I recently received a couple of ARCs from Fitzcarraldo Editions - Merry Christmas to me! For the past couple of years, I have increasingly enjoyed their books, and this was no exception. Latronico paints a very vivid picture, a picture that is both colourful and blurry at the same time.

Throughout the course of the book we learn very little about Anna and Tom; they are always discussed as a couple, never as individuals, and we only get glimpses into the inner workings of their relationship. We are told that they are dissatisfied with some things, but we never learn if it’s both or just one of them. In reality, they always remain slightly out of reach.

While this would probably be a slight in any other book or context, it works wonderfully here. Both the protagonists and we, as readers, always remain on the surface, this marginal place that grants us limited access, if any. It complements the overall feeling of disconnect and discontent of the book, and allows us to experience the same feelings of being at once there and far removed that Anna and Tom seem to experience throughout the book.

As someone who has lived abroad most of my adult life, I could relate to some aspects of Anna and Tom’s life all too well; friends move away, your city stops feeling like your city, you desperately try to replicate the feeling, only to realise that you can spend your entire life looking for home without realising that what you thought of as “home” was a product of the circumstances, and of being very young and very hopeful, at the right place at the right time. The facelessness of the protagonists allows the readers to project ourselves onto them, to see in them our own experiences, anxieties, and fears; and it does so without it feeling lazy, but rather planned out and intentional.

I've never felt so completely nailed to the ground by a novel as I did by this short tale of a pair of elder millennials who accidentally fall into their careers simply by being of exactly the right age to take advantage of the rise of Web 2.0 and social media, only to have to deal with the fact that their bubble is bursting in their late 30s and they have no idea how to adapt to that change.

There's a sense of real jaded disillusionment and dissatisfaction here. It's a portrait of a world and culture becoming sanitised and commodified, flattened by a vision of "perfection" presented in Instagram reels and #sponsored captions, all rendered through the eyes of those who benefited from it and helped make it happen. I felt distinctly anxious and uncomfortable as I watched the perfect life Anna and Tom had built slowly tarnish around them, unable to ignore the parallels with my own life and my own anxieties about my future. I don't think it's an accident that the novel ends with a fluke windfall that sets the two main characters up for a future they've entirely failed to plan for - something that I think many people of my generation can sympathise with dreaming about.

What's most interesting to me here is the fact that we never hear anybody speak and never see any real interaction between characters. Everything is narrated to us secondhand, as something that's already happened, in a way that makes reading this feel a lot like experiencing someone's life through social media highlights. It's a fascinating approach to the subject matter and one that I think works really well.

This is really a novel about the end of an era, the crumbling of an age of excess where anything felt possible, the slow pulling back of the curtain on a golden age to reveal the tarnished subsurface. In some ways it feels like a modern version of <i>The Great Gatsby</i> - and that seems fitting, given that this English translation is arriving exactly a century after that novel.

Thank you to Fitzcarraldo Editions for the ARC of this novel. I liked it a lot and I'll be thinking about it for a while.

I loved this book. It was definitely more character driven than plot. The Berlin setting was also part of its charm.

I really enjoyed this modern novel. Nothing really happens but the process is so pleasurable that I was drawn to keep reading anyway. Anna and Tom felt extremely relatable in their thoughts and conflicts and I very much could envision them and their cohort in my mind.

The ironically named Perfection follows millennial expat couple Tom and Anna. Digital creatives, they immerse themselves in parties, the arts, and food, recording it on social media all the while. Soon, however, their lifestyle begins to feel hollow and they yearn for authenticity and meaning.

The star of this short novel is undoubtedly the prose. Latronico’s is precise and efficient in his wording, paying great heed to visual details. The twin protagonists are intentionally lightly sketched, allowing them to become representative archetypes. This makes it difficult to care for them beyond the most superficial sense, which is something of the point. Their ennui-ridden lives where impression is more important that reality are used to critique topics including social media and gentrification.

I will say that taking aim at millennial freelancers and ‘digital nomads’ felt a bit unfair. It is as though they aren’t the true targets of the Latronico’s frustration but, like his characters, he is simply using the most convenient symbolically Instagrammable representation of the issues with modern society.

Ultimately, this book made me both think deeply and feel like a trapped rat desperately scratching at a mirrored surface and, for that reason, I would recommend.

Ideal for readers who enjoy literary fiction that goes deeply into sumptuous visual description.

With thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an early copy in exchange for an independent review.

I chose to read it because of the Berlin setting and the contemporary cultural references. However the style, despite being top-notch writing, was a little too rich for my taste. On publication, I will post the blurb and a purchase link on my blog.

Perfection is a fascinating look into what life is like for millennial expats and creatives today, exploring how hard it is to separate real life from being constantly online.

