Perfection
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3.6 • 31 Ratings
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- £0.99
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.
Customer Reviews
Reflective and full of irony
I found this book extremely interesting because in my experience as someone peripheral to the types of personalities described in Perfection, but not living in Berlin, it answered to many questions about what the lives of those types of personalities look like, down to the oxymoronic singularly diverse friendship groups, the buzzing but shallow social calendars and networks, the abundance of creatives.
I felt sad at the depiction (and confirmation) of the progression of Berlin as it used to be - shabby and rebellious and unique - to berlin as it is today, polished, gentrified and a caricature of itself. And the irony of the characters travelling elsewhere and observing the same phenomenon.
It’s a very reflective book that I think may be more enjoyed by someone with some experience and connection to Berlin — at least that’s what made it special for me.