Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico
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.
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On his blog A Writer’s Life, British novelist Andrew Blackman shares book reviews, insights into the writing process and the latest literary news, as well as listing short story contests with a total of more than $250,000 in prize money.
Source: https://andrewblackman.net/2025/03/perfection-vincenzo-latronico-review/
