Perfection E-Book

Vincenzo Latronico

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 150

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

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‘Perfection is a jewel of a novel: precisely cut, intricately faceted, prismatically dazzling at its heart. Vincenzo Latronico is the finest of writers.’

—Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds

‘Vincenzo Latronico is a writer who sees clearly and conveys it beautifully. I can’t recommend Perfection highly enough.’

—Lauren Oyler, author of Fake Accounts

‘This book gives startling form to the question of how to live a meaningful life; to the illusion that appearance is beauty; to the restlessness of contemporary society. I read it in a breath and I was captivated.’

—Ayşegül Savaş, author of The Anthropologists

‘Never has a novel so incisively captured what it feels like to participate in the globalized culture of the internet era: to consume it; to be overwhelmed by it; to try, futilely, to make it. Perfection is satire in the way that adult life itself is a comedy. By its end, the novel will cure you of any dream for authenticity.’

—Kyle Chayka, author of The Longing for Less

‘Sharp and revelatory. Latronico is a brilliant and fearless writer. I recommend this novel to every reader I meet.’

—Ellena Savage, author of Blueberries

‘An important novel, innovative in its own way.’

—Claudia Durastanti, author of Strangers I Know

‘Perfection is a generation-defining piece of literature, one that spares us nothing. To read it is to look in a mirror and finally, for the first time, truly see yourself and the culture you’ve helped create: the one that lurks behind the filters, algorithms and curated ephemera of selfhood that make up our public lives. Read it and tremble.’

—Madeleine Watts, author of Elegy, Southwest4

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PERFECTION

VINCENZO LATRONICO

Translated by

SOPHIE HUGHES

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For Alma8

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‘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, tr. David Bellos10

Contents

Title PageDedicationEpigraphPresentImperfectRemoteFutureAcknowledgementsAbout the AuthorsCopyright

11

PRESENT

Sunlight floods the room from the bay window, reflects off the wide, honey-coloured floorboards and casts an emer­ald glow over the perforate leaves of a monstera shaped like a cloud. Its stems brush the back of a Scandinavian armchair, an open magazine left face-down on the seat. The red of that magazine cover, the plant’s brilliant green, the petrol blue of the upholstery and the pale ochre floor stand out against the white walls, their chalky tone picked up again in the pale rug that just creeps into the frame.

The next picture is of the building’s exterior, an Art Nouveau apartment block with acanthus leaf and citrus fruit cornices. The white render is all but invisible under layers of fluorescent graffiti, tattered posters and peeling paint. On the first floor, you can scarcely make out the stucco tympanums beneath the grime. The combination of turn-of-the-century luxury and raw modern grittiness lends a feeling of freedom and decadence, with a hint of eroticism. Some of the windows are boarded up with faded chipboard, but in others there are plants and string lights. An ivy cascades from a balcony onto the street below.

The kitchen is fitted out with glossy white subway tiles, a chunky wooden worktop, a double butler’s sink. Open shelves are lined with blue and white enamel dishes and mason jars filled with rice, grains, coffee, spices. Cast-iron pans and olive wood ladles hang from a wall-mounted steel bar. Out on display on the worktop are a brushed steel kettle, a Japanese teapot and a bright red blender. The windowsill is filled with herbs growing in terracotta pots: basil, mint, chives, but also marjoram, winter savory, coriander, dill. Pushed against one wall is an antique marble-top pastry table and salvaged school 12chairs. They are lit by an accordion wall-light mounted between a botanical lithograph of an araucaria and a re­production print of a British wartime poster.

Next, the living room, where a jungle of low-main­tenance, luxuriant plants shelter in the nook of the bay window: the lush monstera stretching its shiny leaves towards the outside world, a fiddle-leaf fig almost touch­ing the ceiling from its huge faux-concrete pot, trailing ivies and hanging peperomia on display across two wall shelves, and string of pearls and Chinese money plants whose tangled foliage reaches all the way to the floor. In one corner, arranged on a collection of stools and upturned boxes, is a miniature forest of alocasias, giant euphorbias, weeping figs, downy-stemmed philodendrons, strelitzias and dieffenbachias. Through the French window you can make out a balcony with two chairs around a small table, a porcelain ashtray and some string lights.

The reverse perspective shows the rest of the room: a low sofa and Danish curved mahogany armchair up­holstered in petrol-blue textured cotton; a herringbone tweed blanket; an exposed lightbulb with a twiddly fila­ment hanging from a midnight-blue fabric cable; a black metal side table with past issues of Monocle and the New Yorker stacked beside a brass candle holder and a glass bowl filled with fruit. Next, a rolltop wooden sideboard displaying spider plant cuttings in glass jars of water, an avocado seed just starting to sprout, and a vinyl record player; two floor-standing speakers connected to an am­plifier on a low wall shelf; above that, an LP collection with a few prized pieces facing outwards (a limited edi­tion In Rainbows, a first edition Kraftwerk); a dracaena casting a shadow like a spindly hand; a Primavera Sound poster.

