My thoughts on Vincenzo Latronico’s beautiful novel about millennial expats in Berlin, recently longlisted for the International Booker Prize.
What happens when the quest for perfection becomes imprisoning? If you’re constantly trying to make your life match an impossibly perfect image, how can you hope to find happiness? These are the kinds of questions that were prompted for me by Vincenzo Latronico’s novel Perfection, published in beautifully plain, blurb-free format by Fitzcarraldo Editions and recently longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025.
Latronico wrote Perfection as a tribute to Things: A Story of the Sixties by Georges Perec, and it closely mirrors the structure and approach of Perec’s 1965 novella: both stories begin with a long, extremely detailed description of the apartment, and both feature a youngish couple with generic names experiencing a similar plot arc. Perfection is a way of transposing Perec’s novel onto the early years of the 21st century.
The differences between the two books highlight the different values of the two eras, at least as Patronico sees them. Whereas the sixties couple in Perec’s novel defined themselves by “things”, i.e. consumer culture, Latronico’s millennial characters are obsessed with perfection. Perec’s try to achieve happiness by accumulating material things; Latronico’s are constantly trying to make reality match the perfection of the images that surround them.
It’s significant too, I think, that whereas Perec’s novel featured a French couple living in Paris, Latronico’s characters are expats from an unnamed place in southern Europe, living in Berlin. They are in the place but never really of it. As the years go by, they accumulate knowledge that gives them status in the eyes of newer arrivals, but they never seem to connect with local people (or even to want to do that). They are adrift, and as the novel reaches its climax they begin searching for new places to give them the perfect life they want, and I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that this approach is about as likely to be successful as the 1960s strategy of buying a bunch of shiny consumer goods.
From the very first chapter of the novel, Tom and Anna are fighting a losing battle to make the images match the reality. The detailed description of their apartment is actually a description of a series of images that they post online, but the clean minimalism soon dissolves in the reality of dust, smudged windows, food stains on the counter, and the annoying presence of phone chargers, bicycle pumps, herpes cream, tissues, earphones and a thousand other things that they have to clear away when they want to make life match the photos.
Not much happens in the novel. There are no huge dramas, no moral dilemmas, no cliffhangers. We just observe the years go by for Tom and Anna through the cool, detached gaze of Vincenzo Latronico, their lives mirroring many of the cultural trends and technological developments of the first two decades of the new millennium. We see them trying to adapt, trying to cope, trying to be happy as the city and the world change around them.
Tom and Anna are not memorable characters, and I don’t think they’re meant to be. They don’t do the things that characters in novels normally do, like talk to each other, argue, or even take much independent action. They just move through the years in their sterile Berlin apartment as a single unit, with the entire novel being narrated in the third person plural. As far as I can remember, there’s not a single line of dialogue in the novel—the closest we get to that are the indirect reports of what “they” talk about with their expat friends.
A novel about a generic couple not doing much does not sound compelling, I know. Perfection gets a fairly poor average score of 3.39 on Goodreads, with many of the reviews complaining that the characters are forgettable, the events dull, that it doesn’t give a true sense of Berlin. I understand those reactions, but the novel worked for me. The lives of Tom and Anna are intended to be empty and hollow, Berlin is deliberately drawn in the caricaturish way they see it as expats, and although Perfection doesn’t provide drama or suspense, what it does offer is very much worth reading.
What it offers is a way to think about the age we’re living through. I’ve sketched the outlines here, but the novel itself offers much more detail on everything from the constantly changing trends to the sudden food obsessions that somehow seem to be the same as everyone else’s.
More importantly, what’s it like to grow up with “the notion that individuality manifested itself as a set of visual differences, immediately decodable and in constant need of updating”? Sure, we’ve always lived like that to some extent—the consumerist accumulation of Perec’s sixties couple was a way of creating visual differences and hoping to assemble an identity out of them. But never before have people been so surrounded by images that change so often, identities that are so constantly morphing and becoming outdated and needing to be shaped to conform to the new.
Latronico is good at melding details together to show the welter of images and videos and news and sensations in which Anna and Tom are immersed. Here’s a short extract from one of many such scenes:
“An egg became more famous than the Pope. A highly contagious virus raged through West Africa. A fashion brand exploited East Asian sweatshop workers. A young woman recorded all the times she was catcalled. Two African Americans were killed by the police. A man went around filming first kisses. A plane vanished en route to Beijing. A woman was beautiful. An apartment full of plants was beautiful. A vegan quiche was beautiful. A child needed money for chemo. Time disappeared. The city ebbed and flowed like a tide.”
And here he is later, describing the experience of being online in the early 21st century:
“It was like walking through the world’s most hectic street market on cocaine. It was like channel hopping an entire wall of TV sets. It was like telepathically tuning into the thoughts of a stadium packed with people. But really it wasn’t like anything else, because it was new.”
Perec was of course famous for the OuLiPo movement of writing novels within constraints, and by setting himself the constraint of mirroring Perec’s novel, Latronico has achieved a unique and very interesting piece of literary fiction. Perfection is not satisfying in the way that novels are traditionally satisfying—if you want to feel an emotional investment in the lives of Anna and Tom and to be gripped by their story, you’ll be disappointed. But if you want a sharp take on the emptiness of contemporary life, it delivers in spades.
