Perfect Days
Raphael Montes
Penguin Press
Dh70
Patricia Highsmith, the creator of one of fiction’s most original characters, the amiable yet amoral Tom Ripley, said in a 1981 interview that an author “has to forget about his own personal morals, especially if he is writing about criminals. He has to feel anything is possible.”
If that is the case then the young, talented Brazilian writer Raphael Montes must have thoroughly jettisoned his morals while penning his second novel, Perfect Days.
Its anti-hero, Teo Avelar, shares Ripley’s capacity for committing monstrous acts without a glimmer of remorse.
His lawless, guiltless, destructive spree is so wild and intense that we come to wonder what his next move will be and if, like Ripley, he can stay ahead and evade justice.
Teo lives in Rio de Janeiro with his paraplegic mother and her dog. A medical student and a loner, his best friend is a cadaver called Gertrude. In the book’s opening scene, a fellow student takes nail varnish out of her bag and paints the corpse’s fingernails; Teo, enraged, wants to kill her – “And then paint her pale little nails red.”
At a barbecue, Teo meets Clarice, an aspiring screenwriter. He recognises his polar opposite – she is exotic, impulsive, non-conformist; he is clean-cut, conventional, straitlaced – but nonetheless falls for her. Desire quickly leads to infatuation. He proceeds to stalk her and when she cottons on and warns him off he knocks her out.
Readers who were prepared to write off Teo’s earlier display of mental instability as a fleeting moment or two of madness will at this point swiftly reform their opinion.
Aware that Clarice was about to depart on a three-month break to work on her screenplay, Teo decides he will come along for the ride.
He stuffs her unconscious body into a suitcase (“she folded up so easily, like a little travel toothbrush”), packs his father’s old revolver, buys harness gags, handcuffs and other more sadistic restraining contraptions, and then drives off with her to her spiritual retreat.
What ensues is a part grisly, part madcap, and wholly gripping road trip across Brazil, one which traces the same route featured in Clarice’s screenplay.
Teo keeps her chained to a desk to complete her masterpiece. When she gets hysterical or refuses to comply he sedates her with an anaesthetic he has brought along from the university pathology lab, one used for injections in mice (“My little rat” is his warped term of endearment).
She plays an on-off game of cooperation and defiance, “attacks of furies followed by apologies”; he alternates between shows of kindness and bouts of cruelty.
He buys her a dress and an engagement ring and obviates the threat of a rival by carving up her boyfriend with a serrated knife and pruning shears.
Unhinged characters that kill without compunction and are made to carry a novel usually have a degree of charm to offset their foul deeds – think Ripley or Bret Easton Ellis’s psycho-by-night Patrick Bateman.
Teo beguiles us with his comical, almost tragic self-delusion. He latches on to Clarice’s every word, turning a deaf ear to her insults, and twisting innocuous statements and gestures into reciprocated affection.
He claims he would never dare hurt her: “If there were more people like him,” Montes notes wryly, “the world would be a better place.”
Montes is shrewd enough to keep gore levels to a minimum. For the most part he relies on scenes of suspense, such as Clarice breaking free, turning the tables and making Teo the prisoner.
Montes also adds a sinister touch with each pit-stop on the couple’s tour: they stay first at a resort run by dwarfs (and in the lamplight Clarice appears “pale, snow white”), then at the Wonderland Hotel and lastly at a cottage on Never-Never Beach run by an old crone called Tinkerbell.
Perfect Days is Montes's first novel to be translated into English – elegantly by Alison Entrekin.
His plot is tight, his prose lean and lucid, and the pace is so brisk that we overlook nagging implausibilities (there never seems to be a Wi-Fi connection when urgently needed).
Squeamish readers may finally blanch and call it a day on page 198; the rest of us will applaud Montes for his audacity and greedily devour his last dark act.
Malcolm Forbes is a freelance reviewer based in Edinburgh.
