Anna and Tom seem to lead an enviable life in Berlin, or at least that’s the impression their online presence gives. They enjoy slow cooking, Danish furniture, progressive politics, sexual experimentation and the city’s party scene.
The photos accompanying the listing for their plant-filled apartment, which they rent to out-of-towners, paints a picture of effortless style. It boasts well-appointed furniture, expensive coffee table books and mason jars filled with foodstuffs.
“The life promised by these images is clear and purposeful, uncomplicated.”
“It is a life of coffees taken out on the east-facing balcony in the spring and summer while scrolling New York Times headlines and social media on tablet. The plants are watered as part of a daily routine that also includes yoga and a breakfast featuring an assortment of seeds. There is work to be done at a laptop, of course, but at a pace more befitting an artist than an office worker: between intense bursts of concentration at a desk there may be a walk, a videocall with a friend who has an idea for a new project, some jokes exchanged on social media, a quick trip to the nearby farmers’ market.”
Depending on the client, these ‘digital creatives’ are graphic designers, brand strategists or web developers. It’s exactly the life they had imagined for themselves, but their work soon becomes repetitive, and disillusionment sets in as friends move away and have children.
Vincenzo’s observational narrative, without dialogue, doesn’t villainise Anna and Tom, but presents them as products of their time. They are trapped in a globalised, gig-economy-driven existence where identity is shaped by aesthetics, algorithms and brands. The couple are captivated by the never-ending perfection they consume online and they become dissatisfied by reality.
“I had tried for years to find a way to tell a story set at the intersection between our physical and our digital lives - how the two shape each other and our inner horizon. But it never worked - there is something about the way time spent online vanishes, about the simultaneity of it all, that seemed to resist any linear plot. Then I read Georges Perec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties - which is about how consumerism changed a couple’s inner horizon - and immediately started annotating how it would play out today. The analogies seemed to write themselves… then taking some liberties along the way until it became a novel in itself,” says Vincenzo Latronico in a recent interview.
Perfection is a wry exploration of modern life, leaving the reader questioning what can bring meaning in an era where even authenticity feels commodified.
Vincenzo Latronico was born in Rome and currently lives in Berlin. Perfection is his fourth novel, the first to be translated into English (by Sophie Hughes). Perfection was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025.
Reviewer: Andrea Molloy
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