book review: Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico translated by Sophie Hughes
Overview: Anna and Tom moved to Berlin to work their remote design jobs acquired through their childhoods spent navigating the burgeoning internet. They have a relatively perfect life, a nice apartment, a serviceable group of friends. But there's something still dull about their lives, and all the fellow expats in their lives eventually move on. So they start to move around too, chasing different, more than they have. The pursuit of perfection will ultimately rip up their lives. Overall: 4
I don't feel like I can write a typical review for this bite-sized novel. It's only 125 pages with a scaled back type-set and font on the bigger side. I easily read it in a day without trying all that hard. It was the perfect book to get back into reading after a long gap, but the opening did almost make me put it down. The first prelude spends pages describing the apartment in a great degree of detail, and I had to flip a few pages forward to figure out if there would eventually be a point. The book does eventually incorporate more feelings, but that tight observation mixed with a very bird's eye view run of life sticks around. This works because Latronico has interesting observations that he's able to phrase in poetic ways. There are lines that are certainly eye-catching.
I did enjoy reading this book, but it also didn't feel much like a novel. In a way, the vague, expat in a foreign city-type focus reminded me of The Anthropologists, but that book was much more intimate to the understanding of the characters and felt like it was about people. Perfection feels like it's simply about a type of person. Anna and Tom are placeholders for thousands of people their age, living their lives. Each chapter until the end when there's a bit of plot movement examines a different aspect of their lives—work, housekeeping, friends, sex. Eventually, the book sees Anna and Tom follow the course that they've criticized their friends for taking and they decide to leave Berlin in pursuit of something else. We see them learn how the grass isn't always easier as they pursue easing their own discontent.
Latronico does a great job of painting a portrait of that millennial creative-type that's not entirely an artist that makes money freelance, works from home, moves into up-and-coming cities and bemoan the ways they make the cities inaccessible for the next generation. Latronico points out all the contradictions of their identity and does a quick exploration of the problems that arise when a youthful life is no longer what's most fulfilling. Again, it's all very surface, highest altitude view, but that's the place where it's easiest to make sweeping cultural commentary, and it certainly has a vastly different feel than most literary fiction you'll read. This book technically doesn't touch on anything I love about fiction, but the writing is at a level where I enjoyed it anyway. He does a great job of toeing the line between satire and understanding a complicity.
The section I related to and enjoyed the most was his thoughts on forming connections and a sense of permanence in a place that people come to and leave on a whim and more than that, in a place that's extremely hard to make a long-term life in because of housing instability and financial reasons. He really captures how life and friends feel like a constant, tiring revolving door and how seeing all that movement makes you start to live in the mindset of wondering when you'll get sucked down the drain. Even though my hometown is worlds away from Berlin, those paragraphs echoed my thoughts and those of so many of my friends. How do you build your life on sand?
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