Perspective(s) by Laurent Binet
Published 2023 · 272 pages · 78,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · historical fiction, epistolary novel, literary mystery
How hard is Perspective(s) to read?
Perspective(s) scores 57 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 48 out of 100
- Binet mixes plain, propulsive contemporary prose (English by Sam Taylor, Binet's regular translator) with period texture — fresco terminology, Italian titles and honorifics, and the theological vocabulary of Counter-Reformation censorship debates. It sits closer to The Great Gatsby's elegant accessibility than to anything genuinely obscure; readers need no glossary, just patience with unfamiliar sixteenth-century Florentine nouns.
- Sentence structure: 46 out of 100
- Each letter carries its own voice and rhythm — Vasari's fluent and gossipy, Cosimo's clipped and administrative — but none approaches Jamesian subordination or unpunctuated stream of consciousness. Sentences stay legible and mostly short, in keeping with a novel built for narrative propulsion rather than syntactic difficulty.
- Abstraction: 54 out of 100
- Underneath the murder plot sits a real argument about what art is for and who gets to police it, staged through characters actually debating Counter-Reformation doctrine on nudity and idolatry in sacred images. It sits around Gatsby's level of social observation filtered through story rather than the sustained philosophical abstraction of something like Brothers Karamazov.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Binet packs in real Florentine art history — Pontormo's actual, historically destroyed San Lorenzo frescoes, Vasari's own Lives of the Artists, the Council of Trent's crackdown on religious imagery — alongside Medici court politics spanning Florence, Rome, and the French crown. It's denser than a straight genre mystery but stops well short of an encyclopedic work like 2666.
- Narrative indirection: 68 out of 100
- Nothing is narrated directly — every fact about the murder arrives filtered through a letter-writer with something to hide, a structure Binet borrows explicitly from Laclos's Dangerous Liaisons. Readers have to weigh each correspondent's self-interest against their claims, closer to Lolita's demand to read against the narrator than to a book that simply tells you what happened.
- Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
- The title does double duty from the first page: perspective as the Renaissance painting technique Pontormo's generation inherited from Michelangelo, and perspective as the epistolary novel's real subject — whose account of the murder, and of the frescoes, gets believed. The doomed frescoes themselves, which the real Pontormo spent his final decade on and which were later plastered over, carry that tension bodily.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- Binet, who spent HHhH interrupting his own war novel to argue with himself about writing it, brings a similar sly self-awareness to a genre pastiche here — sincere enough to work as a murder mystery, knowing enough to keep needling the premise of pious Renaissance letter-writers who all happen to be lying. It sits below Gatsby's sustained double-vision but well above a straight-faced historical procedural.
- Resolution withholding: 42 out of 100
- This is a whodunit first, built to deliver an answer to who killed Pontormo rather than to dwell in ambiguity — closer to Gatsby's closed plot than to something like 2666's unsolved violence. The larger question the title poses, about whose version of events survives, stays more open than the murder itself.
- Structural complexity: 72 out of 100
- The entire novel is composed of letters among a rotating cast of correspondents writing from Florence, Rome, and the French court, with no narrator to stitch the gaps together — a structural commitment closer to Midnight's Children's multiple timelines than to Gatsby's single retrospective voice. Reconstructing the sequence of events means cross-referencing what each letter-writer claims against what the others say happened.
How Perspective(s) is regarded
Perspective(s) holds a literary regard score of 50 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.