Let me know if you’ve read this one or think you might. Also check out Lizzy’s review if you want a second opinion.
There are 17 comments
oh wow, I am curious as I love Perec’s book. But s this one also Oulipo in nature? As you know, Perec’s novel is actually based on a very complex structure
Hi Emma, I think you’d love this if you loved the original. This one follows Perec’s structure very closely, from the long description in the opening to the sudden switch to future tense at the end. The trajectory of the characters mirrors that of Sylvie and Jerome, and Anna and Tom also try to escape to a new location (in this case Lisbon, not Tunisia) without finding what they’re looking for. So it’s more or less an exact mapping of Perec’s novel onto the 21st century. I thought it was a wonderful literary experiment. Hope you like it if you do read it – would love to hear what you think!
Thanks!
Oh, I’ve been wondering about this one and you’ve made it sound quite interesting. Should a person read the Perec before Perfection since they seem to be in conversation?
If you wanted to read them both, I think that would be a fun project, Stefanie, but it’s by no means necessary – the book stands up very well on its own. I like viewing Perfection through the lens of Things because there are so many similarities between the two books, and it makes the differences stand out. That’s why I referred to Perec quite a bit in the post, but I don’t want to give the impression that you have to read Perec before reading this. Either way is fine!
(Stefanie, if you’re wondering, as I was, how to get this in North America, without having it shipped from overseas, it was just published last week by NYRB.)
Even though I’ve not read a lot of Perec (A Void, Life, and something very skinny and clever and strange that I very much enjoyed…which is probably a suitable description for pretty much everything else he wrote) this sounds fascinating.
Thanks very much for adding this, Marcie! The way things are going, there’ll probably be a tariff on European literary fiction by the time Stefanie orders the Fitzcarraldo Editions version, so NYRB sounds like a better bet 🙂
This looks really interesting, and I don’t think I would be bothered by the lack of memorability in the characters as that seems fitting for the point of the novel. I wonder about the influence of social media. You don’t bring that up in your post, so I’m curious if that is part of the perfection trope. It seems that for millennials and even more so for Gen Z and possibly the current Gen alpha much of their perfectionism is really just a mirage, a public persona on display to keep up with the landscape of other public personas.
Good point! Yes, social media is definitely a big part of the perfection trope, in exactly the way you describe. Latronico takes us through all the stages of the development of the internet in the 21st century, and social media of course plays a big role in that, especially towards the end. I realise now that in the post I just talked about things like “being online” and the welter of images and videos that Anna and Tom are exposed to all the time, but a lot of that is happening through social media. Thanks for the comment and for bringing out that point more clearly!
I think I read your review too quickly and didn’t see that you did discuss the role of online life!
Forgot again. Politics has me all flummoxed these days.
I think a bit of flummoxation is a very appropriate response to the times we’re living through, Bean. It’s the people who are fine with it all that I’m worried about.
Sorry. Forgot to add my email to that comment.
Oh, hi Bean! No problem, I’ll go back and add it. I was wondering who “Anonymous” was!
So many things I want to comment about, let’s see if I succeed. Beautiful edition. I have heard great things about Perec. I’m starting to become a fan of Oulipo. Calvino is one who has written novels fulfilling the group’s requirements, and Tellier’s Anomaly, which fascinates me.
I agree that one of the 21’s century maladies is emptiness, and pursuing perfection or meaning in things or goals that are as superficial as the consumerism of the past century. I do enjoy this type of literature, the difference is in what you have done, understanding the coordinates of the book and all it references. If you notice that the lack of certain aspects such as the dialogue, is on purpose, that’s where the fascination starts and value resides. As I was reading, it made sense that those elements you mention were on purpose. I enjoyed the quotes and I am sure I would enjoy these two books.
Isn’t the life of a reader something strange? I was always reading mainly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, I always found 21st century books hard to read because of the harsh content, the very difficult form and resources, and these past years, due to some contemporary literature being short and the proliferation of short stories books, I am catching on some of the conversation with the past and proposal for the future that contemporary books bring. I have been able to cope with the crudeness and disturbing themes and the demanding form more now than I have started to comprehend a bit their intentions.
Hi Silvia, Thanks for your comment! I haven’t read Anomaly, but it sounds very interesting. I also love Calvino – I went on a reading spree on his books years ago, although I haven’t returned to them recently, so maybe it’s time to revisit. I think extra credit must go to the translators of novels like this, with such complex structures and rules.
I enjoyed hearing about your reading journey and how your tastes have changed over the years. That could be an interesting subject for a post on your blog one day! I do understand what you mean about contemporary literature, and many readers do prefer the classics for similar reasons. It’s great that you were open-minded enough to try new things and that it has paid off. And judging from the books you mentioned, it seems you dived right in the deep end 🙂
Wow, it’s like Instagram wrote a novel! I’d heard of this and read one other review but only your description of it has really made me think about Baudrillard’s notion of the hyperreal – the kind of reality that is so real it goes beyond being real. He calls out advertising images as being a perfect example, but he also, controversially, gave the label to the Gulf War after seeing a journalist’s report of other journalists watching CNN in order to know what to say to their own audience. What’s real anymore when we believe only a certain kind of crystallising image can produce it? I’m not sure I will rush to read this novel, but I think it raises – or rather YOU raise – fascinating questions.