Perfection
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
hey have everything to make them happy. Expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin, in a bright, plant-filled apartment. Young, cool digital creatives, they enjoy slow cooking, Danish furniture, progressive politics, sexual experimentation and the city’s twenty-four-hour party scene.
It’s exactly the life they had imagined for themselves. But they begin to feel disillusioned, bored. Work becomes repetitive. Friends move away, have children, grow up. An attempt at political activism proves fruitless, since their direct action amounts to taking an Uber only if it is snowing, tipping in cash, never eating tuna.
Trapped in a lifestyle optimised for digital perfection, yearning for authenticity, they find themselves doing something they could never have predicted.
Vincenzo Latronico’s stylistic mastery, wit and wry humour make Perfection a brilliant novel about contemporary life.
Vincenzo Latronico was born in Rome in 1984 and lived for a number of years in Berlin. He is an art critic and has translated many books into Italian, by authors such as George Orwell, Oscar Wilde, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hanif Kureishi. Perfection is his fourth novel, the first to be translated into English. He lives in Milan.
Sophie Hughes has translated Spanish and Latin American authors such as Fernanda Melchor, Alia Trabucco Zerán and Enrique Vila-Matas. She was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019 and 2020, and in 2021 she was awarded the Queen Sofía Translation Prize. Perfection is her first translation from Italian.
‘Sharp and revelatory. Latronico demonstrates that, despite their vanity, his characters Anna and Tom are not so different from others whose lives are conditioned by the consumer economy—they want what others want: a life that is legible to them yet not prescribed. Latronico is a brilliant and fearless writer. I recommend this novel to every reader I meet.’ Ellena Savage, author of Blueberries
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.
