A Pitch-Perfect Portrait of the Millennial Creative Class: In Conversation with ‘Perfection’ Author Vincenzo Latronico
By Rida BilgramiThe opening pages of Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection are lavished with an itemised description of a chic apartment complete with Scandinavian furniture, a geometric berber rug, lush monstera plants and past issues of Monocle and the New Yorker stacked neatly.
Originally written and published in Italian as Le Perfezioni in 2022, Perfection is a slim novel centering on Anna and Tom, creative professionals, who have moved to Berlin from an unnamed Southern European country, drawn by the city’s mythology of abundance undergirded by cheap rent. The couple view work and labour as the “bassline to the tune of leisure.” The word abundance in relation to the city shows up repeatedly in the novel: an abundance of time; freedom that has turned into abundance; and more importantly an abundance of possibilities for creative millennials mostly from Western countries who have the privilege of living and partying in a city whose language they barely speak and make little effort to learn. Their hyper-curated digital life and its aesthetic shapes the most intimate aspects of their existence, their choices, and desires. But the quest for something resembling perfection imprisons them in a life that gleams on the surface but is in fact hollow.
Perfection is astutely observed as a snapshot of a moment in time: the churn of gentrification partly driven by digital nomadism, a generational subculture whose sense of being adrift comes not from serious material deprivation but from an atomised existence working jobs with unclear boundaries, living in spaces where landlords can raise rents or evict you arbitrarily, friendships that are transient, and above all rootlessness from any real sense of community. There are no dialogues in the novel that would reveal character details. Anna and Tom exist more as ideas than fleshed out characters. This abstraction serves to emphasise that the story’s themes are not confined to a specific place. This could be as much a Berlin novel as a Lisbon novel or an East London novel. The story unfolds wherever the reader happens to be. In Latronico’s methodical hands and Sophie Hughes stellar translation, Perfection is both a striking mirror implicating the reader and a refracting object.
In conversation with Rida Bilgrami, the author shares insights into the novel’s form, his approach to characterisation and depicting time, and the novel’s world building.
Rida Bilgrami: In Perfection, you employ description as the main narrative tool, relegating plot to the background while foregrounding what is usually the setting. How did you arrive at the novel’s form?
Vincenzo Latronico: I had been frustrated for quite some time regarding how few contemporary novels have captured how daily life is shaped by and interacts with our digital life. I don’t think this is due to snobbery or disinterest on the part of writers. Technically it is extremely difficult to render what is happening on a screen and make it interesting on the page. Either you do it in an experimental way, like Patricia Lockwood does incredibly or you do it in a niche and hyper specific way, such as Tony Tulathimutte’s short story collection Rejection, which I love and am currently translating into Italian.
I was interested in doing something that feels more transparent, more legible, so I spent several years trying to find a way to depict the time that we spend on our phones, but also the way that this shapes who we are, how we see ourselves, how we imagine our sex lives, our politics, our living spaces. Digital technologies are a huge part of our life, but they’re part of the background. Our life is still made of relationships, of ambition, of work, of illness, of trauma, of grief, of the things that drive plots. Every time I tried to foreground the digital life a little bit more, it became something contrived, like a writer trying to make a point, which I didn’t want to do. Then I read the novel Things: A Story of the Sixties by French writer Georges Perec. He employs a narrative strategy to capture consumerism in the post war generation in Paris. He foregrounds the background in his book, and lets the plot move almost between the lines. As I read Perec’s novel I began annotating with analogies to modern life. And then the first chapter almost wrote itself. I am a big fan of descriptions. I worked for a long time as an art critic, which helped me realise how much I like it as a form of writing.
RB: The two central characters in your novel – Anna and Tom — lack a sense of individuality and are indistinguishable from each other. What was the thinking behind writing these characters?
VL: The book is divided into themes — one on their sex life, one on their apartment, one on their politics. In my initial drafts I had a chapter about their fights, in which they were more fleshed out as individuals. Based on feedback from my Italian editor I decided to take it out. It led me to review the whole book, whittling away at all the points in which they differ. This is a book that is written entirely in the third person plural. I deliberately included no information to distinguish them because I wanted to write a collective self, and a couple was the simplest collective subject that there could be.
RB: The novel has been described by Fitzcarraldo Press, the publisher of the English translation, as a “taut, spare sociological novel about the emptiness of contemporary existence.” The descriptive elements, the third person plural, and even the sense of detachment have ethnographic precision, but the novel also reads as devoid of judgement. How did you achieve that balance?
VL: I’m very happy that you say so, because this was very important to me. With this kind of writing, you really run the risk of being smug. Simply put, every detail in the book is real, every observation, every little event, comes either from my own life or from the life of my circle of friends, people that I love and admire who I generally don’t judge. But I think that just by making sure that I was doing it in a respectful way, this generated the emerging property of not judging. But also, I don’t have a plinth to judge from. I am inside that book as much as anyone else who sees themselves in it.
