Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico review – an object lesson in hollow hipsterism

Anna and Tom are expats living in Berlin in the 2010s. As freelance digital creatives, their Neukölln flat is affordable, their windowsills are plant-lined, their armchairs are Danish mahogany. Meanwhile, their social lives are curated around gallery openings for art they do not much care about, cooking and the occasional attempt at an orgy.

Perfection is Berlin-based Italian writer Vincenzo Latronico’s fourth novel, his first to be translated into English, here by Sophie Hughes. The book artfully lays out detail upon detail of Anna and Tom’s quotidian existence in forensic, deadpan style, from the limited edition of Radiohead’s In Rainbows facing outwards in their LP collection to their reclaimed-wood dining table, lain with raw cotton cloth. Theirs is a life defined through a keen outward projection of taste. Over a period of about 10 years, as Berlin becomes increasingly gentrified, we observe this couple through their many possessions.

Latronico’s book is modelled closely on Georges Perec’s 1965 novel, Things: A Story of the Sixties, in which another young couple, this time in Paris, lead a life in thrall to objects. Perfection follows a similar narrative structure, opening with an idealised description of an apartment before detailing the values and desires of its inhabitants, named inseparably together, their personalities subsumed within their milieu of tastes, habits and home furnishings.

Yet where the “things” in Perec’s book are distinctly and evocatively material – a silver fob watch, a jade ashtray – the objects that Latronico’s protagonists desire are just as often apparitions, mediated through images posted on Instagram. It’s a crucial difference; indeed, an existential difference for a whole generation. Anna and Tom’s lives oscillate between things and images of things, material and immaterial, or at least a kind of remote materiality that manifests in undersea cables and vast warehouses of servers in the Arctic Circle. The description of a perfect boho Berlin apartment that opens the novel is actually a series of carefully curated images Anna and Tom use to attract short-term subletters, the mess of their real lives carefully hidden out of shot.

But where is reality, Latronico asks in this sharp, deliciously pessimistic novel. Anna and Tom can’t seem to escape a feeling that it’s always out of reach. They hunger for authenticity at Berlin’s warehouse parties and, while home cooking, they capture these things for social media, and yet it all ends up feeling unsatisfying, only quasi-real. When reality with a capital R does arrive, it too is folded into this life-curation. At one point the 2015 migration crisis bursts into their Berlin circle. “Something was taking place that they didn’t want to miss,” we’re told, Latronico deftly layering the couple’s sincere outrage with self-serving geopolitical Fomo. All the while, the fantasy of Berlin they have helped to create is being undercut by rising prices and an influx of US tech bros.

The creep of gentrification is the backdrop to Perfection, but the novel avoids nostalgia for cheap rent and bohemian community. Anna and Tom’s early years in the city are defined less by happy abandon than by a miasma of dissatisfaction depicted as endemic to a generation. Stylistically, there are pitfalls here. By keeping the reader at arm’s length from the characters’ individuality, we’re denied the distinctiveness that might sharpen our interest in their existential dissatisfaction. Depicting Anna and Tom as emblematic of a social group is clearly Latronico’s aim, as it was for Perec, but it does at points lead to a shrug for their plight. “Enthusiasm eluded them,” we’re told, “always out of reach.” Boo hoo, the reader may be forgiven for muttering. Poor privileged millennials.

Yet Perfection transcends its satire of 2010s hipsterdom through the depth of Latronico’s sociological observations. This chronicle of contemporary Berlin is strongest in its articulation of how a certain kind of globalisation dislocates us from our surroundings. Anna and Tom’s actions, plainly stated, devastatingly illustrate a homogenisation shown to colonise minds and bodies as much as cities. In one standout section, Latronico describes the couple’s efforts at sexual experimentation, taking them to a club where propositions are whispered. Do they want this? They are ultimately unsure if what they feel is “desire or more a desire to desire”. This alienation 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.