Perspective(s): A Novel

by Laurent Binet, Sam Taylor (Translator)

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Set in Michelangelo’s Florence, this epistolary whodunit caters not just to murder mystery lovers but Renaissance art aficionados, history buffs and anyone who loves a good dose of 16th-century politics served with a side of humor.

“As full of epic characters as the Sistine Chapel ceiling . . . Sinfully fun to read.” —Jennifer Wilson, The New Yorker

“[A] thorough success . . . A dazzling romp.” —Steven Poole, The Guardian

“Historical fiction doesn’t get much better than this.” —George Cochrane, The Telegraph (5/5 stars)

One of Vulture's Best Books of 2025 (So Far)

A pulse-quickening murder mystery set in Renaissance Florence by the renowned author of HHhH.

As dawn breaks over the city of Florence on New Year’s Day 1557, Jacopo da Pontormo is discovered lying on the floor of a church, stabbed through the heart. Above him are the frescoes he labored over for more than a decade—masterpieces all, rivaling the works of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. When guards search his quarters, they find an obscene painting of Venus and Cupid—with the face of Venus replaced by that of Maria de’ Medici, the Duke of Florence’s oldest daughter. The city erupts in chaos.

Who could have committed these crimes: murder and lèse-majesté? Giorgio Vasari, the great art historian, is picked to lead the investigation. Letters start to fly back and forth—between Maria and her aunt Catherine de’ Medici, the queen of France; between Catherine and the scheming Piero Strozzi; and between Vasari and Michelangelo—carrying news of political plots and speculations about the identity of Pontormo’s killer. The truth, when it comes to light, is as shocking as the bold new artworks that have made Florence the red-hot center of European art and intrigue.

Bursting with characters and historical color, Laurent Binet’s Perspective(s) is a whodunit like no other—a labyrinthine murder mystery that shows us Renaissance Florence as we’ve never seen it before. This is a dark, dazzling, unforgettable read.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374614607
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/08/2025
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Laurent Binet was born in Paris in 1972. His first novel, HHhH, was named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times and received the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman. His other novels include The Seventh Function of Language and Civilizations.

Sam Taylor has written for The Guardian, Financial Times, Vogue and Esquire, and has translated such works as the award-winning HHhH by Laurent Binet, and the internationally-bestselling The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair by Joël Dicker.

Editorial Reviews

"This gossipy, epistolary novel is as full of epic characters as the Sistine Chapel ceiling: naughty Médicis, wine-drunk nuns, proto-Marxist painter’s assistants . . . Sinfully fun to read." —Jennifer Wilson, The New Yorker

"[An] entertaining whodunnit . . . stuffed with real-life Renaissance artists behaving badly . . . Sam Taylor’s translation, superb throughout, reaches its apogee in Cellini’s joyously scandalous voice . . . [A] thorough success . . . A dazzling romp." —Steven Poole, The Guardian

"Seriously enjoyable . . . Brightly charismatic . . . From this delectable book’s clamor of voices and versions, Mr. Binet arrives at the truth of the crime." —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"Atmospheric [and] highly literary . . . Perspective(s) even revives the lost art of the epistolary novel. . . . The mystery [allows Binet] to ask deeper, more elusive questions about human existence." —Talya Zax, The Atlantic

"Collapsing the distance between then and now, the novel emphasizes the very modern stakes of its central question . . . Translated into chatty and colloquial English by Sam Taylor, Binet’s prose crackles with the energy of an art history class, and the author takes an infectious delight in the unique qualities of Renaissance Florence." —Irene Katz Connelly, The Washington Post

"Steeped in art history and underpinned by an aficionado’s delight . . . The novel wears its history lightly, filled as it is with irreverent sendups and winking anachronisms . . . The letters in Perspective(s)— translated with aplomb by Sam Taylor—have a certain giddy perfection . . . What’s moving, in the end, is the novel’s sheer enthusiasm for the act of making art." —Chelsea Leu, The New York Times Book Review

