#RivetingReviews: Sheridan Marshall reviews PERFECTION by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes
Perfection is about a couple, Anna and Tom, and their carefully curated lifestyle in contemporary Berlin. “Lifestyle” is the key word here, because the pair are highly focused on how their lives appear to others and on making choices to sustain the appearance of an effortless, innate sense of style. In fact, though, their lives are effortfully and painstakingly managed to conform to their desired aesthetic and self-image.
Anna and Tom are digital freelancers who benefit from the freedom and flexibility of the 21st century economy yet also have to live with the insecurity of their working arrangements. Although they have a beautifully appointed apartment – described in all its glory in the novel’s opening chapter – which doubles as their home and workspace, and are successful in their careers with comfortable incomes, they are still plagued by an existential doubt: “Previous generations had had a much easier time working out who they were and what they stood for.” Much of Anna and Tom’s insecurity stems from their compulsion always to compare themselves to others, be that the previous generations referenced here, their present friends in Berlin, or even those yet to arrive to live in the German capital, whose circumstances Anna and Tom continually compare to their own, obsessed with the rising costs of real estate in the city.
Perfection is very good at exposing the cracks between appearance and reality in relation to Anna and Tom’s lives and reflecting on this discrepancy in society at large. The opening chapter describes the picture-perfect apartment owned by Anna and Tom as depicted in a series of marketing images used to advertise the apartment for lucrative short-term rentals. It is tastefully decorated and full of carefully chosen and artfully displayed objects: “an exposed lightbulb with a twiddly filament hanging from a midnight-blue fabric cable; a black metal side table with past issues of Monocle and the New Yorker stacked beside a brass candle holder and a glass bowl filled with fruit.” In the second chapter, however, Vincenzo Latronico presents the disordered reality outside the frame of these images: “And then there were the things. Things absolutely everywhere: […] the herpes cream, the tissues, […] the felt wool insoles, the sunglasses case, the odd glove they still hoped to match with its pair, the tangled earphones.” Anna and Tom’s aspirations to perfection are continually undermined by the messy reality of daily life.
This gap between the version of life on display to others and the unedited reality of lived experience is epitomised by social media, and one of the things I found most impressive about the novel was its account of the fluidity between our online and offline lives. Latronico describes the insidious, all-pervasive presence of the internet in the lives of his protagonists, alongside their discomfort and embarrassment about how much time they spend on various social media platforms: “They lived a double life. There was the tangible reality around them, and there were the images, also all around them.” In his chronicle of this dual existence, Latronico comments on the novelty of these parallel experiences for human beings. Anna and Tom struggle to find names for their interconnected experiences on- and offline, and the author suggests that this is because it is uncharted territory and that we currently lack the vocabulary for “expressing an inner landscape reconfigured by twenty years of the internet.”
Despite the novel’s acuity and its lucid, precise prose in Sophie Hughes’s beautifully crafted translation, I felt that Perfection falls somewhat short of the perfect novel. It is impressive and entertaining in the way it captures a slice of expatriate life in 21st-century Berlin, but for all its efforts to get under the surface of the meticulously curated lifestyle of the protagonists, it still ends up feeling slightly superficial and unsatisfying. At the end of the book, the reader still feels that they do not know Anna and Tom, or have any sense of them as individual characters beyond the idealised versions of themselves that they endeavour to present to others. We understand that the perfection they strive for is elusive and unattainable, and that they are always falling short of the lifestyle they are so successful at advertising to others in digital form, and that their attempts to find happiness and satisfaction IRL are repeatedly thwarted. Perhaps this is the sum of their lives at the point at which they are portrayed in the book and the most that we can know them? Perhaps this imperfection and this unknowability of its protagonists is the point of Perfection? Vincenzo Latronico is an astute observer of modern life, and I am glad to have read his novel, although I feel like I might prefer to have read it as an essay in a Sunday supplement than as a piece of fiction.
Reviewed by Sheridan Marshall
PERFECTION
Written by Vincenzo Latronico
Translated by Sophie Hughes
Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (2025)
March 2026 #RivetingReviews titles are available to buy from bookshop.org.
Sheridan Marshall works as a learning support assistant in a secondary school, and as a translator and editor. She has been part of the editorial team at New Books in German for the last fifteen years. Her PhD thesis is published as Forgetting to Remember: Religious Remembrance and the Literary Response to the Holocaust (2014).
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