Perfect Days by Raphael Montes – review

‘the book has an electrifying pace, full of shocking and macabre twists and turns’

In an interview for the literary website Carpe Libri, Raphael Montes makes it clear that, in his books, he prefers to explore the countless facets of human wickedness instead of creating a fantasy world. The young writer is being called the Brazilian Stephen King and shows in Perfect Days, his second novel, a violence steaming with irony that can happen by your side and you don’t even dream about it, absurd as it may seem.

The story behind the creation of the book is noteworthy: after reading her son’s first novel, the shocking and cruel Roulette, Montes’ mother asked him to write a love story, and so he did, but in a rather different way...

In Perfect Days, Teo is a young medical student with a fertile and wicked imagination, and a strong, complicated personality – (almost) a psychopath – who is wounded by Cupid’s arrow and falls in love with a girl who is totally his opposite in personality, Clarice. Yin and Yang. Teo and Clarice. A volcano about to erupt. And the eruption happens, taking the reader’s breath away.

Facing a platonic love unrequited, the only (and extremely calculated) solution that Teo’s paranoid mind comes up with is to kidnap Clarice and make her fall in love with him. With a lot of planning, coldness, syringes and a pink suitcase, Teo takes Clarice on a claustrophobic road trip across the countryside of Rio de Janeiro, passing through the same dream places portrayed in the road movie screenplay the girl was writing. Their relationship is disturbing, and the couple establishes an unusual routine, full of psychological torture and squalor.

‘What you feel is infatuation. It’s an illness, an obsession. It’s anything but love.’

‘I don’t believe in the taxonomical classification of emotions, Clarice.’

Raphael is an author who masterfully controls tension during the narrative. In his writing, it is possible to see the influence of suspense masters such as Patricia Highsmith, Agatha Christie and Jim Thompson. Even stronger are the cinematic influences: Raphael Montes is a mixture of Alfred Hitchcock’s suspense with Quentin Tarantino’s black comedy. Not surprisingly, the book has an electrifying pace, full of shocking and macabre twists and turns.

And the reader? Oh, perhaps this is the best, and hardest, part to write about in this review. My number one advice is that you must take a few straight hours of your day to read this book, because, believe me, you won’t be able to put it down. When you come to the end – and that will happen at the speed of light – wrath will probably be your first feeling, but stop and think about it for a little while (perhaps for days) and you will understand it.

Perfect Days has been conquering readers who do not even read crime stories, and the good news is that the book, which is being published in a grand total of 15 countries overseas, has just landed in the UK, published by Harvill Secker and translated by Alison Entrekin. Perfect Days is undoubtedly a great representative of the wonderful literature being produced in Brazil nowadays.

Buy this book at the Guardian Bookshop

Want to tell the world about a book you’ve read? Join the site and send us your review!

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJuYnrmlvsSnqmaan6S4tHnSoqueZ2Jlfnd7zJqpaGhkZL2mvsWemq1llJbGtHnRmqehmZWheq67za2crGWimsOqsdY%3D