Maria Stepanova – In Memory of Memory

I don’t know, both because I wasn’t born then and because I still haven’t read enough, whether at any other time there has been such an obsession with memory as there is in our own age. Still, I suspect not. There have been times in the past when humanity has loved some deeper past – commonly that of the Romans, the ancient Greeks, or Renaissance Italy – but that love was always for the big things, not the small, personal, or individual. We loved soaring city gates, the idea of military triumph, or some kind of atmosphere we believed to predominate among the homes of the great and the good. We only cared about the individual insofar as we could imagine how we ourselves would make use of this environment to grow our own strength, or more sinisterly, the strength of our own state. In that sense, this past-obsession has always been egotistical, uncaring. Nobody looks back to a time of shared bread, only the great wars or cultures bread fuelled.

We are more sceptical of such ideas now, the idea of building a state or even a self according to past models. I smile wryly at those men who try to construct and conduct themselves as if they were a Roman tribune. And as for states, the evidence seems pretty conclusive – the best way to build a future is to work in the present, not reshape things according to some untransferable past or imaginary utopian scheme.

Today, though, the past retains its power – what has changed is the focus. Individual memory has now come to take the place of the wider past in prominence. Maybe it has some connection with Francis Fukuyama’s much maligned idea of the end of history – that now that the present is sorted, we only need to do a little tinkering upon the past, and all will be perfected.  “Memory brings the past and present into confrontation in the search for justice.” This is how Maria Stepanova, the contemporary Russian-Jewish writer of poetry and prose, puts it in In Memory of Memory, translated into English by the poet Sasha Dugdale. We go back, but only personally, into the past, not in search of a better world, but to bring back evidence of the past’s unjustness, that we may not repeat it, or more simply not let it form false images in our mind.

(Maybe we go back for another reason. The world of the present is now, even if we discount the wars surrounding us and mounting tensions of all sorts, strangely soft and hard to find a foothold in. To go back into memory is to find something solid, to make something solid if we do it with our own past or another past we choose. It’s another manifestation of that urge to find some small sense of power in a world that seems both crying out for goodness but also near-impossible-seeming to influence as an individual.)

Instead of a description of death camps in history books, which to one politically aligned with such things can seem a jolly good idea or else a fabrication, or even the historical novel, which sadly can always and easily be denied any impact on the heart or mind by the latter charge, what is individual and evidence-based always makes a much stronger impression, at least on me. The German writer W.G. Sebald sits strangely but centrally in this world of memory, creating fiction (?) that is both evidence-based and not, bringing in sources that were both real (most of the facts) and not (some photos), something which has led to no small amount of controversy since his death.

In Memory of Memory is post-Sebaldian. You can read descriptions of it online in catalogues and on marketplaces and nobody quite knows whether its mix of genres contains fiction or not, and if so, how much. Like a work of Sebald our narrator is in the world, wandering about, talking to people, visiting old graveyards. Like Sebald, we have a range of media – diaries, letters, notes, photos. I have no ability to question whether Maria Stepanova is telling the truth, nor any particular desire to. The work feels true and I trust the narrative voice. Is it just that sense of doubt which makes something seem fictional?

Sebald often seems to present things as such clear truths that we might want to question him, especially with his love of coincidence; Stepanova is more likely to take us into her confidence when things go wrong. At the end of the first chapter of In Memory of Memory she has just visited the remote village of Pochinky, once home to part of her family, in search of clues as to their past existence. She finds none. On the way back she remembers that she should have checked the cemetery there and calls her contact. No cemetery left, she hears, but there was a Jew still living there. “She even knew his name: Gurevich. Strangely enough it was my mother’s maiden name.” This failure (and there are many others) is enough to make me trust Stepanova, to shift my attention from the teller onto the tale in a way that we never quite can with Sebald.

So, what tale? “This book about my family is not about my family at all, but about something quite different: the way memory works, and what memory wants from me.” Stepanova can speak for herself, especially when the translation is done by a poet and is this consistently beautiful and clear throughout. On the one hand, In Memory of Memory is about Stepanova’s family. She tries to sift through documents, archives, and oral stories to create a picture of the fates of some of her relatives throughout the past hundred or so years – educated Jews for the most part, who somehow survived the worst of the 20th century. At the same time, the work stretches beyond this. It asks important ethical questions about how we treat the past and its people.

