Perfection
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- 59,00 kr
Publisher Description
Millennial expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin, in a bright, affordable, plant-filled apartment. Their life as young digital creatives revolves around slow cooking, Danish furniture, sexual experimentation and the city's twenty-four-hour party scene – an ideal existence shared by an entire generation and tantalizingly lived out on social media. But beyond the images, dissatisfaction and ennui burgeon. Work becomes repetitive. Friends move back home, have children, grow up. Frustrated that their progressive politics amount to little more in practice than boycotting Uber, tipping in cash, or never eating tuna, Anna and Tom make a fruitless attempt at political activism. Feeling increasingly trapped in their picture-perfect life, the couple takes ever more radical steps in the pursuit of an authenticity and a sense of purpose perennially beyond their grasp. Superbly translated by Sophie Hughes, Vincenzo Latronico's Perfection is a taut, spare sociological novel about the emptiness of contemporary existence, scathing and brilliantly affecting.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Latronico dissects the Berlin expat scene in his biting and insightful English-language debut. In the early 2000s, 20-somethings Anna and Tom leave their unnamed southern European city for Berlin, where they work remotely on freelance graphic design projects. The couple are exhilarated by the city, and easily form friendships with other expats. They spend weekdays working out of their beautiful and affordable apartment and weekends at art openings, restaurants, and parks, convinced that "the city was inexhaustible." As the years pass, however, the couple becomes increasingly disenchanted. Despite good intentions, they can do nothing to help the rising tide of migrants arriving in Berlin, and their friends begin to drift away, either to raise families or move home. As Anna and Tom approach 40, they grow desperate to find meaning. Latronico's portrayal of his rootless and searching characters is frank and clear-eyed, revealing the limits of the idealism of their youth, when "beauty and pleasure seem as inextricable from daily life as particles suspended in a liquid." Fans of The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş ought to check this out.
