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the complete review - fiction

Perfection

by
Vincenzo Latronico

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : neatly done

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  Mostly think it's very well done

  From the Reviews:

• "Its tone sits somewhere between anthropological study and scathing Substack, the implication of inauthenticity underpinning every description of their diet, philanthropy, social scene and sex life. (...) Perfection is never explicitly judgmental, but simply by laying out the lines of their lives Latronico alludes to Anna and Tom’s double standards or clichés. Rarely has a book succeeded in making me feel quite as self-conscious about so many aspects of my millennial life (.....) Perfection is a defining picture of a generation, even if it is a frustratingly cynical one. This makes it a curious and compelling read" - Chris Allnutt, Financial Times
  
  
• "The book artfully lays out detail upon detail of Anna and Tom’s quotidian existence in forensic, deadpan style (.....) Theirs is a life defined through a keen outward projection of taste. (...) But where is reality, Latronico asks in this sharp, deliciously pessimistic novel. Anna and Tom can’t seem to escape a feeling that it’s always out of reach. (...) Perfection transcends its satire of 2010s hipsterdom through the depth of Latronico’s sociological observations. This chronicle of contemporary Berlin is strongest in its articulation of how a certain kind of globalisation dislocates us from our surroundings." - Thomas McMullan, The Guardian
  
  
• "Latronico’s conceit is clever and will delight anyone familiar with his source material, but his execution is ingenious. (...) Like Things,” Perfection contains no dialogue, the characters existing almost post-verbally, as though the images they create and curate and consume on social media might speak for them. (...) The magic trick of Perfection, like Things before it, is to reveal readers to themselves -- gently, in the way a therapist might encourage a patient to arrive at an unflattering truth. This original misapprehension might not be your fault, but it is your responsibility, Latronico suggests. You, contemporary reader, are the victim of poor training. You have been duped into turning any text into a catalogue of fleeting images. You have been distracted from what is right there on the page, waiting to make you actually happy." - Alice Gregory, The New Yorker
  
  
• "One of the more trenchant portraits of expat life in contemporary Berlin I’ve encountered in the 11 years I’ve lived there (.....) With ethnographic precision, Latronico taxonomizes the tastes, attitudes, vanities and blind spots of the people we now call digital nomads, a class and subculture made possible by the innovations of American tech and media conglomerates and policymakers in Brussels. (...) The strength of Perfection is that it never succumbs to the temptation of ridiculing its protagonists. Whether or not they live in Berlin, many of its readers will belong to the same class and generation as they do, and bald contempt is generally less effective at inducing the discomforts of recognition than keen, tactful observation. (...) Yet, all told, Perfection remains an insider’s critique: a young, left-wing European’s view of what was probably the high-water mark of European cultural integration." - Ryan Ruby, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "(A) short, sly, scathing satire about dissatisfied millennials who live in a “miniature forest” of monsteras and euphorbias. (...) If you’re a style-conscious, Instagram-scrolling millennial, consider yourself seen. But Perfection offers something more than amusing social stereotypes. It is a devastating critique of aspirational consumerism and personal branding, of a generation’s “identical struggle for a different life”, in a world where the principal means of expressing their agency is through food and fonts (.....) Latronico’s piercing irony is translated with great care and dexterity by Sophie Hughes, meaning it all feels painfully familiar. (...) Latronico has written one of the most brilliantly controlled works of social realism I’ve read in a while. His observations are entertaining and so damning that Perfection made me want to whoop and vomit at the same time." - Johanna Thomas-Corr, Sunday Times
  
  
• "Latronico’s writing is easy to read, and allows him to provide social commentary without it seeming shoehorned in. (...) But while all this commentary may be easy to follow, it isn’t especially enlightening; in fact, it becomes as generic and predictable as Anna and Tom themselves. (...) To me they seemed not uncomfortably relatable, but totally bizarre. (...) Perfection recreates the exact emptiness it claims to critique. Latronico’s style is self-consciously refined, like much of the Rachel-Cusk-lite literary fiction that you find in reams and reams these days. (...) Maybe it’s too much to expect us to read a formally experimental novel that hits closer to home. But I found myself craving a bolder execution, in both content and style -- not something this safe." - Rachel Connolly, The Telegraph
  