"A delightfully inventive whodunit . . . [Binet's] most brilliant feat is incorporating historical facts and attributes into the framework of his mystery . . . You’ll get lost in this world of political backstabbing and artistic passions." —Cory Oldweiler, The Minnesota Star Tribune

"Saturated with self-aware wit . . . Perspective(s) has an obvious precursor in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose . . . A reminder that metafiction, baroque allegory, erudite citation, genre pillage, and the novel of aesthetic ideas are not just the preserve of a now-distant postmodernism." —Brian Dillon, 4Columns

"Historical fiction doesn’t get much better than this . . . [Perspective(s) has] surprising twists, exciting action and a satisfying denouement. Binet hasn’t short-changed us on the fun, and it doesn’t matter that some of the events are fudged or wholly invented. Binet projects such mastery of the period, his correspondents ranging from proletarian plotters to Catherine de’ Medici, queen of France, that you swallow it all." —George Cochrane, The Telegraph (5/5 stars)

"Seriously silly and immensely enjoyable. . . Compelling . . . It’s one of Binet’s achievements that the convoluted politics of Renaissance Europe underpin the plot of his novel without overshadowing it." —Thomas Jones, London Review of Books

"[Perspective(s)] 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 . . . The sublime and the sensational combine as art theory is put to work in the service of catching criminals . . . Racy and enjoyable." —Edward Wilson-Lee, The Times (London)

"[Perspective(s)] blends the postmodern playfulness of Umberto Eco with the vigor of Dashiell Hammett . . . Binet's novels [are] full-blown alternate histories in which he has let loose the reins of his imagination . . . [Binet] is also skilled at fast-paced narrative . . . funny and very gripping." —Magdalena Miecznicka, Financial Times

"A tight, fast-paced, well-managed whodunnit . . . Postmodern playfulness with an underlying message is what we have come to expect from Binet . . . Entertaining . . . Lyrical." —Russell Williams, Times Literary Supplement

"An art-world whodunit set in the agonies and ecstasies of sixteenth-century Florence ... Who gets to look, and from what position? Does any one point of view matter more than any other? These are rich questions for Binet." —Emily Cox, Art in America

"A crackerjack depiction of [Renaissance] political intrigue . . . Binet masterfully weaves together the story’s multiple threads. Readers will be captivated." —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

2025-02-15
An epistolary novel of art, intrigue, and homicide in Renaissance Italy.

French novelist Binet opens with a familiar trope, declaring that he’s stumbled upon a cache of letters from 1557 and 1558 that “form a tale so compelling that [he] stayed up all night devouring them.” The first letter, from teenage Maria de’ Medici to her aunt, the queen of France, offhandedly announces a mystery: The painter Jacopo da Pontormo is dead, according to her by his own hand. “What a drag!,” she exclaims in an anachronistic turn of phrase when moving on to her real subject, her father’s plan to marry her off. The courtier Giorgio Vasari, writing to Michelangelo at his Roman place of exile, has different news: Pontormo’s body was discovered “with a chisel embedded in his heart,” and with his head bashed in as well. Vasari ventures a theory, Michelangelo counters with another, and other interlocutors, such as Agnolo Bronzino and Cosimo I, the duke of Florence, have their own ideas: Pontormo was killed by an offended beau because he superimposed Maria’s face on a nude Venus; he was done in by zealous nuns who were followers of Savonarola and who, when interrogated, called all painters “degenerate sodomites with bestial morals”; one of Pontormo’s apprentices has killed his notoriously irascible master; and so forth. Vasari, a slippery fellow, turns out to have cat burglar skills as well as a nose for police work, announcing in the language of a modern procedural his conclusion that one suspect “brought together the three elements necessary for a guilty verdict: motive, means, and opportunity.” It’s noName of the Rose, but 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.

Kirkus Reviews