Tying it all together is a sandy-coloured Berber rug 13with a fine geometric pattern. On either side of the room there are facing double doors, stripped but with the odd streak of pistachio paint still visible. The doors are closed, which gives the modest space a cosy, homely, almost stuffy feel. It is a room for low-lit, hushed conversations on winter evenings. But in the next picture, those same four doors, now wide open, offer a view of the connecting rooms, and the perspective is lengthened again by the line of the hardwood floorboards.

The room on the left is a home office set up for two. Inside it, a large, white melamine blockboard desk with hairpin legs is arranged as facing workstations: each holds a monitor, a wireless keyboard, an Anglepoise lamp and a pair of over-ear headphones in garish colours. One of the workstations has a seventies swivel chair with a moulded plywood seat, the other a wooden ergonomic kneeling chair with black upholstery. The back wall has floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with paperbacks and graphic novels, most in English, interspersed with illustrated coffee table books – monographs on Noorda and Warhol, Tufte’s series on infographics, the Taschen history of typefaces, and another Taschen on the entryways of Milan. In place of bookends there are succulents in cement plant pots, a waist-level camera, a few boardgames – Scrabble, Risk, Catan. Over in one corner you can make out a router and an A3 printer.

There is only one picture of the bathroom, which has a single slit window but is nonetheless bright, thanks to all the reflective surfaces. A lush trailing ivy drapes itself across the window from the curtain pole, picking out the dazzling green of the mosaic floor tiles, which also run up the side of the inset bath. On a cylindrical cabinet with sliding doors the eye is drawn along a skyline of little bottles and vials, all by different brands but with similar 14labels in white, pink or light grey, the names printed in lightweight sans-serif fonts.

On the opposite side of the living room there is a bed­room with an extra-deep double mattress resting on a tatami base. The headboard is hidden from view by four oversize pillows, and the duvet is spread with a vintage quilt, the only splash of colour among the creamy bed­linen, white walls and pale yellow tatami. There are two reading lights, one on either side of the bed – slim metal cylinders with more decorative bulbs; two symmetrical clothes stands on either side of an antique travel trunk; a yoga mat rolled up in one corner beside some dumb­bells and a resistance band. All the pictures are brightly lit and in focus but one: it’s of the same bedroom but now in semi-darkness, the curtains drawn, the walls streaked with that orangey light that filters into a room when you wake up late and the sun is already high, and maybe it’s a Sunday, or maybe it’s not.

The life promised by these images is clear and pur­poseful, uncomplicated.

It is a life of coffees taken out on the east-facing bal­cony in the spring and summer while scrolling New York Times headlines and social media on a tablet. The plants are watered as part of a daily routine that also includes yoga and a breakfast featuring an assortment of seeds. There is work to be done at a laptop, of course, but at a pace more befitting an artist than an office worker: be­tween intense bursts of concentration at a desk there might be a walk, a videocall with a friend who has an idea for a new project, some jokes exchanged on social media, a quick trip to the nearby farmers’ market. They are long days – altogether, the working hours probably exceed those of an office worker – and yet, unlike in an office, here no one is counting hours, because in this life work 15plays an important role without being an obligation or burden. On the contrary, work is a source of growth and creative stimulation, the bassline to the tune of leisure.

But it is also a life with room for joy, which is clear from every little detail. The long days are followed by a man­datory hour offline to go out for a drink or flick through a magazine while curled up on the sofa, shielded from the cold. Beauty and pleasure seem as inextricable from daily life as particles suspended in a liquid.

And it is a happy life, or so it seems from the pictures in the post advertising the apartment for short-term rental at one hundred and eighteen euros a day, plus the fee to cover the Ukrainian cleaner, paid through a French gig economy company that files its taxes in Ireland; plus the commission for the online hosting platform, with offices in California but tax-registered in the Netherlands; plus another cut for the online payments system, which has its headquarters in Seattle but runs its European subsidiary out of Luxembourg; plus the city tax imposed by Berlin. 16

17

IMPERFECT

Reality didn’t always live up to the pictures.

In the mornings it often would. Waking up, the sight of filtered light dancing on the walls would instantly put them in a good mood. Yesterday’s clothes would be strewn over the clothes stands. Their phones, having charged overnight, would be glaring rectangles on the dusty covers of two open books with their spines facing up. They would check their emails and social media from bed, their faces blue from the backlit screens, looking like a young professional couple in Berlin, which is exactly what they were.

But the moment they set foot in the living room, that confidence would start to falter, like a previously clear voice on a phone losing signal.