This book was wonderfully dry and cutting. In some ways I was empathising with Anna and Tom - I’ve been an expat myself and have a similar job to them - but also found myself recoiling at some of their decisions.

I really felt I grew with them, from their twenties, partying away, to their thirties as the Berlin they knew becomes gentrified and expensive. All with needling reminders that they are bound to some sort of digital presence that permeates everything they do.

The way they moved on from the migrant crisis so fast was haunting and timely. It was another thing on their timeline - one that lingered but one that like everything, scrolled by.

I so easily read this in a couple of hours so it’s perfect to read in an afternoon and then spend the evening in absolute dread over what social media is doing to your brain.

Felt incredibly seen by the “every other Sunday they would clean the apartment listening to old Eurovision songs”

Felt terrifyingly seen by the “they went to bed with bloodshot eyes and dreamed of the photoshop toolbars floating in front of them”

Latronico really nails what it feels like to live in this endlessly connected world. Highly recommend!

Review will be shared on Instagram closer to pub date!

How do you write a novel about boredom? This is essentially the challenge that Vincenzo Latronico set himself with the ironically-titled 'Perfection', which tracks the experiences of Anna and Tom, two escapees from an unspecified part of Southern European,, as they establish themselves, and grow frustrated, as graphic designers in Berlin. Latronico captures the feel of 21st century Berlin really well, as well as the aimlessness and dissatisfaction of the central characters and their friends, and largely manages to do so without making them completely irritating, although it's a close-run thing. They feel a little bit like easy targets and the deus ex machina at the end of the book may feel unsatisfying, despite the novel's undercutting final line. Despite these reservations, 'Perfection' is an impressive, and admirably short, novel and I suspect its reputation may grow, along with Latronico's, over the next decade or two.

Young Ex-pats Anna and Tom are living the Millennial dream as "creatives" . Everything they do is calculated to look appealing on social media,artfully presented and photographed food,the "right" brands of coffee and proof of their enviable lifestyle as part of the gilded set of young professionals from around the world to whom "being in Berlin" appears to be as important as their work,invariably working very visibly in packs in swanky cafes around the city.
The problem is that the story they create for themselves isn't quite the reality, Berlin has lost it's edge as the anarchic party town of the immediate post-Wall period and they live sterile lives in a sterile apartment never quite fitting in.
While others move on the couple barely realise that they often appear to be the oldest people at social events and spend more time trying to give the impression of an amazing lifestyle than actually living one. They're too late to experience the concerts and squats,they go to sex clubs as onlookers and their attempts at helping refugees are half-hearted and naive as they do little more than stir resentment.
This short story reads as an allegory of Berlin,and too many other cities around the world ,with Tom and Anna as its mirror. The barren glass jungles of the soulless and increasingly over-priced apartments swamping old areas where anything of character is demolished to make way for them, lively and diverse populations pushed out of areas whose reputations and history they have created to make way for shiny,dull buildings populated by shiny dull people.
Buildings and a lifestyle carefully curated to look enviable that in reality are crushingly dull.

I love Fitzarraldo, I love Berlin and I love hating on millenials, so this was my fastest click ever. I enjoyed the prose style, with its mostly cold and ironic distance, veering occasionally into chilly pity. I enjoyed the horribly recognisable details of the digital and non-digital lives of Anna and Tom, cyphers who only exist as a pair, and I enjoyed the speed with which they are dispatched to the arid wasteland of their perfect future (the book was definitely well-paced and the right length). But in the end, it left me feeling sad and a bit dirty. Turns out witnessing another round of low hanging fruit being artisanally skewered is less enjoyable than I thought, no matter how fast it happens.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Look, you know what to expect of Fitzcarraldo Press. Let me introduce you to a slim literary novel with an emphasis on the prose which aspires to capture something essential about human nature, exhibit #247.

Perfection can be read in multiple ways. On the most obvious level, it is a satire of the older Millennial generation, adrift, uprooted, disconnected from the real world, seeing both the beauty of it and the terrible things happening around them through the prism of the internet and social media. We follow Anna and Tom, an everyman and everywoman from a 'Southern' country establishing themselves as freelancer digital workers in Berlin. They are from a privileged background back at home, which both enables them to have their current lifestyle and sets them up for failure, as their lives cannot measure to the stable and rooted livelihoods of their doctor/lawyer/accountant parents. They are at the forefront of the gentrification of Berlin in the 2000s, only to be consumed by the wealthier British and American 'expats' of the 2010s.