There’s a lot here. Not too much for itself, but too much for a blog post. In Memory of Memory is an incredibly rich work and one of the most brilliant I’ve read in recent years. Stepanova may tell us of a man expecting a knock on the door at any moment during the Great Terror who throws all his documents into the fire, but in spite of this and other incidents of destruction she manages to achieve a great deal – but never so much that her reconstructions seem unfairly wrought. To give an example, we have a chapter which is just descriptions of about twenty photos. The point, as I took it, was to undermine the idea that photographs are perfectly truthful or helpful documents. (Even before we talk of Stalin’s love of airbrushing). If we know no context, do not even know the people in the photos, then photos are strangely reluctant to provide any useful information.

Meanwhile, in the various “Not-a-chapters” scattered throughout the book we have other documents, typically letters, with what context Stepanova can provide for them.  In one, from 1947, we have a single letter, which makes reference to “our appalling conversation” but gives no more clues as to its meaning. There are, I think, clues elsewhere in the book, but only faint ones. Again, the purpose seems to be to emphasise that sometimes the past refuses to be receptive, to answer our requests for a complete story, a neat takeaway. Letters are missing, things are not written down, life is not neat. A diary which sets the book going has nothing personal in it at all until the odd message, the last one included in In Memory of Memory, where the writer notes “sleep is my salvation.” With Sebald, we feel the danger of forgetting; with Stepanova, we fear things have already been forgotten without possibility for return.

Only one chapter is story-like in its construction and conclusive in its ending. Where in other places absent information is like rust that has eaten away too much at the structure, here the absences we have make the text spongey, so that the imagination can enter into it all the better. It is the longest chapter in the book, and the most horrible. “Lyodik, or Silence”, is the story of a young man, Lyodik, who is in the Leningrad region during the siege. Stepanova has not only his own letters, but also the memoirs of those who were fighting in the region or just trying to survive, such as the writer and critic Lydia Ginzburg. Using these other sources to provide context, she uses Lyodik’s letters back home to give a kind of negative of Lyodik’s life, where what is important is what is not said, or said indirectly: a hospital visit he claims is for tonsilitis is almost certainly because of a war wound; the starvation and deprivation of the civilians (including relatives he visits in the besieged city) is something he can only hint at. And then finally, alongside a description of a battle from a memoirist, we have the official letter confirming Lyodik’s death. And then the death of his father, also fighting, soon afterwards. Such hammer blows need no further context or commentary. They are the kind of thing that makes you put the book down and step outside.

In Memory of Memory has its innocent working hypothesis, that everyone survived, that all was well in spite of the 20th century’s storms, but Stepanova’s discoveries in the end do not lead in this direction. (The Second World War / Great Patriotic War was always going to be the exception by the sheer weight of bodies it took into itself.) In the book’s third part the correction to the other notions comes. There’s a relative among the hundreds of thousands of Jews murdered by the Romanians when Odessa was occupied, and another, a manufacturer in Kherson, who seems to survive the changes in power during the Revolution, but at the cost of everything he owned. While looking for clues, Stepanova finds a comic note in an article but little more: “in his old age the former factory owner Gurevich, sitting in the warm sun, said laughingly that he remembered the war and the revolution, but he couldn’t recall making a present of his factory to the Communist Petrovsky”.

Another relative manages to survive the Revolution by joining the “special task units”, a kind of volunteer militia for the new state. There are no photos or documents, but “the terrible scars on his stomach and back, traces of something that pierced him through, are proof enough.” This man, later, burns his documents and paintings in 1938 because he believes that he will soon be taken away to an interrogation that may end his life. It does not happen. A doctor in the family, at the time of the “Doctors’ Plot”, where Stalin began systematically murdering Jews in the medical profession, somehow survives that too. (Thankfully, Stalin croaked first).

What may be a simple hypothesis is undermined by the sense that it does not really cover what matters. They survived, yes, but traumatised. The man who lost his factories also lost his family, who didn’t seem to want anything to do with him for reasons we cannot even guess for lack of evidence. There were the older familial patriarchs who watched in anguish as newer generations left the Jewish faith and even married other ethnicities. And then there are the smaller traumas, the people who won’t or can’t talk to each other for whatever reason. Can we really speak about a happy family when Stepanova’s conclusion is that “the more I think about our family history, the more it seems like a series of unfulfilled dreams.”

