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Book Reviewed by:A scathing, provocative novel about contemporary existence by a rising star in Italian literature.
Anna and Tom, an expat couple, have fashioned a dream life for themselves in Berlin. They are young digital "creatives" exploring the excitements of the city, freelancers without too many constraints, who spend their free time cultivating house plants and their images online. At first, they reasonably deduce that they've turned their passion for aesthetics into a viable, even enviable career, but the years go by, and Anna and Tom grow bored. As their friends move back home or move on, so their own work and sex life—and the life of Berlin itself—begin to lose their luster. An attempt to put their politics into action fizzles in embarrassed self-doubt. Edging closer to forty, they try living as digital nomads only to discover that, wherever they go, "the brand of oat milk in their flat whites was the same."
Perfection—Vincenzo Latronico's first book to be translated into English—is a scathing novel about contemporary existence, a tale of two people gradually waking up to find themselves in various traps, wondering how it all came to be. Was it a lack of foresight, or were they just born too late?
PRESENT
Sunlight floods the room from the bay window, reflects off the wide, honey-coloured floorboards and casts an emerald glow over the perforate leaves of a monster shaped like a cloud. Its stems brush the back of a Scandinavian armchair, an open magazine left face-down on the seat. The red of that magazine cover, the plant's brilliant green, the petrol blue of the upholstery and the pale ochre floor stand out against the white walls, their chalky tone picked up again in the pale rug that just creeps into the frame.
The next picture is of the building's exterior, an Art Nouveau apartment block with acanthus leaf and citrus fruit cornices. The white render is all but invisible under layers of fluorescent graffiti, tattered posters and peeling paint. On the first floor, you can scarcely make out the stucco gables beneath the grime. The combination of turn-of-the-century luxury and raw modern grittiness lends a feeling of freedom and decadence, with a hint of eroticism. Some of the ...
Latronico is interested in a specific generation of the digital age, the last group to "still remember paper maps and landlines" but introduced to technology early enough in their teens to have embraced it with great enthusiasm, those who are now working as creative professionals and embracing a fully digital lifestyle. His protagonists are Anna and Tom, European expats in Berlin who work online as graphic designers. Latronico skewers the contemporary millennial obsession with the curated lifestyle. Perfection's focus on a certain kind of digital nomad felt accurate to this American reader living in southern Spain, especially in terms of the complex entry into a different cultural environment and the relentless pull of the next new thing...continued
Full Review
(793 words)
(Reviewed by Danielle McClellan).
In 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, the Italian fiction writer Vincenzo Latronico was mulling over the role that media plays in contemporary life. He had looked at Instagram one day and noticed that several ideas that he had believed he had come up with himself spontaneously appeared on other people's Instagram feeds. This surprised him, reminding him of the mysterious ways that ideas travel.
According to Latronico, he had long been interested in writing something "set at the intersection between our physical and digital lives," but had not been sure how to frame it until he read a short novel by the French writer Georges Perec, called Things: A Story of the Sixties. The book was about a young French ...
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