Perfection

Millennial expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin, in a bright, affordable, plant-filled apartment. Their life as young digital creatives revolves around slow cooking, Danish furniture, sexual experimentation and the city’s twenty-four-hour party scene – an ideal existence shared by an entire generation and tantalizingly lived out on social media. But beyond the images, dissatisfaction and ennui burgeon. Work becomes repetitive. Friends move back home, have children, grow up. Frustrated that their progressive politics amount to little more in practice than boycotting Uber, tipping in cash, or never eating tuna, Anna and Tom make a fruitless attempt at political activism. Feeling increasingly trapped in their picture-perfect life, the couple takes ever more radical steps in the pursuit of an authenticity and a sense of purpose perennially beyond their grasp. Superbly translated by Sophie Hughes, Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection is a taut, spare sociological novel about the emptiness of contemporary existence, scathing and brilliantly affecting.

About the Author :
Vincenzo Latronico was born in Rome in 1984 and currently lives in Berlin. He is an art critic and has translated many books into Italian, by authors such as George Orwell, Oscar Wilde, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hanif Kureishi. Perfection is his fourth novel, the first to be translated into English.

Review :
‘The book artfully lays out detail upon detail of Anna and Tom’s quotidian existence in forensic, deadpan style…. But where is reality, Latronico asks in this sharp, deliciously pessimistic novel…. [A]lienation from the self is at the hollow, restless heart of Anna and Tom’s lives: constantly yearning, empty of meaning. Latronico’s thought-provoking book is anything but.’ — Thomas McMullan, Guardian ‘Perfection is a short, sly, scathing satire about dissatisfied millennials…. But [it] offers something more than amusing social stereotypes. It is a devastating critique of aspirational consumerism and personal branding, of a generation’s “identical struggle for a different life”, in a world where the principal means of expressing their agency is through food and fonts…. Latronico’s piercing irony is translated with great care and dexterity by Sophie Hughes, meaning it all feels painfully familiar…. Latronico has written one of the most brilliantly controlled works of social realism I’ve read in a while.’ — Johanna Thomas-Corr, Sunday Times ‘I read Perfection in a single hypnotized sitting. Time disappeared, as it does for Anna and Tom. In the following days, I described the book to myself with words like “flat” and “clinical” and “affectless”. I thought of it as a “case study” or a “kind of ethnography”. Reading it again a week later, I had the impression of meeting a beautiful, well-dressed person for the second time and realizing only then, with some embarrassment, that they were smart and funny and sensitive. Perfection is dense with ideas, feelings, political insights, beautiful turns of phrase, unexpected observations about ordinary occurrences – all the qualities I look for (and appreciate in real time) when reading fiction.’ — Alice Gregory, New Yorker ‘Perfection is a defining picture of a generation…. [A] curious and compelling read – like staring into a mirror for the first time, unsure whether to be struck by wonder or terror. Whichever it was, I couldn’t look away.’ — Chris Allnutt, Financial Times ‘Perfection captures with uncanny precision the sorry state of things in an era where abundance – of choices, of possessions, of personal freedoms – has brought the opposite of fulfillment.’ — Sarah Moorhouse, Spectator ‘Perfection gave me the gift of being able to hold a long span of time – in a relationship, in a city – and the experience of being young, and the experience of being not so young – all in my head at once. I could hold it there the way you hold a parable or fable, but with all these tiny details, too. It also functioned like a kind of murder mystery: what slowly killed the magic? Was it their values, was it aging, was it... was it...? It’s such a beautiful, thoughtful, impeccably crafted book.’ — Sheila Heti, author of Pure Colour ‘This book gives startling form to the question of how to live a meaningful life; to the illusion that appearance is beauty; to the restlessness of contemporary society. I read it in a breath and I was captivated.’ — Ayşegül Savaş, author of The Anthropologists ‘Perfection is a jewel of a novel: precisely cut, intricately faceted, prismatically dazzling at its heart. Vicenzo Latronico is the finest of writers.’ — Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds ‘Perfection is a generation-defining piece of literature, one that spares us nothing. To read it is to look in a mirror and finally, for the first time, truly see yourself and the culture you’ve helped create: the one that lurks behind the filters, algorithms and curated ephemera of selfhood that make up our public lives. Read it and tremble.’ — Madeleine Watts, author of Elegy, Southwest ‘Vincenzo Latronico is a writer who sees clearly and conveys it beautifully. In Perfection, he paints a stark picture of the conditions that have created a generation’s “identical struggle for a different life”: globalization, homogenization, the internet. Though on one level the novel is (pitch-perfectly) “about” Berlin and the “creative professional” expatriates who have sought a different life in, and inevitably colonized, the city, the story of Anna and Tom will be uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has tried to resist the flattening effects of whatever life is now. I can't recommend it highly enough.’ — Lauren Oyler, author of Fake Accounts ‘The world of this horrifying novel has been built piece by perfect piece – honey-colored floorboards, a monstera’s perforate leaves, glossy white tiles, a breakfast of assorted seeds, a game of Carcassonne – the method of its construction likewise perfect, a perfection of prose that ends by releasing, miraculously, the very thing perfection is made to prohibit, the heavy stink of mortality — Kathryn Davis, author of Aurelia, Aurélia ‘I recognize Anna and Tom in Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection because I am them. Never has a novel so incisively captured what it feels like to participate in the globalized culture of the Internet era: to consume it; to be overwhelmed by it; to try, futilely, to make it. The repeating symbols of homogenized good taste – potted house plants, reclaimed-wood furniture, post-industrial clubs – haunt the characters as their own poignant hopes to be original. I felt attacked, as they say online. Perfection is satire in the way that adult life itself is a comedy. By its end, the novel will cure you of any dream for authenticity.’ — Kyle Chayka, author of The Longing for Less ‘One of Europe’s most talented young writers, Latronico has written the great Berlin novel we’ve all been waiting for.’ — Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New Yorker staff journalist ‘An important novel, innovative in its own way.’ — Claudia Durastanti, author of Strangers I Know ‘Sharp and revelatory. Latronico is a brilliant and fearless writer. I recommend this novel to every reader I meet.’ — Ellena Savage, author of Blueberries ‘A new master of Italian literature.’ — Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ‘Perfection masterfully updates Georges Perec’s masterpiece Les Choses.’ — Rivista Studio