Description

Millennial expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin, in a bright, plant-filled apartment in Neukoelln. They are young digital creatives, freelancers without too many constraints. They have a passion for food, progressive politics, sexual experimentation and Berlin’s twenty-four-hour party scene. Their ideal existence is also that of an entire generation, lived out on Instagram, but outside the images they create for themselves, dissatisfaction and ennui burgeon. Their work as graphic designers becomes repetitive. Friends move back home, have children, grow up. An attempt at political activism during the refugee crisis proves fruitless. And in that picture-perfect life Anna and Tom feel increasingly trapped, yearning for an authenticity and a sense of purpose that seem perennially just out of their grasp. With the stylistic mastery of Georges Perec and nihilism of Michel Houellebecq, Perfection, translated by Sophie Hughes, is a sociological novel about the emptiness of contemporary existence, beautifully written, brilliantly scathing.

Publisher Review

‘Vincenzo Latronico is a writer who sees clearly and conveys it beautifully. In Perfection, he paints a stark picture of the conditions that have created a generation’s “identical struggle for a different life”: globalization, homogenization, the internet. Though on one level the novel is (pitch-perfectly) “about” Berlin and the “creative professional” expatriates who have sought a different life in, and inevitably colonized, the city, the story of Anna and Tom will be uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has tried to resist the flattening effects of whatever life is now. I can’t recommend it highly enough.’

– Lauren Oyler, author of Fake Accounts ‘One of Europe’s most talented young writers, Latronico has written the great Berlin novel we’ve all been waiting for.’

– Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New Yorker staff journalist ‘An important novel, innovative in its own way.’

– Claudia Durastanti, author of Strangers I Know ‘A new master of Italian literature.’

– Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung ‘Perfection masterfully updates Georges Perec’s masterpiece Les Choses.’

– Rivista Studio