Stepanova, like Sebald, is memory-obsessed. Like Sebald, she lives like a ghost in the narrative, an “I” which is more “eye” than flesh-and-blood actor. Where she differs from the German is in her unease, which grows in the book. She goes back, she finds answers, she crafts narratives, tells stories. But the whole project seems to rot as she writes it. She realises that even as she is trying to remember, to bring justice, she’s also doing something wrong. She sees herself as a kind of exploiter of trauma, a little bit like the accusations that have been thrown at Sebald since his own death. “The dead have no rights: their property and the circumstances of their fate can be used by anyone and in any way.”

That is the theory, but it is not a moral thing to take lives and manipulate them, even when that manipulation is just an attempt to tell the truth. Stepanova sees the dead as being another group which we must soon come to treat with respect, the same way humanity had to come to treat slaves, and women, and certain ethnic, sexual, or religious groups with respect. What this would look like, I’m not sure either of us knows. What is clear is that “we, the people of the past and the present, are endlessly vulnerable, desperately interesting, utterly defenceless. Especially after we are gone”. That is precisely why things must change. There’s a powerful moment when she is trying to force her father to let her include some letters he wrote in a “not-a-chapter” section and he refuses, saying that the past was not really as he wrote it. “I was prepared to betray my own living father for the dead text.” Unlike the dead, he has a voice to refuse. The obvious implication is that they too, if they could, would have their reservations.

In Memory of Memory is not just the story of a Russian Jewish family, nor yet alone Stepanova’s reflections on the ethics of memory. The book is so much broader than that in its range. With its dialogues with French, American, German cultures and cultural figures (among others), it’s a book that consciously refuses the box some might prepare for it: as “Russian culture”, or “Jewish memory culture”. I learned, for example, about the box maker, Joseph Cornell, the photographer Francesca Woodman, the artist Charlotte Saloman. This is a book about trauma and the past, not just in the Russian or Russian-Jewish context. Its questions and answers touch all of us, drag all of us into the whirlpool.

“Kill the yids and save Russia”, a charming stranger says to Stepanova at a railway station, shortly after the Soviet Union has collapsed. It’s all still here, this trauma, this need, this obligation, to remember, to do better, not just for the Jews, but for all of us. At least we can be grateful that we have such a beautifully written and powerfully argued book to help us begin to do so.

Art, God, and Madness – Jon Fosse’s Melancholy I-II

Jon Fosse’s novel Melancholy, through four linked episodes, makes a forceful argument for what being a certain kind of artist actually means and feels like. Taking the real 19th century Norwegian painter Lars Hertervig as its central figure, a man who was released from an asylum as incurably mad and who ended his days destitute in a poorhouse while still having created many masterpieces, Fosse finds Lars’ artistic power to be inextricably linked to his ability to see what others could not and place it on the canvas. He was great precisely because he was mad, mad because he was great. This special sight, his gift, in both its glory and its terror is presented not only through what Fosse writes, but also how he writes it. Preceding those extraordinary works Septology and Aliss at the Fire, Melancholy is every bit as extraordinary as them in its use of language. It’s a truly beautiful work.

Four episodes comprise the novel, each giving us a new angle from which to observe Lars himself. In the first and longest, we follow Lars for a single feverish afternoon in Düsseldorf in 1853 as he gets kicked out of his rented rooms and wanders between them and a pub frequented by others from the art academy where he studies. The second sees Lars in 1856, already trapped within an asylum and still less in control of his mind than he was even in the first section. The third deals with a writer, Vidme, who in 1991 is trying to write about Lars, and decides to visit a pastor to enquire about returning to the Norwegian Church. The fourth and final section follows one of Lars’ sisters, Oline, shortly after Lars’ death in 1902, as she tries to hold onto life in the present as memories and age keep her drifting back mentally into the past.

Lars is there, forcefully, for the reader from Melancholy’s very first words – “I am lying in bed…” The man we get acquainted with strikes us immediately by his strangeness and his child-like vulnerability. He is in love with his landlady’s daughter, Helene, a fifteen-year-old girl, and by the novel’s beginning has already had a moment of rapture with her. Not sex, but something stranger – “And then Helene Winckelmann stood there and looked at him, with hair falling down from the centre part over a small round face with pale blue eyes, with a small little mouth, a small chin. With eyes that shined. Hair flowing below her shoulders. Pale, flowing hair. And then a smile on her mouth. And then her eyes, that opened towards him. And out from her eyes came the brightest light he had ever seen”.

