan Dark or the Evidence of Ghosts (Orion, [pound]12.99), a speculative policier set in a London where ghosts dwell alongside the living. At its centre is Maria, a once-blind Thames mudlarker pursued by a stalker who thinks sending Maria a ring attached to its previous wearer's finger is a sound way to propose. Can Met detective Jonathan Dark succeed where he failed before and keep her safe? It is worryingly hard to care. Perhaps Difficult Second Novel Syndrome is to blame. Benedict has great imaginative flair and can write beautifully, but she seems to be struggling here -- willing disparate stories and scenarios to cohere; introducing new characters well before we have worked out who the old ones are; and generally overcomplicating the novel's fragile universe. Brazilian novelist Raphael Montes has attracted high-profile plaudits (Sophie Hannah, Jeffery Deaver) for Perfect Days (Harvill Secker, [pound]15.99), a black comedy-cum-road thriller in which deranged medical student Teo stalks and then kidnaps the object of his warped affection, Clarice, in a bid to make her love him (previously, he has only had feelings for his dissection-class corpse). Call me humourless, but I found the flat, affectless prose -- the traditional vehicle for conveying "hilarious" Asperger's-style misreadings of people, environments and social cues -- charmless and unsubtle. Some of this may be the fault of Alison Entrekin's translation. Even so, the lazy equation of autistic spectrum disorders with psychopathy is tedious beyond belief. - John O'Connell.
Kirkus Review
Psychopathology, Carioca style: well-paced but troubling thriller by Brazilian novelist/lawyer Montes. "He didn't want to come across as sick or a psycho": Hannibal Lecter he's not, not yet, but when we learn that the only person medical student Teo Avelar likes is his dissecting corpse, Gertrude, who, "in the pale lighttook on a very peculiar brownish hue, like leather," well, we're sure that bad things are about to ensue. Teo lives with his crippled mother and her dog in a Rio walkup, scarred by unhappy memories. A vegetarian, nondrinker, and otherwise abstemious chap, Teo nonetheless finds himself at a party, where he is smitten by the tiny but overflowingly confident Clariceher name not just that of a Brazilian novelist ("For God's sake," our Clarice yells, "don't talk to me about Clarice Lispector, because I've never read anything by her!"), but also that of Hannibal Lecter's bte noire, Clarice Starling. Accident? It wouldn't seem so, any more than the poor dog's passing is, and certainly not when Teo kidnaps Clarice, trusting that one day she'll love him as much as he loves her. Their interaction is ugly and violent, and it's not entirely believable that Clarice is able to turn the tablesand then Teo, and then Clarice, until the game of cat and mouse seems more like cat and cat. The suggestion that Clarice is complicit in her own captivity is both daring and controversial; John Fowles did it neatly in The Collector, but half a century on, Montes handles the question somewhat less deftly, and in any event, the characters seem incomplete, their motivations not quite clear save that Teo has a Norman Bates-ian sensitivity to matters maternal. The ending in particular lies on the very border of good and bad taste, but Montes gets points for neatlyand appallinglyconnecting it to the opening of his narrative, ironic title and all, in a most unpleasant full circle. Readers of Thomas Harris and Henning Mankell may feel that they've been here before, but a fast and fluent read all the same. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
No one understands Teo Avelar. He is a medical student in Brazil with few friends. Well, he has one close friend named Gertrude, but she doesn't talk much, as readers will quickly find out. Teo takes care of his crippled mother and leads a lonely life until he meets the lovely Clarice. After a simple kiss on the cheek at a party, Teo falls in love. He begins by stalking and eventually kidnapping Clarice. He just can't understand why she will not give him a chance to prove his love, so he takes her on an adventure similar to the screenplay she is writing. Moving from location to location, packing Clarice away in a suitcase and calling her mother to let her know they are safe and having fun, Teo becomes crueler to Clarice. Montes's (Suicides) first novel to be translated into English will make readers grip the pages and hang on for a very disturbing ride. VERDICT Recommended for fans of serial killer and stalker stories, Thomas Harris characters, and those who seeking a look inside the mind of a psychopath.-Jason L. Steagall, Gateway Technical Coll. Lib., Elkhorn, WI © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
