It’s 2010, millennial couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin. From their home office – an apartment in the coolest part of the city furnished with Danish design armchairs and exotic plants – they create tasteful websites and clever brand strategies for hip hotels and microbreweries. They hang out with interesting, likeminded people from all over the world. Life seems perfect, but are they happy? Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico is a spot on portrayal of a generation for whom everything is possible, and nothing is permanent. One of my best reads this year.
Anna and Tom are from a nameless Southern European city and don’t speak German, but in a place as international as Berlin, they don’t need to. They certainly don’t have any German friends. Rather, they belong to a transitory group of international creatives or digital nomads.
‘They spoke stumbling English with other non-native English speakers. They inhabited a world where everyone accepted a line of coke, where no one was a doctor or a baker or a taxi driver or a middle school teacher.’
Friends come and go, sometimes back to where they came from, sometimes to new places, often without explanation.
They complain of gentrification driving up rental prices in their ‘Art Nouveau apartment block’, seemingly unaware that they themselves are part of the problem. Their life is filled with things which send subtle messages about who they are – a dining table of reclaimed wood, past issues of Monocle, a vinyl record player. And then there are the images, likes and comments, their online lives as important as their real lives, although ‘Reality didn’t always live up to the pictures’.
Tom and Anna are vaguely interested in art, but mostly for the gallery opening parties. Horrified by the refugee crisis they want to help, but is it out of genuine altruism or because their friends post about it on Instagram? When it comes to it, their help is not needed, ‘…the NGO’s were looking for people with experience at sea or rescue missions’.
When life in Berlin leaves them wanting, they start to look for alternatives, convinced that a move will fill the empty space in their existence. Of course, it doesn’t, but that doesn’t stop them from trying again and again.
Latronico’s sad-funny novel is about a generation whose lives can be so full of things and experiences, but so empty of meaning. His spot on portrayal of our obsession with social media made be blush with recognition. Although his somewhat clinical descriptive tone avoids judgement, it’s nevertheless a stinging satire of how we live now. Perfection indeed.
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico is translated by Sophie Hughes and published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, 113 pages.