This is chaste, the kind of thing that is reminiscent of a saint’s vision. Lars is innocent in other ways too. For one, he’s incredibly susceptible to others’ words. At the inn, Malkasten, the other artists taunt him, saying Helene is hiding there waiting for him, and he believes them as readily as he believes himself when he convinces himself that she has telepathically called him back to the house where he has just been thrown out onto the street. He seems petulant rather than upset at being mistreated, mentally tapping his feet while he waits to be allowed to go and find Helene again. At the same time, we notice the purity of his belief in his own artistry. Over and over, he remarks mentally that he is an artist. It’s not as if he fears he is not one, rather it is the fixed core of an identity that is otherwise totally unstable.

For Lars is, admittedly, barking mad. Just as he has these beautiful visions with Helene, he has visions of a darker sort too. He sees black clothes hovering and trying to smother him. His anger is ferocious, and he declares an intention to kill every single other painter on a regular basis. His mood swings from elevation into despair. He loves Helene with every tick but with every tock believes, wholly without any textual evidence, that she is actually trying to get rid of him to pursue a sexual relationship with her uncle.

These negative qualities become still more pronounced once Lars is incarcerated in the asylum in Melancholy’s second section. Where in the first section he referred to how Helene’s uncle would “do things” to her, now he expresses a hatred of all women as mere whores and spends a considerable amount of the section touching his penis against the guard’s explicit instructions. Deprived of his art, all of Lars’ worst qualities are magnified. Unsurprisingly, ripping out the core of someone’s identity is no way to bring them back to anything approaching sanity. While the novel at no point makes any suggestion that Lars is even several kilometres away from sanity, it presents those who challenge his mild delusions as only making things worse – whether Helene’s uncle, the guard at the asylum, or the workers of the poorhouse in the final section – and reminds us of the dire state of mental health treatment in past centuries.

In some sense though, it doesn’t matter what personality Lars has, or what the external world does to him. What matters is only the implicit argument of Melancholy that being an artist (of a certain sort) can bring us closer to God or, if you prefer, something higher. To some vision of the sort Lars experiences with Helene, which can provide succour for a whole life. Perhaps the best way of exploring this, however, is to shift from the content of the text to how that content is itself presented, the texture of it. For all of the oddities of Fosse’s style – the shifting times, the shifting perspectives, the repetition – turn the novel into something more like a picture than a prose work, and bring the reader to the borderlands of something she would be hard pressed not to call mystical in nature.

Melancholy is a book that drifts from the now into the then, and the real into the unreal. Even without considering the black clothesthat attack Lars, he travels in his mind while remaining physically in one place – to Helene’s transfiguration, to his departure from Stavanger on the boat, to images of his father and sister Elizabeth underwater. Vidme, the writer, drifts between what he expected of his meeting with the pastor, and what he actually experiences. And Oline, in the final sections, drifts between the drudgery of her aged life (emphasised by repeated struggles to maintain control over her bodily functions and trips to the outhouse) and the wonder of her childhood with Lars in the Norwegian countryside. Overall, the technique is less advanced than it is in Aliss at the Fire, but still, we might go from now to then with only an “and” to warn us.

The impression of such shifts is that life is turned into a thing of layers, a little like those transparent sheets we place and shift around for an overhead projector. It gains a wholeness and interconnectedness from the prose which in its lived moments it can seem to lack. Even as the present moment is devalued, something we see most concretely in the way Lars will often talk to people who aren’t there, or fail to talk to those who are, individual experience is placed on a still higher plane.

Something similar happens when we think of the novel’s willingness to shift between the first and third person within the sections. It’s almost like the characters in Melancholy decide from time to time to turn away from their embodied lives and talk directly to us, reflecting on themselves and their fates from a strange new distance. Here again, loosening themselves from the physical world, the emphasis seems to be placed on life seen as flux rather than constancy. This is something that is in evidence also from Lars’ shifting moods and liquid identity. Perhaps I can venture to say that if the text presents the leap from first person to third as no great jump, it implies the leap to another perspective or other life is no great challenge either.

