Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico (translated by Sophie Hughes) captures the soul of the modern globalised and culturally homogenised society shaped by the constant flow of online images available on the internet which promises the purposeful and uncomplicated life. The reality however does not always live up to these pictures. The world presented in the book shows the daily activities often defined by the well curated images in their idealised version seen on social media. Underpinned by sharp sociological observations Perfection is a story of the ambiguous superficiality of the millennial culture, one’s dislocation from their surroundings despite living in the seemingly connected world and the search for the authenticity, “perfection”, something deeper and different in life. Perfection is a universal tale of modern life exploring the core of human condition.
Perfection is also a chronicle of life in contemporary Berlin it its heyday era during the 2010s when often it was the city itself that defined the lives of the newcomers. Berlin is depicted as “a city that ebbs and flows like a tide” which, like no other place, is a reflection of the current times where “the fee to cover the Ukrainian cleaner [is] paid through a French gig economy company that files its taxes in Ireland; plus the commission for the online hosting platform, with offices in California, but tax registered in the Netherlands.”
Perfection tells a story of a millennial couple, Anna and Tom, two so-called digital nomads working on a freelance basis in the creative fields who are originally from southern Europe and established their home in Berlin. They came out of age with the birth of internet and social media. The path they followed is very much conditioned by the times they grew up in.
”They lived in the country whose language they did not speak, in a job with unclear boundaries and no fixed hours” and location. They would start their mornings in a very Instagram-like way by sipping their organic coffee scrolling through their social media and newsfeeds looking at “perfection”. They arranged their lives around the visits to galleries and exhibitions that they saw other people also visiting on social media but in reality they did not have any interest in what they saw. Their personalities seem to be interwoven in the way that their flat was furnished with “Danish curved mahogany armchair, (…) a black metal side table with past issues pf Monocle and the New Yorker stacked beside a brass candle holder and a glass bowl filled with fruit (…). The back wall has floor -to ceiling shelves lined with paperbacks and graphic novels, most in English, interspersed with illustrated coffee table books.” Their intellectual horizon was largely formed by the headlines in the Guardian or the New York Times which happened to be the same newspapers their Greek, Dutch and Belgian friends read. English became the main language of communication between the immigrants like Anna and Tom, even though it was the language often spoken incorrectly. In the early 2010s there was not enough Anglophone immigrants in Berlin for them to claim the language as their own. At that time the English language belonged to everyone.
The story of Perfection is told through the images and their description; there is no dialogue recorded between the main protagonists in the book:
“They lived a double life. There was a tangible reality around them, and there were images, also all around them. Those images would be on the phone that woke them up. (…) Whenever they went out for lunch, the images would shrink to the size of the rectangular screen and hover, mid-air, a foot above their plates.(…) Those images lit up their faces in the dark bedroom when they went to set the alarm (…). “
Trying to escape the insularity of their hometowns in southern Europe Anna and Tom found void, dislocation and later in life also the sense of instability. As they were approaching their 40s, their friends would disappear, either going back to their home countries or moving to a more affordable place like Lisbon or Milan or Zagreb. Often there would no official farewell. An attempt to make a call to those who ‘disappeared’ would end up with going straight to a voice mailbox and receiving the automated message stating that this number is no longer in use:
“Someone would ask after Pasquale or Veronika, and someone else would reply that they had left. The conversations would end there, no questions asked, as if it were a fact of life.”
Anna and Tom’s friendships or rather those superficial acquaintanceships were also fading, and they were priced out of their once affordable flat due to gentrification. They realised that their happier, perfect years in Berlin were merely an accident of timing: their personal story being interwoven with the story of Berlin at the right time. They became increasingly alienated and often looked at the past years with nostalgia.
The hierarchy of life has also changed in Berlin which affected our protagonists. Age or experience were no longer factors in securing a spacious and affordable flat. As they were ageing, they realised the importance of company health insurance and pension plans resulting in them having to work more to make up for lack of contributions in the previous years. Being closer to their 40s they felt trapped in this once perfect life of theirs in this now ever-changing city:
“Fewer and fewer of the new arrivals would be from Spain, France and Italy and more and more from Bavaria and the US. (…) lots of these people worked in finance or tech. They either had permanent jobs or regular freelance contracts with start-ups based in the Pacific Time Zone. The still worked from cafes like everyone else, but that new row of luminescent apples emanated an intense concentration altogether distinct from the dreamy, distracted atmosphere of before. (…) New restaurants were staffed by Scottish or Australian bartenders and only had menus in English. The old regulars would remark bitterly that no one even attempted to learn German anymore. (…) The injections of dollars (…) only fuelled the chaos in the city housing market. (…) Evictions were also becoming more common.”
This was also the time when the reports of sunken boats in the Mediterranean sea were constantly popping up on the screens and the influx of one million Syrian refugees to Germany had an impact on our protagonists. They desperately wanted to feel useful, but their lack of transferable skills and no German language made impossible for them to help the new arrivals.
Anna and Tom felt that they wanted to find something like what they had found in Berlin a decade earlier, but they realised that it might not happen again. As mentioned earlier the appeal of Berlin in its heyday era was a combination of Anna and Tom’s own personal story, their age and the story of Berlin. They tried to look for a copy of Berlin of their youth in Lisbon and Sicily but despite stunning images of these places they shared on their social media feeds, all they found was unhappiness and alienation. Pictures they shared seemed like a con.
Perfection includes an epigraph from Georges’s Perec’s book, Things: A Story of the Sixties which was an inspiration for Latronico to write his book. In Perec’s book the protagonists are a young couple Sylvie and Jerome living in Paris of the 1960s and working in the new field of market research. Like Anna and Tom, Sylvie and Jerome’s professional choices were shaped by the times they lived in, and their interests and daily activities were defined by the objects. Their lives were curated by the commercial images seen in the advertising which resembled the way the life of Anna and Tom was shaped by the images shown on the internet. One can conclude that technology might have changed over the decades but the impact of the idealised images available either through the social media or as it was in the past through the billboard adverts, magazines, journals and TV has not changed much. The challenges experienced and emotions felt by those living in the 1960s and 2010s seem very much alike in terms of their quest for “authenticity”, meaning and purpose in life and their place in the world.
Ultimately Perfection depicts the ordinariness, detachment, rootlessness of human life, and it shows that human condition remains unchanged despite the new technological advancements. Social media, internet as a whole, advertising do not constitute a bad or a good thing; they are neutral tools, and its impact depends on how they are utilised. Whereas there is a lot of information about the impact of social media on one’s emotional health, the older generation might also remember that in the previous decades the similar concerns were also shared in relation to the impact of advertising, TV programmes, images placed in the magazines or journals.
Latronico has left us with the question whether the current alienation many of the millennials feel is really related to the usage of social media and its transcendence of our lives or this is rather connected to the core of human condition, also experienced by those living in the previous decades but in a different form.
Perfection is a slim novel but with so many profound reflections on the modern life. I highly recommend it, especially as this book is now on the 2025 Booker Prize shortlist.