The plants would be permanently caked in a thick layer of dust, which polish only seemed to attract more quickly. Streams of direct sunlight would fall on the floating dust motes, giving the impression the apartment had been shut up for years, but in winter it would be too cold to air it out because the windows were old and the radiators too small to keep the space heated. Only rare­ly did they muster the patience and resolve to clean the double-paned windows, which were covered in tiny con­stellations of milky smudges that would appear brighter as spring turned to summer.

Desk-sharing didn’t suit them. He preferred working from the sofa, and her mugs, Post-its and pens had a habit of migrating to his side of the desk, where, to save time, they would also often eat lunch, leaving greasy stains on the white melamine. The dishwasher was too big for two people’s dishes so they had bought a plastic dish rack which took up most of the worktop. An old towel had 18been placed underneath it to protect the wood from even more water damage.

And then there were the things. Things absolute­ly everywhere: the chargers, the receipts, the bicycle pump, and the endless stream of forms and reminders that constituted German bureaucracy; the herpes cream, the tissues – fresh packs, used, or scraps that had been through the wash – the felt wool insoles, the sunglass­es case, the odd glove they still hoped to match with its pair, the tangled earphones. Moving from room to room, their vision still hazy from sleep, they would take it all in at a glance, each new item on the list adding to a feeling of physical discomfort that was more than irritation – it bordered on distress.

Over the course of the day, more out-of-place objects and signs of slovenliness would enter their field of vision, breaking their concentration. They would come off a call or look up from a difficult email and see themselves from the outside, surrounded by leftover takeaways and scraps of paper, a bathrobe flung over the Danish armchair, and they would feel flawed, like impostors in a grown-up world that would have caught them out already had the webcam lens been any wider.

It wasn’t order they so desperately craved, but some­thing deeper and more essential. They lived in a country whose language they didn’t speak, in a job with unclear boundaries and no fixed hours or base, and which was, to a great extent, subject to the whims of their clients and social media contacts. The environment where they slept and worked, and which they themselves had chosen and shaped, was the one tangible manifestation of who they were. That apartment and those objects weren’t merely reflections of their personalities: they provided a foot­hold, in their eyes proof of a grounded lifestyle, which, 19from another perspective (that of, say, their parents’ gen­eration) appeared loose. In itself, chaos could be joyful, creative; but in that context, it only seemed to signal impermanence.

These ideas weren’t at the forefront of their minds ev­ery time they went to tidy up, but they did provide the background music when, each morning, they would painstakingly restore the apartment to its factory settings. Waiting for the coffee to brew, they would switch on the lamps in each corner of the room, plump the sofa cush­ions, fold the herringbone blanket, remove any mouldy fruit from the bottom of the large glass bowl and wash the mugs, or else shove them in the dishwasher. By the time they sat down for breakfast, all would be as it should be, and for ten unspoiled minutes they would sip their coffee, scrolling through their social media and newsfeeds, ready to start the day.

All that resplendent order would have begun to crum­ble by lunchtime under the strain of countless mundane tasks (the mail, their head cold, that urgent phone call), almost as if reality were fighting back to reassert its superiority.

Two or three times a year they would put more energy into their interventions. On those occasions – whenever they flew home to their southern European city for the holidays, or to escape the harsh northern winters – they would sublet the apartment for what was, even to them, an extortionate price. It was usually rented by tourists looking for an authentic experience of the city, many of them visiting from Anna and Tom’s own country. In addition to the house keys, on arrival they would receive a note both friendly and exuding savoir vivre, listing farmers’ markets and neighbourhood dining spots. Other times, though, it would be new arrivals to the city 20needing a base while they searched for more permanent accommodation. Dealing with these guests never failed to remind them that they had made the right choice: in their email exchanges, Anna and Tom would warn the newcomers that prices in the city had risen sharply. If it was a permanent lease they wanted, they would need a decent level of German to wade through the complicat­ed paperwork. Anna and Tom would put them in touch with online expat communities and occasionally invite them out for drinks, once they had found their own place. Some of them would end up joining their circle of friends – if they settled, if they survived the string of short-term sublets and their first winter.

Whatever the reason for their stay, it was crucial those guests got what they paid such a premium for: Anna and Tom’s earning potential hinged on their satisfaction. And so, before leaving Berlin, they would devote several hours to taming reality to make it fit the images they had sold.

The bulk of these clean-up operations usually hap­pened in the evenings because they tended to travel on the cheap, early morning flights. Having finished work for the day, they would pack their bags, then set about stuffing every last trace of reality into huge, clear storage boxes, which they then stacked one on top of the other in the attic. In would go the invoices and shoes, the beauty products, the mismatched plates they ate from (leaving the blue and white enamel ones for the guests). They would line up the glasses on the open shelves in the kitch­en, clear their paperwork from the table, stock up the fruit bowl and refill the matching candleholders. Next, they would line up the barely opened magazines in the rack, stash their food in the cupboard, return the books left lying around to their shelves, and throw all their worn-but-not-dirty clothes to the back of the wardrobe. After 21