Perhaps the most unique aspect of Melancholy’s prose in comparison to other fiction is, however, its use of repetition. Many writers aim at the telling detail or the careful avoidance of cliché as they craft their images, so that their works build up huge beautiful flat scenes like artful, intricately layered watercolours. Fosse does not even work from the same paints. He uses oils. That is why it is so hard to quote him. Not just because he writes long flowing sentences, but because taking individual pieces from the work is like chipping off some paint, no, varnish, and expecting it to tell us something about the picture it was trying to represent. Fosse’s works are thick, lumpy, textured things. He builds up impressions through repeated words – “white” and “black”, or “eyes”. Perhaps this is closer to how the world really comes to us moment to moment – wave after wave of the same vision with only slight differences each time.

What matters here is the effect: the reader is forced to confront a kind of loosening of the bond between text and meaning. We sense that here what is important is not what is in the text but what lies behind it, the “silent language” Fosse refers to in his Nobel Prize speech. No text tells us how to interpret this. There’s no evidence for the pub Malkasten being like Hell other than the overwhelming impression on my soul caused by page after page of Fosse’s prose. In the same way, God isn’t a character, but the text brings us closer to the mystical way of thinking by showing us what it looks like, what it feels like. We see things as an artist, a particular artist, perhaps saw them. The light and dark, the magic and wonder of shifting impressions, shifting times, intense visions – these things make us look up from the page to see the world as being closer, perhaps, to the kind it is to a believer.

Vidme, in the third section, is ultimately rejected by the pastor. She says she has read one of his books and dislikes the mystical inclinations in it. Lars himself is raised a Quaker, a group that look for their own inner light rather than waiting to be told how to live. The emphasis on interconnectedness made me think a little bit about Spinoza, who saw the everything as one substance, and his successor Schopenhauer, who believed that if we could “still” our will, we could notice that all things are interconnected and simply manifestations of the same single longing. Reading Melancholy I certainly felt the strange connections it seemed to want me to find.

In the end, Fosse himself did not return to the Norwegian Church, neither when Melancholy was written in the late 1990s, nor later. Instead, around 2012 he became a Catholic, a church which has historically been far more accommodating to mystics. Reflecting now as I come to the end of this post, I realise I have perhaps given the wrong impression when I wrote about the role of God in this novel. Rather, Melancholy expresses a longing for God, but not yet a success in finding Him. We are still far away from the awesome beauty of Septology, where God is right there on the page and the single salvatory force holding the painter Asle’s life together. This lack makes Melancholy a sadder book, as its title implies, but still far from a hopeless one. It remains a beautiful, wonderful, if occasionally insane, novel, and perhaps the best vision of what it means to be an artist that I have yet read.

The Best Kind of Modern Life – Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection

I now cannot recall how I came across Perfection, a short novel by the Italian Vincenzo Latronico translated this year by Sophie Hughes, but once I, an uprooted cosmopolitan type in Germany, learned it was about some uprooted cosmopolitan types in Germany, I considered myself duty-bound to read it. In fact, I’ve already read it twice. (Occasionally I have to stop imagining I am the hero of a Russian novel and instead admit my real-world reflection might be a little less flattering.) What we have here is a short novel – but this word feels wrong, when the work feels more like an extended observation, almost anthropology – of a couple who move to Berlin to work in the creative sphere when young, watch the city and themselves change, and wonder with a little sad dismay at the shape their lives have taken. And all this without a word of dialogue, in a style that is numb yet perfectly, patiently, observant. 

For these are the heroes of Perfection – style and detail. The goal of this book is not to turn Anna and Tom – our couple – into people we might shed a tear for as individuals, but to display their life choices and their consequences with such clearsightedness that any implied assessment of their lives, whether by themselves or the author, has the crushing finality of a prison door clanging shut. From the first section, where we see an image of their existence as a series of snapshots on a holiday rental booking for their Berlin apartment, the details are so overwhelming that we feel they must be true. The houseplants are named, the furniture, the board games, the magazines. The impersonal narration itself – “the life promised by these images is clear and purposeful, uncomplicated” – seems to suggest we look no further, that the objects of a life are sufficient for extracting all its meaning.

Things. I do endless, hopeless, battle against them. Perhaps I fear that I myself can be identified in my entirety by them. Perfection is not some anti-materialist novel, but by leaving out the dialogue and individual scenes – the habitual “would” is an extremely important word in the novel, giving a weightless generality to any event and action it mentions – we as readers are forced to find meaning in these details, rather than in those things that otherwise might be the key to understanding character, intention, and novelistic work.

