a millennial's search for meaning

a review of Vincenzo Latronico's "Perfection"

Was it wise to read a novel about “the emptiness of contemporary existence” (no, no, thank you, Booker Prizes) at a time when I myself am prone to spells of unmoored flailing? Hard to say! The jury’s still out! All I can tell you is sometimes, misery loves company that’s at least a little less miserable. Jesus.

I read Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated from the Italian by Sophie Hughes, earlier this week on the two-hour flight from Montevideo to São Paulo, where upon arrival I proceeded to spend my six-hour layover pondering the meaning—or lack thereof—of/in my own life.¹

Lovely way to spend a Monday evening.

If I were really serious about things, this coffee cup would’ve been full. But I feel like it lends the photo an air of authenticity, no? Like, yes, I meticulously (ish) set everything in its place just so, but the coffee was very much being consumed. It’s the little things.

Perfection is Latronico’s first novel to be translated into English, and thanks in no small part to the chic Fitzcarraldo edition (it’s that blue! The eye can’t help but be drawn!), the Booker Prize shortlist (one thing the Booker folks are gonna do is go out of their way to laud a sparse novel about millennial ennui, and you have to appreciate that kind of consistency), and the friendly 120-page length, it has been popping up in literary discussions like quirky Australian cafes in quickly-gentrifying neighborhoods.²

The novel, heavily inspired in style and substance by Georges Perec’s 1965 novel Les Choses: Une histoire des années soixante, shows us a millennial couple, Anna and Tom. The graphic designing duo hail from an unspecified “Southern European" country (my money’s on Italy) but have settled in Berlin, where they’ve (1) found and furnished an apartment with all the trappings of modernity (the Scandi sofas, the oversized Monsteras, the side-by-side workstations by the window, the “floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with paperbacks and graphic novels, most in English, interspersed with illustrated coffee-table books”) and (2) joined a community of fellow expats working in creative and creative-adjacent fields, just like them, forming “relationships based on affinity and emulation, affection, intimacy, similarity, schadenfreude, and support.” They co-work in light-flooded cafes and go to art galleries and drink at microbreweries and dance at basement clubs and attend sex parties and dine at old Soviet buildings currently occupied by intrepid squatters.

Reader. Rea-der. I won’t say I’m partaking in all of these activities since exiting the States, stage left—I’ll leave you to guess which of them I’m bravely opting out of—but the energy of it all felt verrrry familiar. Eerily so. Embarrassingly so.

So from the very first pages of Perfection, my guard was, shall we say, up.

I don’t really discuss this in a spoilery capacity, and I don’t think this is the kind of novel that even can be spoiled, but out of an abundance of caution, I guess, let’s just say that minor spoilers may indeed ensue.

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Because still, despite everything they possess, material and otherwise, Anna and Tom gradually begin feeling ill at ease, faintly dissatisfied with their life in a way they can’t exactly explain or express, even to themselves. Do they not, after all, have the freedom they’ve always yearned for? And yet they’re getting older and many of their friends (none of whom are German, as their circle is composed entirely of fellow foreigners) are leaving Berlin, settling back in their home countries, seemingly finding the kind of purpose that has for years been eluding Anna and Tom.

Although maybe purpose is the wrong term for it. The couple is in a state of constant doubt as to whether they’re living the life they’re meant to be living. Is there a better one, and if so, how can they find it? Can such a life even be found, or does it have to be forged?

We can’t say Anna and Tom don’t try: they briefly make volunteering for refugees their entire personality, before realizing eh, you know what, actually not as fulfilling as we thought it would be; they move to Lisbon, which they compare to the Berlin of fifteen years ago minus the edgy coolness (derogatory); following that disappointing Portuguese excursion, they try Sicily’s countryside, thinking, surely, that it’ll yield some sort of rural revelation, a kind of Michael-escaping-the-police-and-the-rival-mob-bosses-in-The Godfather montage—I won’t spoil how that particular experiment ends.³

Suffice it to say that the malaise endures.

This pursuit for meaning, though, becomes so intentional, so naked and almost childlike in its insistence, that it can’t help but endear the reader to Anna and Tom. How many of us, after all, are doing the same—making the rounds, observing our jobs and our relationships and our homes with an increasingly critical eye, trying to figure out if what we’re doing is what we’re supposed to be doing—while pretending, to be satisfied? Convincing ourselves of it. There’s something almost sweet about the openness with which Anna and Tom seek more, even if they don’t know what that more might entail. It’s not more things, surely.

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We have more options now, or at least that’s what it feels like. Over the last year I’ve had many conversations with friends about how, when Covid started, our lives shook and in the aftermath appeared this fork in the road that wasn’t there before, that couldn’t have been there before. Now, those of us who decided to take that new, shiny path are left wondering if we made the correct choice, or if there is a sense of fulfillment and contentment that will always manage to escape us. If there is a difference between living and making a life. If we’re all doing that thing of sifting through moments, trying to find something heavy. Asking ourselves if being alive is heavy enough—meaningful enough—on its own. My own answer varies from day to day.

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I think I thought I hated this book, at first, because it puts a sly little spotlight over these questions, when for the most part, they are questions I’d prefer to ignore, or at most ponder drunkenly in the wee hours once or twice a year. It’s terrifying to challenge the rightness of your chosen path, regardless of its [im]permanence.⁴ Even if I am largely happy with my current life. Most days, I trust myself enough to believe that I’ve made the best choices available to me at the time, but I found it impossible not to sympathize with Anna and Tom’s constant wondering.

As I turned the pages, I found myself getting annoyed at the characters, sure, but also at myself, for making life more complicated than it has to be. And I am not someone who delights in criticism, however constructively delivered.⁵

Wow, this is a self-indulgent novel, isn’t it, I kept musing, somewhat furiously, somewhat fondly, seeing my own doubt(s) reflected in Anna and Tom.

There’s a question, one I don’t think is unique to this couple, being asked over and over again by Latronico: you’ve lived, you say, but what have you to show for that life? If we removed the monsteras and the book collections and the light in your apartment and the over-ear headphones and the fancy chairs and the soft rugs, what are you left with?

It’s not a fun question, and most days I don’t even think it’s a fair one.

So yeah, I didn’t hate Perfection. I occasionally hated the experience of reading it because it made me want to punch myself in the face. Repeatedly. But the work itself? Reluctantly loved it.

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1. Just FYI, any book links I share (with the exception of Les Choses, because that is basically out of print) are to bookshop.org, and they’re unaffiliated because I’ve been too lazy to set that up. So.

2. I say this with love.

3. Particularly as regards the refugee crisis, I couldn’t help but think of another relatively recent novel set in the shifting Berlin of the 2010s, Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone. Written from the point of view of an elderly German man adjusting to his changing city and country, it’s a novel worth reading to gain further context on the setting and note, respectfully, the self-centeredness of our main characters and their cadre of expats who, by sole virtue of their nationality, get to be called expats and not immigrants.

4. Last year,

Michael Rance

wrote a beautiful piece called “You Can Live the Wrong Life,” that I still think about every now and then. It’s nice to tell people when their work spends time in your head.

5. As per self-submitted reports, I am vaguely working on this. Vaguely.