Atmospheric, highly literary ... Revives the lost art of the epistolary novel ... The mystery plots allow the author to ask deeper, more elusive questions about human existence ... Both entertaining and instructive.
A brisk and breezy English translation ... Binet does an excellent job of cycling through the various letter-writers without ever allowing the reader to get lost. But his most brilliant feat is incorporating historical facts and attributes into the framework of his mystery.
Seriously enjoyable ... The epistolary novel can be a stodgy form, but in Sam Taylor’s translation from the French the letter writers here are brightly charismatic ... From this delectable book’s clamor of voices and versions, Mr. Binet arrives at the truth of the crime.
Self-aware ... Binet has a great deal of narrative and tonal fun ... Playful subplots weave around this main story, like the sinuous lines of Mannerism itself ... Smart and funny ... Might offer one good hope of outflanking the blanker ironies and implacable cultural ordinances of our own time.
Has all the elements of a classic mystery, put together by a knowing hand that is at once respectful of the genre and dexterous enough to be playful ... We need devices like the whodunnit to provide a vanishing point on which to centre the canvas, so that the messy beauty of history can play on the peripheral vision.
Perspective(s) may be set during the Italian Renaissance, but its vision of the period is absurd, antic, slightly askew, steeped in art history and underpinned by an aficionado’s delight ... Filled...with irreverent sendups and winking anachronisms ... The letters in Perspective(s) — translated with aplomb by Sam Taylor — have a certain giddy perfection ... Each letter comes across as a set piece, a small achievement of style and tone ... The novel dazzles with its cleverness but doesn’t seem much concerned with articulating a deeper message, and the result, as entertaining as it is, can feel slightly brittle ... What’s moving, in the end, is the novel’s sheer enthusiasm for the act of making art, which seems to be the only thing spoken about with unironic passion.
Binet’s yarn has plenty of entertaining moments as the would-be detectives rule out suspects and hone in on their quarry. With a plot as thick as gesso, Binet’s latest takes inventive twists to arrive at a satisfying conclusion.
