Meet Anna and Tom, a millennial expat couple seemingly living the dream in Berlin. Their bright, affordable, plant-filled apartment is the backdrop to a life perfectly curated for the digital age: slow cooking, designer furniture, sexual experimentation, and the city’s legendary twenty-four-hour party scene. It's an existence shared by an entire generation and tantalizingly broadcast across social media.
But beneath the flawless images, a quiet current of dissatisfaction and ennui begins to burgeon. Work becomes a repetitive loop. Friends start moving back home, having children, and growing up. Frustrated that their progressive politics amount to little more than boycotting Uber or avoiding tuna, Anna and Tom's attempts at meaningful political activism prove fruitless.
Feeling increasingly trapped within their picture-perfect life, the couple escalates their pursuit of authenticity and purpose, taking ever more radical steps. Yet, these elusive ideals remain perennially beyond their grasp.
Superbly translated by Sophie Hughes, Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection is a taut, spare sociological novel that cuts to the core of contemporary existence. It’s a scathing and brilliantly affecting examination of the emptiness underlying a generation's idealized online lives, making it a compelling read for anyone grappling with the search for meaning in the modern world.
‘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
Physical Info: 4.92 x 0.34 x 7.76 inches | 120 Pages | Paperback