Excerpt from Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The room on the left is a home office set up for two. Inside it, a large white melamine blockboard desk with hairpin legs is arranged as facing workstations: each holds a monitor, a wireless keyboard, an Anglepoise lamp and a pair of over-ear headphones in garish colours. One of the workstations has a seventies swivel chair with a moulded plywood seat, the other a wooden ergonomic kneeling chair with black upholstery. The back wall has floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with paperbacks and graphic novels, most in English, interspersed with illustrated coffee table books – monographs on Noorda and Warhol, Tufte's series on infographics, the Taschen history of typefaces, and another Taschen on the entryways of Milan. In the place of bookends there are succulents in cement plant pots, a waist-level camera, a few boardgames – Scrabble, Risk, Catan. Over in one corner you can make out a router and an A3 printer.

There is only one picture of the bathroom, which has a single slit window but is nonetheless bright, thanks to all the reflective surfaces. A lush trailing ivy drapes itself across the window from the curtain pole, picking out the dazzling green of the mosaic floor tiles, which also run up the side of the inset bath. On a cylindrical cabinet with sliding doors the eye is drawn along a skyline of little bottles and vials, all by different brands but with similar labels in white, pink or light grey, the names printed in lightweight sans serif fonts.

On the opposite side of the living room there is a bedroom with an extra-deep double mattress resting on a tatami base. The headboard is hidden from view by four oversize pillows, and the duvet is spread with a vintage quilt, the only splash of colour among the creamy bed- linen, white walls and pale yellow tatami. There are two reading lights, one on either side of the bed – slim metal cylinders with more decorative bulbs; two symmetrical clothes stands on either side of an antique travel trunk; a yoga mat rolled up in one corner beside some dumbbells and a resistance band. All but one of the pictures are brightly lit and in focus: it's of the same bedroom but now in semi-darkness, the curtains drawn, the walls streaked with that orangey light that filters into a room when you wake up late and the sun is already high, and maybe it's a Sunday, or maybe it's not.

The life promised by these images is clear and purposeful, uncomplicated.

It is a life of coffees taken out on the east-facing balcony in the spring and summer while scrolling New York Times headlines and social media on a tablet. The plants are watered as part of a daily routine that also includes yoga and a breakfast featuring an assortment of seeds. There is work to be done at a laptop, of course, but at a pace more befitting an artist than an office worker: between intense bursts of concentration at their desk there might be a walk, a videocall with a friend who has a new idea for a project, some jokes exchanged on social media, a quick trip to the nearby farmer's market. They are long days – altogether, the working hours probably exceed those of an office worker – and yet, unlike in an office, here no one is counting hours, because in this life work plays an important role without being an obligation or burden. On the contrary, work is a source of growth and creative stimulation, the bassline to the tune of leisure.

But it is also a life with room for joy, which is clear from every little detail. The long days are followed by a mandatory hour offline to go out for a drink or flick through a magazine while curled up on the sofa, shielded from the cold. Beauty and pleasure seem as inextricable from daily life as particles suspended in a liquid.

And it is a happy life, or so it seems from the pictures in the post advertising the apartment for short-term rental at one hundred and eighteen euros a day, plus the fee to cover the Ukrainian cleaner, paid through a French gig economy company that files its taxes in Ireland; plus the commission for the online hosting platform, with offices in California but tax-registered in the Netherlands; plus another cut for the online payments system, which has its headquarters in Seattle but runs its European subsidiary out of Luxembourg; plus the city tax imposed by Berlin.

Excerpted from Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico. Copyright © 2022 by Vincenzo Latronico. Excerpted by permission of New York Review Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.