Perfect Days
SynopsisPlot
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.
Story
About this book
Teo Avelar is a medical student in Rio de Janeiro who lives a deeply isolated life with his paraplegic mother and her dog. He has few social connections and finds his only sense of closeness with the cadaver he studies at school. That changes when he meets Clarice, an aspiring screenwriter whose openness and spontaneity are everything Teo is not. She is working on a screenplay titled Perfect Days, which follows three friends on a road trip across Brazil. Teo becomes fixated on her, and when she turns him down, he kidnaps her and forces a journey that mirrors the route in her own script.
The novel follows Teo's increasingly desperate logic as he convinces himself that enough time together will make Clarice love him. Each step pulls him further into dangerous territory, and his efforts to keep the situation under control grow more extreme as obstacles appear. The story is told from Teo's perspective, placing the reader alongside a narrator whose reasoning is disturbingly methodical.
Raphael Montes is a Brazilian crime writer, and Perfect Days was his English-language debut. The book has drawn comparisons to Patricia Highsmith's work, particularly The Talented Mr. Ripley, for its close attention to a calculating protagonist operating just beneath the surface of ordinary life.