RB: There is a line in the novel: “On social media, just as on InDesign, time disappeared.” I am interested in how you approached temporality in the novel.
VL: I have a lot to say about that. There’s a sentence by Philippe Forest, the French writer, that resonates a lot with me. He says that ultimately, all novels are about one topic only. The topic here is that it is inconceivable how time passes. When we spend time online scrolling, five hours can disappear. Time also disappears while reading a book or watching a TV series or walking in the forest but I think that it disappears in a different way. The strange thing is that the time we spend online leaves almost no memory. If you spend three hours reading a book it is imprinted on your memory but if you spend three hours on Instagram, you don’t remember much because of the way it’s structured. It doesn’t build up as a cohesive narrative. In some ways, the way time vanishes scrolling is similar to what happens when you are a privileged young person having fun in your 20s and before you know it you are 40. You don’t really think that time is passing. The book plays on this parallel between the way you perceive time in your 20s, and the way you perceive time online. In the English translation this is less apparent but in Italian every chapter is written in a different tense. In the first chapter, the description is written in the present simple tense, which is called imperfect, a tense that doesn’t exist in English. We have to imagine that the main section of the book is all written with ‘would.’ This is just like a sequence of stories on Instagram. You don’t build up any chain of events. In English this would have been unreadable. Therefore, Sophie Hughes, the translator, alternates between ‘would’ and the past simple.
RB: I found it striking how you explore beauty as integral to a rarefied, curated life – there is a line in the novel: “But polemics and current affairs were mere thunder and lightning in what was otherwise a deluge of beauty…..The images followed no logical thread beyond their own splendour.” Why was it important to explore the idea of beauty in the novel?
VL: If you think about how to describe the digital part of our life, how would you describe it to someone who knows nothing about it? You spend hours looking at beautiful pictures and have this constant flow of images that are mostly extremely beautiful, and you just like looking at them. It could be a cake, a building, a plant, an apartment. I was just fascinated by how these images that occupy such significant space in our life, are quite ephemeral. Viral images from years ago on Instagram have vanished completely.
RB: I’m also interested in the novel’s political voice. The term immigrant is rarely used throughout the text. The protagonists see themselves and others in their circle as expats. Of course, that in itself, says something about their passport privilege and class positionality. When they are confronted by Germany opening up its borders to a million Syrian refugees it exposes their white saviourism and their bubble of privilege sort of bursts. I’m interested in your views on how we bring politics into the art that we create.
VL: That’s a really good question. I feel there is an extreme lack of political engagement in my generation – if I look around myself, also in myself, as compared to 20 years ago. A lot of my youth was spent being a housing activist in Milan and being part of an anti-gentrification movement. The collective dimension of activism and organising has really been eroded to the point of vanishing. The way that I could write about politics in this novel is by its absence, by showing that these characters don’t see the world through the lens of politics. Speaking from personal experience, the group of activists I was a part of were arrested, our collective was disbanded, and it was such a deep, personal disappointment. And I know that the same was true for my comrades at the time. Nearly all of us left Italy. Moving abroad on a whim is also something that allows you to not be a citizen. And not being a citizen is, I think, ultimately the reason for the permanent dissatisfaction and shallowness that Anna and Tom cannot even name. They are not part of anything because their life has no communal dimension. The fact that they refer to themselves as expats and how they react to the so-called migrant crisis is something so distant from their experience. You say that the bubble bursts, I think that the bubble is almost about to burst, but then, in order to preserve their bubble, they move it elsewhere, so the problem ceases to exist for them. The migrant crisis threatened their illusion. And so in order to save the illusion, they move somewhere that hasn’t been spoiled for them.
RB: And, in a sense the dissatisfaction comes from their constant pursuit of a frictionless life.
VL: Yes. Any kind of politics from the highest level to the most grassroots, is fundamentally about friction. It’s about doing things that are mostly boring and unbearable. The people that you try to help are usually rightfully angry and miserable, but the joy comes from the sense of being part of something. But if you remove the community dimension to it, it becomes an abstract exercise in virtue signalling.
RB: The only date you mention in the novel situates this as a pre-pandemic novel. How would this be a different novel in post-pandemic times?
VL: How the pandemic will enter our collective storytelling remains to be seen. Every novel that is set today you may ask yourself where the characters were during the pandemic. How did they survive lockdown? I am happy with the way I was able to situate the pandemic in the novel because in the end it’s a subtle hint that it’s just a catastrophe looming on the horizon. Not every reader picked up on it but that single date shows you that even though their reinvention as AirBnB gentrifiers may be going well initially, you know that it won’t last, but they cannot even expect it. The world has changed especially from the privileged part of Europe – there has been a pandemic, a war. The life I depict is even more sheltered than when I was even aware of when I was depicting it. In a sense it is a document of an easier time.
Rida Bilgrami is a writer based in London. Her work spans poetry, essays and reported features with a focus on travel, books, visual culture and cities. Read more of Rida’s work on Something Curated here.
Header photograph by Marcus Lieder.