A review of Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, 120 pages, Fitzcarraldo Editions (February 2025)

That was where real life was, the life they wanted
to know, that they wanted to lead.
~Georges Perec, Things: A Story of the Sixties

Unbounded—that was the strange word bubbling up as I wandered Helmut Newton’s exhibition on a Berlin summer morning in 2019. It was only my fifth day in the city and already the relief of having arrived, and the giddiness for what lay ahead, was beginning to drain into a slowly dilating void. Looking at the naked decadence of those maximalist and oversized photographs, I couldn’t help but feel hopelessly depressed by it all. There was something reflected in these images; something about this performed, preening hedonism that was mesmerising but also meaningless. The exhibition seemed to prefigure our current, life-draining obsession—one that seeks to frame each moment as an image to be captured and then collaged into a performed version of ourselves. The more our reality is unbound into tiles and tweets and TikTok clips—the more we live within a curated version of life—the more our own sense of what is real and authentic becomes concealed.

This moment resurfaced while reading Vincenzo Latronico’s novel, Perfection. Translated into English by Sophie Hughes at the beginning of this year, Perfection traces the lives of Tom and Anna, “creative professionals” living in Berlin during the 2010s. It is a reworking of Georges Perec’s novella, Things: A Story of the Sixties, which documents a young Parisian couple defining their identity through beautiful objects and the alienation they feel as a result. For Tom and Anna, these “objects” are the images of social media, which increasingly govern their lives and split them from their own sense of what is real and essential. 

Not long out of university, Tom and Anna move to Berlin on a whim. Their days are spent working from home in an apartment that might have featured in a 2014 issue of Kinfolk Magazine. The novel’s opening describes sunlight reflecting off “honey-coloured floorboards,” the perforated leaves of a monstera brushing the back of a Scandinavian armchair half-covered in a “herringbone tweed” blanket. Back issues of Monocle and the New Yorker are propped against carefully curated homewares, an LP collection faces outward, and everything is tied together perfectly with a “sandy-coloured Berber rug.” It is “a happy life” we are told—or so the images suggest on the short-term rental website listing their home for “one hundred and eighteen euros a day.”

Tom and Anna’s life is dictated by images—a life in which the messiness of reality sits just outside the camera’s lens. Their work consists of building wireframes, choosing fonts, and tweaking margins for the galleries, kombucha breweries, vegan food companies, and other experience economy brands emerging at the time. We never find out much about their past, except that they are from a provincial city somewhere near the Mediterranean. “Lovers, partners and best friends,” they are only spoken of together in the novel and described as having, “grown up with the notion that individuality manifested itself as a set of visual differences.” It is this notion that motivates them in their work, that pushes them to Berlin and that drives the curation of their lives.

Their move to Berlin is part of a shared struggle with “an entire sector of their generation” for a different life, for the freedom to reinvent themselves. They spend much of their first year in the city constructing a life that matches the shared mythology of transformation for which everyone else seems to be searching. Simply being in Berlin feels like enough to them: it is Berlin that is their purpose, defining them more than their work. It is the “quasi-reality” of this mythology that becomes the canvas they sketch their identity on—a canvas stretched and framed by a feeling of abundant possibility.  

Reading this novel, I was reminded of Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s 2012 memoir of Millennial restlessness, A Sense of Direction. Writing about his life in Berlin around the same time that Tom and Anna arrive, he described the city as having an air “clear with vast possibility,” a haven for a “rumoured lost generation” seemingly marooned “on an island outside of time.” Everyone Lewis-Kraus meets seems to hold an almost religious belief in personal reinvention—a belief he shares as he reflects on his own “grand gesture” of faith in the city and his assumption that simply being there would allow a more authentic existence to reveal itself. 

Writing of his naivety in hindsight, Lewis-Kraus quotes a line from the 1920s critic and gossip columnist, Karl Scheffler, who quipped that Berlin was damned always to become and never to be. Initially, he is seduced by this notion of becoming, thrilled at not needing to worry about missing the right moment or frittering away time doing not much—he is completely unbound from any demands or responsibilities. He recognises later (as do Tom and Anna) that the shadow of all that possibility is an open-endedness that is intense and exciting, but also chaotic and draining. Possibility without purpose leads to nihilism, and it is only later, as he reflects on Scheffler’s quote, that he realises he missed the word damned. 

It is this constant becoming that flicks sparks of anxiety onto the surface of Tom and Anna’s perfect life. As the energy of the city ebbs, they begin to feel as though their “identity was anchored not in their thoughts or deeds, but in something fickle and brittle, a roll of the dice.” Seeing what now seem like the distant lives of their friends and family on Facebook, their own images of Berlin begin to degenerate, and they realise how radicalised they’ve become in their expat bubble. A bubble “where everyone accepted a line of coke, where no one was a doctor or a baker or a taxi driver or a middle school teacher,” a bubble where they feel increasingly alienated. Despite this, they are unable to imagine any other reality and so convince themselves that no other reality exists. 