  
• "Vincenzo Latronico has done a clever thing. He has written a Berlin novel -- perhaps what will prove to be the Berlin novel of our time -- as a self-conscious "tribute" to Perec. (...) If Les Choses was concerned with an idealized way of living, Perfection (Le perfezioni, 2022) is concerned with an idealized way of being in a society that has succumbed to the wholesale capitalization of the self. (...) If all this sounds like easy laughs, Latronico, like Perec before him, in part succeeds through sheer will of style, surety of voice, precision of description. Great credit must go to Sophie Hughes for her sparky translation from the Italian original; she has an excellent ear for rhythm and makes judicious use of colloquialisms (.....) Latronico is also good on politics, the virtue-signalling and bandwagon-jumping, the unchallenged view of the world mediated by the same papers (the Guardian, the New York Times), the same documentaries, the same causes (.....) Vincenzo Latronico's update to Perec's ending is brilliantly done." - Toby Lichtig, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "Anna and Tom (.....) are archetypes more than they are characters: We never hear them speak, are never given entry into the privacy of their minds. Instead, the book’s style is almost exclusively expository. (...) Like Perec, Latronico is biting and withering, a funny critic of certain habits of mind and social conventions, which works especially well for the Berlin expat set, with its balance of radical hedonism (at the club Berghain and elsewhere) and middle-class, even technocratic careerism. What’s notable about Latronico’s experiment is that by borrowing Perec’s mode of caricature -- exporting it into the present -- he shows something universal about generations and their anxieties." - Kevin Lozano, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The epigraph for Perfection is a quote from Georges Perec's novel, Things, and in the concluding Acknowledgements Latronico acknowledges that: "This novel came about as a tribute to Things: A Story of the Sixties, by Georges Perec; anything good in it owes a lot to him". Like Perec's novel, the protagonists of Perfection are a 'they', a couple, Anna and Tom, treated as essentially a single unit, but whereas Things was a Paris-centered novel of the 1960s, Perfection is a Berlin-centered one of essentially 'digital nomads' in the 2000s and 2010s (like Sylvie and Jérôme in Things, Anna and Tom eventually do come to leave their capital base).
       Perfection is presented in four parts. It begins with a snapshot 'Present' -- or rather snapshots, descriptions of a series of pictures, "simple, pristine photos, so carefully curated", images of Anna and Tom's Berlin apartment, the space where they live and work, from a "post advertising the apartment for short-term rental". The next and longest section is 'Imperfect', describing Anna and Tom's life and (lack of) progression, followed by a short 'Remote' section ("They tried traveling" ...), before concluding -- in another echo of Things -- with a prospective 'Future' look ("They will try to settle back into their old life").
       Anna and Tom grew up in some unnamed southern European country but as young adults settled in the international expat community in Berlin, working as 'creative professionals' ("a term even they found vague and jarring"). They grew up with the internet and rode their fascination (or obsession) with it to careers: "Everyone wanted a website, logo or graphic", and they could shape and provide these. They are part of the international community that (re)settled in Berlin when it was hip and cheap; they never learn adequate German, with English the near-universal language both of their business and social lives. They easily make connections among the many leading similar lives -- but, over the years, Berlin changes (and becomes more expensive); after the so-called migration crisis in 2015 the gentrifying city hardly seems like 'their' Berlin any longer and they try something different, heading to Lisbon ("the city many were saying was becoming the new Berlin")
       While the locales they live in are meaningful to them, it is the internet that dominates their lives. They are among the generation that was sucked into it, there from the beginning -- "The internet came of age with them" --, from before when the first social media sites really came to the fore, still remembering a time when "Instagram was little more than an archive of people's holiday snaps" or how: "after a long and painful wait -- they were finally able to join Facebook" (as, in its earliest days, the site limited who could join). They find then that: "They lived a double life. There was the tangible reality around them, and there were the images, also all around them" -- and the latter dominates and shapes their experience of the former. Sure, "they were embarrassed by how much time they spent on there" but they can't free themselves from the internet's hold, especially that of the social media sites.
       Even in the good days in Berlin, among the like-minded pursuing similar lives, Anna and Tom can't shake a fundamental sense of dissatisfaction:

They couldn't put their finger on exactly what it was they craved, but they knew it was very different from what they had.

It was all different, which was what they had wanted; and yet it was also somehow all the same. They had wanted that too, but still they weren't satisfied. In Lisbon, Anna and Tom were bored.
     Within a few days they had run out of ideas for what to do with their time.

     From the outside, it was easy enough to identify the cause of their alienation, but to them, paradoxically, no explanation revealed itself. Anna and Tom lived in a bubble, one even more insular and limited than those just starting to appear on social media.

- M.A.Orthofer, 20 March 2025

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About the Author:

       Italian author Vincenzo Latronico was born in 1984.

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© 2025 the complete review

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