The fourth novel by Italian writer Vincenzo Latronico, Perfection, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions earlier this year and shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. While this is the first time translator Sophie Hughes has worked with Italian as a source language (but her fifth nomination for the International Booker!), her rendering of Latronico’s witty, deadpan style is truly exceptional. Inspired by the novel Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965) by George Perec, which Latronico decided to ‘rewrite’ during the pandemic, Perfection certainly works as a standalone narrative that provides a poignant yet ironic portrait of our uncertain times.
Tom and Anna are creative professionals who move to Berlin from Southern Europe at the beginning of the new millennium itching to feel ‘free to reinvent themselves’. Like them, an army of other creatives, whose professions are variously linked to the growing Internet, flock to the city from other countries and contribute to create its mythology. The great attraction of Berlin ‘after the collective upheaval of the twentieth century’ is its abundance of time – there is no need to work long hours – and space: ‘undeveloped lots and deserted housing blocks … abandoned commercial spaces … an entire airport’.
So expats Tom and Anna thrive, or so it seems. During the day they work mainly from their apartment, facing each other at their computers; in their leisure time, they join other non-nationals, semi-permanent drifters, ‘a group that expand and contract like a living, breathing thing’, casually meeting in cafés and then hopping from art galleries to bars and night clubs. Occasionally, our protagonists venture to a sex club, more for fear of being ‘pathetic being so comfortable with long-term monogamy’ than for a real attraction to polyamory. When that happens, it never really works out and the pair rejoice in their new-found intimacy.
Despite having achieved a dream-like dimension, a sense of melancholia hangs over the entire book. It is clear, from the very beginning, that Tom and Anna’s desires are shaped by the images of perfection from which they are surrounded and haunted. Their notion of ‘individuality’ is tied to logos, pictures and visual art that provide ‘a little beauty, a unique point within a coordinate system of differences’. Those images also promise a life that is ‘clear and purposeful, uncomplicated’ like the carefully staged shots of the apartment full of luxuriously decadent objects that Tom and Anna occasionally sublet. And yet, life always proves messier, more chaotic then what beguiled by the pictures. Hence the characters frantically work to tidy up their flat, restore its uncluttered appearance to make it resemble, as much as possible, the original idea of perfection.
Tom and Anna are in many ways caricatures of what we are, we have been, we will have been. And because of this fact, because they are a ‘border-line case’ in the acceptation that Bertolt Brecht uses in his epic theatre, they are utterly realistic. This is due to the fact that such extreme characters bring about a feeling of estrangement that makes what is familiar look novel and unfamiliar. Therefore readers are invited to bear witness to a well-known reality – the addiction to screens, the blurred boundaries between digital and physical realms, the voyeuristic compulsion of social media, the precarity of our impermanent existence – and see it as if for the first time.
When reading Perfection, our process of identification is constantly challenged by the third-person narrative, reported speech and absence of dialogues, and by the presence of computer screens that magnify every gesture and word of the characters. Pictures, especially those on social media, generate a relentless game of mirroring. Behind such mirrors characters constantly hide while they pretend to display their lives. At the same time, mirrors/screens create a distance which produce a feeling of defamiliarization in the readers. We can never grasp what Tom and Anna feel precisely because it is always on show. On the other hand, we are led to believe that Tom and Anna are really that shallow: they model their existence on images and virtual realities, incapable of producing an original thought and therefore always inhabiting a present that tries to emulate simulacra of the past, like in a Baudrillard’s hyperreality.
This is where our melancholia comes from. Ultimately, Tom and Anna are no more than phantasmatic presences, ciphers printed in sans-serif font and never really alive but in a world that is a text/palimpsest where everything can be reproduced. The gradual gentrification of the city, which causes the loss of its decadent aura, and the mass arrival of migrants that makes it impossible to reconcile the binary division between voluntary nomads and refugees, accelerate Tom and Anna’s debacle, posing crucial ethical questions and offering an unexpected and truly rewarding finale.
Reviewed by Enrica Ferrara
PERFECTION
Written by Vincenzo Latronico
Translated from the Italian by Sophie Hughes
Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (2025)
June 2025 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.
Enrica Ferrara lives in Dublin where she lectures at Trinity College. She has written widely about Italo Calvino, Elena Ferrante, Domenico Starnone and other leading Italian writers. Her debut novel in Italian, Mia madre aveva una Cinquecento gialla, was awarded the Rapallo prize for fiction in 2024.
Read Enrica Ferrara’s #RivetingReview of ROMAN STORIES by Jhumpa Lahiri
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