Enter the Librarian, a Review by Josh HanagarnePerfect Days by Raphael Montes Perfe
Enter the Librarian, a Review by Josh HanagarnePerfect Days by Raphael Montes Perfect Days made me uncomfortable in the best and worst ways, right down to its brilliant cover design. It reminded me of Roberto Bolano’s darker works, nearly all of Patricia Highsmith’s short stories and novels, Hannibal Lecter, and every oddball I’ve ever had a class with.When the book starts, medical student Teo Avelar is lovingly interacting with a cadaver. She’s his best friend. At this point, you are already intrigued or you know all you need to. I suggest you keep reading. There have been a glut of get-in-the-head-of-a-sociopath books recently and I find nearly all of them tedious. Not so with Perfect Days.To put it charitably, Teo has issues. He lives with his mom. He’s a medical student for all the wrong reasons. He sees himself as a romantic but is most definitely not. For most of the time on these pages, the issues are directed at Clarice–and maybe that’s why I couldn’t get Hannibal Lecter out of my head–an aspiring screenwriter and party girl. Teo begins fixating on her immediately. When she doesn’t reciprocate, and to be fair, she gives him every chance, he kidnaps her and begins the long process of winning her over. Easier said than done when you stash someone in a suitcase, or under your bed, during the day while you go out.Clarice comes with all sorts of baggage, like a boyfriend of her own, a mother, a life that does not include being kidnapped, et cetera. But these are all mere inconveniences to Teo, who whisks her away to a remote cabin where she can work on her screenplay and where he can slowly bend her to his will. When they’re driven onto the road by events that I won’t spoil for you, so begins a bizarre trip.It’s ostensibly undertaken for the research and completely of Clarice’s screenplay, titled Perfect Days, which also concerns a road trip. The journey is a struggle of wills, a genuine creative endeavor, an obscene tableau of a developing codependency, something of a romance at times, and a nail-biter of a book. Teo and Clarice’s interactions always left me a little queasy, partly because her fears align so closely with some of my own.Talk to enough people about their fears and you’ll hear “I can’t imagine just being stolen and locked up.” Most people fear what they consider randomized violence. The truly chilling reality is that, with Teo as an example, these sorts of cases are anything but random. Perfect Days is a good reminder that there are people who look like everyone else, who are very much not. It is naive to think that you can predict the behavior of someone who plays with a different rulebook.Perfect Days is a brilliant examination of the victim selection process. I can’t quite “recommend” a handful of books that would make your reading of it even more unnerving, but if I had to I’d choose Robert Hare’s Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, Gavin De Becker’s The Gift of Fear, and Jon Ronson’s more lighthearted but equally serious The Psychopath Test.Highly recommended for fans of Chuck Palahniuk, Patricia Highsmith, Thomas Harris, Katherine Dunn, and people who can’t get enough of reading about writing. Or reading about perfectly rendered psychopaths. And that cover. I had to close the book five times just to look at it and shiver. -- source link
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