The novel starts with an instantly recognisable description of a sad beige early 21st century aspirationally minimalist apartment, paying homage to Georges Perec's Things: A Story of the Sixties. We then follow the couple, always referred to as a couple, never as individuals, across about fifteen years in Berlin in a whirlwind of parties, gallery openings, socialising, working, having (or not having) sex, all of this whilst never integrating into German society. The acerbic prose captures some of the most obvious (and often satirised) aspects of this generation's lifestyles, from inept and vague political involvement to constant use of takeaways. One reviewer called this type of immigrant life in Berlin a 'colonisation', and even though the author does not use that word, his critique of gentrification is very clear in the text.

In my opinion, satire should be punching up. The very deliberate choice to keep Anna and Tom as vague, generic and symbolic as possible removes many of the factors that might influence the embodied reality of their existence in Berlin. There is a reason why they are Anna and Tom, rather than Carlotta and Gabriele or Desislave and Yordan - Anna and Tom are much easier to critique, because they are not real. I've been to Berlin maybe a couple of times in my life, but one of my classmates has had a journey similar to Anna and Tom's. And this is where my discomfort starts. Yes, they have had some privilege growing up, people without any privileges do not get to leave our country of birth. But our childhood's are anything but those of an 'Anna' and a 'Tom'. Why shouldn't someone from one of those Eastern Block brutalist nostalgia videos you've probably seen on social media want to better their economic and political situation? Why would someone from rural Bulgaria or Lithuania be 'colonising' Berlin if they moved there and happened to not end up in the service industry? The kind of critique Latronico offers comes quite close to denying any social mobility to migrants. You're either educated and with some security 'at home', ending up in a sort of lifestyle that gentrifies Berlin and is worthy of satirical scorn, or you are an uneducated working class migrant deserving of pity, but not a closer look. It is telling that his 'migrant Berlin', supposedly representative of a multicultural Europe adrift in the German capital, almost exclusively consists of a Europe of Romance languages (although I would encourage anyone reading to look up Portuguese migration to rural East Anglia in the 2000s, not only Eastern Europeans end up in conditions close to modern slavery, enabling the Annas and Toms to have their takeouts). In reality, many migrants to Berlin, London or Paris from elsewhere in Europe have degrees, work experience and aspirations, and the division between 'working class' and 'professional' migrants is much more porous than it might seem, with many starting off as baristas or cleaners and working their way to office jobs in language teaching or logistics.

Perfection is not designed to capture any of this complexity by its very nature, and I found it (and the satire it offers) a bit boring because of that. Closer to the 70% mark, Latronico seemed to have developed some sort of a sympathy for his characters, missing the zeitgeist they rode in the 2000s, still adrift, still unstable, still not able to afford to settle down. The novel can serve as an archetypical but almost photographic portrayal of our generation, but I personally found it boring for that vert reason, as I see that life all around me. I wouldn't want to look at a photograph of my own flat, filtered or not. I wonder if this book would be of more interest to readers 50 or even 100 years from now, in the same way we read Berlin Alexanderplatz or Goodbye to Berlin for the sense of time and place. Weirdly enough, despite capturing this very specific time (even as a younger Millennial I could not relate to some of the opportunities people 5-10 years older than me had, my 20s were less plat pot full apartments and more crammed house shares with tiny bedrooms and, as a friend put it, 'smelly tea towels of houseshare kitchens'), something in the style felt very intentionally retro, the sort of European literature one might associate with the early 20th century.

I wonder if the description of Anna and Tom lodging around Europe and not finding the 'authentic' experience they were looking for was intended to be purely satirical, or whether the author had some understanding of the characters' melancholy. That was the only moment in the entire novel when I wanted to chop their heads off. Many people in those Eastern Block nostalgia videos would give so much to be able to hop between Portugal and Sicily, eating local food, however underwhelming, and getting to explore those places. Anna and Tom's privilege is never more apparent than in the last 20% of the narrative, culminating in hilarious but predictable finale.

Definitely worth reading, if only for the prose, but I expected a little bit more from this one.

Thank you, NetGalley, and the publisher for a review copy.

4,5

Le Perfezioni (the English translation titled ´Perfection´ will be published by Fitzcarraldo in September) is a short, sleek and sterile portrayal of the ‘perfect´ life that an Italian expat couple have built for themselves in Berlin. They are both ´creative professionals´ that work from home in their perfect apartment. They drink speciality coffee, visit art exhibitions, have lots of hipster ´friends´ and care about the right things. They feel they have moved upward in life from their provincial city in the Mediterranean. And yet, something is missing. Is it meaning? Is there too much form and too little content?

I enjoyed this very, very much – the minimalist style that reflects the clean lives, the lack of warmth (which I suspect is what other reviewers miss) and of dialogue that fits the narrative so well. And also, I have to admit, it is so very recognisable that it was almost confronting.