That other reality arrives in 2015 as the “deluge of beauty” from their social-media feeds is interrupted by the horrors of the Syrian civil war and the emerging refugee crisis in Germany. Energised by “becoming citizens of something much bigger,” their circle urgently mobilises as the “activism on social media” trickles into their real lives and they rush towards what they hope will be their generation’s “outstanding rendezvous with history.” Despite what the images documenting their efforts on social media suggest, they become more of a nuisance than a help, and gradually, as the biennale approaches and then summer, they go back to their old life. In the wake of this rendezvous, the lens through which they view the world becomes permanently adjusted. The future now “out of focus,” their perfect life now appears rather “abstract and unenticing.”

The Digital Mirror of Narcissus

Technology steers my life along tracks chosen for my digital double, not for me. But this proxy personalisation wouldn’t work at all if I didn’t play my part.

QuilletteTimandra Harkness

At the same time, “a thousand tiny details” begin to manifest across the city. The new rows of macs at the cafe no longer emanate the “dreamy, distracted atmosphere of before” but an intense concentration. The Porsches and Teslas continue their spread south from Kollwitzkiez, and gentrification, “a term used almost exclusively by the people who caused it,” begins “striking down members” of their community like an epidemic. The fabric of their Berlin is re-worked by a younger, more ambitious crowd coming out of schools like Goldsmiths and Bard, who all know each other and dress in “menacing Balenciaga and Vetements coats.” 

As their malaise spreads and they travel to Lisbon to recapture some of the excitement they felt upon moving to Berlin, they notice “it was all different … yet it was also somehow the same.” Travelling through the Portuguese countryside and then Sicily, nothing feels like they expect it to and they long for somewhere that “hadn’t been spoiled by the internet.” Despite this, they continue to curate images of their life for Instagram: glasses of Campari filtering the setting sun, prickly pears contrasted against an azure sky. As the gap grows between the perfection of their staged images and the reality of their unhappiness and frustration, they begin to see them as a con. A con that has created a vast cultural empire of sameness—an empire where every fashionable café from Brooklyn to Berlin starts to look the same. And yet, despite their increasing alienation, much of this sameness is welcomed because it matches their expectations—yet frustrates them, because it doesn’t feel authentic or real.

The Greek origin of the word authentic, authentes, means to act on one’s own authority. Combining the words, autos meaning self, and hentes meaning doer or being—the root of this term evolved to describe the originality or genuineness that we mean now. It is this self-authority and originality that is obscured for Tom and Anna by their “quasi-reality” in Berlin. Despite their efforts at differentiating themselves, they increasingly feel that something “deeper and more essential” is missing. The more they try to be authentic, the more they unwittingly conform to the re-presented world of social media that governs their existence. Their imagination, that self-renewing well of originality and authenticity, has been flattened by this world of images and as a result, they are unable to imagine any other kind of life.

It is here that the horror story of Perfection begins to reveal itself. In philosopher Agnes Callard’s review of the book, she describes this horror as a utopia realised—the result of which is that everything remains the same. If everything is perfect, if the utopia you conceptualised has been achieved, then there is no need for change and so nowhere else to go–the arc of progress has reached its endpoint, the circle has closed. In chasing difference, specialness, and authenticity—their utopia—Tom and Anna ultimately paint themselves into this corner of sameness. As the differences they seek are framed by the sameness that surrounds them, they become locked within their own prism of self-reference, a world that looks perfect, but doesn’t feel it.

I read Perfection as a lament for the hopes and dreams of an entire generation, whose inner landscape has been “reconfigured by twenty years of the internet.” “It hadn’t always been this way,” Tom and Anna wistfully think as they try to determine when the internet had become so all-consuming. The brilliance of Latronico’s prismatic novel lies not only in how it traces the preoccupations of a generation coming into its own, but also in how it shows, through its tribute to Perec’s story sixty years before, that the lives of every generation are inextricable from the time and culture from which they emerge. Tom and Anna may be unable to imagine any other life than the one that alienates them, but this lack of imagination doesn’t make them deficient or bad people. The novel explores how they respond, in the only way they know how, to the reality they’ve been thrown into—a reality that feels like “channel hopping an entire wall of TV sets,” a reality that conceals their own authenticity from them.

My own version of Tom and Anna’s Berlin was cut short by COVID. It was only then that I finally felt comfortable in the city, no more expectation to do it right, no more feeling like a failure for not living up to whatever mythology drew me there, no more angst over whether or not my experience was “authentic.” As everything went into lockdown, an unfamiliar calm descended on me like a light fog, muffling the anxiety that had accompanied me since that morning with Helmut Newton’s nudes. In that strangely beautiful twilight zone of a spring and summer, I no longer felt the need to become in Berlin—I could just be. A being that was no longer preoccupied with hoovering up experiences to stave off some phantasm of future regret. I think most of us can remember that strange feeling of relief during that time, of no longer worrying about what we were missing out on, or needing to live up to some picture-perfect version of our lives.  

The digital world has the illusion of the infinite. Its proximity and accessibility make it appear inexhaustible—and at times, preferable to real life. But like blemish-free AI-images, it is this perfection that creates a gap of believability, a gap into which the reality rushes and reminds us of what has been lost. Perfection serves as a brilliant reminder that authenticity isn’t something that emerges in a vacuum. Unbounded freedom may be what we think we want, but without an anchor to something authentic, it’s easy to become lost—like Tom and Anna—in a mirrored world of images stretching infinitely into the void.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this review misspelled Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s name. Quillette regrets the error.