THE STARS

Tariffs, The White Lotus, Armadale

★★★★★ Perfection

Do you ever get a niggling feeling that you could be doing more for the environment, could be experimenting (sexually speaking) with greater élan, could be—even should be—sitting in a nicer chair under a nicer lamp in a nicer room? If you answered no to all those questions, tell us who your analyst is and don’t bother reading Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection. If you answered yes, immediately get a copy of this novel, which examines a decade or so in the life of a modern millennial couple, Anna and Tom, with devastating sociological precision. At some point in the 2000s, Anna and Tom moved from an unnamed southern European city to live in Berlin. They’re digital freelancers who could be described as “creative,” though it’s a designation even they are not so sure about (they’re graphic designers and brand consultants). Throughout the novel, they are described only as a unit—Anna and Tom. They also never speak; the narration hovers above them, an alienating close third-person. Latronico wrote Perfection as an update of Georges Perec’s epoch-distilling 1965 novel, Things: A Story of the Sixties. Thematically, the new book parses the effects of the internet, globalisation, gentrification, neoliberalism-induced precarity and entrepreneurialism, millennial sex positivity, and ineffectual leftist politics. This description might make it sound insufferable. Yet it is not. It achieves pure pathos. Latronico maintains a masterfully controlled tone throughout, suffusing dry, withering judgment with empathy. It somehow makes the transnational economic arrangements and sheet-washing practicalities of the short-stay rental market into material for profound tragicomedy. Perfection describes Anna and Tom's house plants, their record collection, their Japanese teapot, their fermentation hobby, their circle of friends, and their vocation, if short-term contracts and overdue invoices can be called such a thing (“They did for money now what they used to do out of passion. This was a fact. From this fact they concluded that they had turned their passion into a job. This was a deduction”). Theirs is a lifestyle marked by a hyper-abundance of images. Latronico is Italian and spent years living in Berlin, writing art criticism. He has a dispassionate eye for visual details which pile up, phrase after phrase, accumulating to show the suffocating hollowness of Anna and Tom's existence. The chapter on the pair’s response to the 2015 European refugee crisis is particularly wince-inducing. It may resonate painfully if you have ever been involved in a frenzied moment of activism, mediated through group chats and infographics, which leads to the seeming mass mobilisation of everyone you know, a sense of possibility, of world-historic change—and then been disappointed, looking back six months or two years later, by the sense that the battle has been lost, and that nothing ever seems to really change. Latronico’s descriptions of the experience of using a smartphone are also queasily relatable. Picking up a phone is likened to “walking through the world’s most hectic street market on cocaine.” Perfection was first published in Latronico’s native language in 2022. The reason why it’s suddenly everywhere in our Anglosphere is because an English translation by Sophie Hughes was recently published by NYRB in America, Fitzcarraldo in England, and Text in Australia. We advise picking up the Fitzcarraldo edition, in that gorgeous royal blue with the classy embossed insignia. You can be sure it’s the copy Anna and Tom would have on their coffee table.