Often with literature we talk about the dichotomy of “show” versus “tell”, and Perfection provides an example of why this is a simplistic approach. The novel tells us everything in declarative paragraphs dully consistent in length and weight, yet enhances the telling by showing it through the details chosen. It tells us who Anna and Tom are and then finds its proofs in the materiality of their world, whether it’s the details of what they do at the weekends, their sex life, or the social media they consume. Whole sections might have been lifted from some report with titles chosen according to the part of their lives that are in focus: “gentrification”, “money”, “sex”, “social groups”. Only vaguely do we sense that in the background time is passing.

Talking about the book sensibly is hard because the action and characterisation is so light. There are no ambiguous gestures to interpret, no action to set our heart hammering, nor even any real personality on Anna or Tom’s part to make us care about them. We care, if we do, because they are like us, and not because they have earned our love. The narrator, observing them from behind the glass, does not try to make us feel for them too much. Another key word in Perfection is “if”, used in a kind of characterisation by absence. “If they had ever thought it through” – but the couple had not. Or else “…looking like a young professional couple in Berlin, which is exactly what they were.” Brutally, mutely – because all dialogue is differentiation – they become the types that they are. Even the country in Southern Europe that they are from is not named.

Without cares, without interpretation or ambiguity, we can only judge – them and their world. This is how such an anthropological novel works, and it seems that this is how Perfection aims to work, given its narrator speaks with enough distance to encourage us to judge them. Anna and Tom are uprooted, just as passive as the narration of their lives. They live in Germany, but do not speak the language or work with German clients, and their social circle is a series of people like themselves passing in and out of a revolving door. “They inhabited a world 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.” They are ultimately isolated. Reading, it’s like we are following these two people as they push their way through a thick fog, clinging mutely onto each other.

Isolated as they are, they are also part of a kind of community. Except that it is a community of appearance, rather than reality. Loose connections, comings and goings. The scene shown in an Instagram post is more significant than the memories of a bad day that the photo came from. They live in anxiety about their sex life, because they are not polyamorous or getting off at sex clubs or using toys when they know that others are. They have to lie to their parents about how much money they make. As the city becomes ever more gentrified, they realise that they haven’t got the money to keep up. At the same time, they have no idea how to change things because they have never worked in an office.

There is a dark well at the centre of Perfection which it slowly lowers us into alongside the characters. Things start well enough, then get steadily worse. Young and in Berlin in the early-mid 2000s, Anna and Tom have a good life. But using only clients from back home, not integrating or learning the language, they become trapped. When an opportunity for real action appears during the beginnings of the European refugee crisis in 2015, Anna and Tom discover that the lives they have led have not given them anything that would actually allow them to help. They use their house as a base for gathering donations for onward movement to the refugees camps, but when they try to help at the camps themselves they learn they have no in-demand skills, nor even enough German to communicate properly with the police.

At last, they try travelling, but find that the world they left behind is simply following them. In Portugal helping a new hotel set itself up they realise they are just importing the same design aesthetics from Berlin with only the slightest Mediterranean twist. Even the people they find on the street, the early harbingers of gentrification, are like ghostly echoes of the people they knew when they first came to Berlin. The people they themselves were when they first came to Berlin. Travelling lets them see nothing new, and there’s a real hopelessness that settles in on the text as it approaches its end.

Then, just when we are fearing the worst, they have a moment of luck. In a section entitled “Future”, using that tense rather than the “would” of the rest of the novel, we witness a redeeming vision. Anna and Tom inherit a farmhouse in their country, and are able to turn it into a large holiday rental. Using a PR agency they are able to get influencers to stay the first few nights, and positive initial reviews ensure that theirs will be a going concern. Away from Berlin, which they had outgrew, or which perhaps had outgrown them, the ending seems to promise something new, solid, rooted, compared to what came before.

That the novel ends with what is just a stroke of good luck is not unreasonable within its own rules. Throughout it we get a sense that Anna and Tom have not the agency or fortitude to lead lives that are not determined for them. Without language, without enough money, without enough strength of will to fight against conformity, they are blown around by chance, helpless against their changing world. Even their choice of career is an accident – something formed from “teenage obsession” with the early internet and then monetised, rather than coming from any real intention. This ending, too, comes from things happening to them, not because of them. But at least this thing is a positive one. A little bit like the changing fortunes of Frédéric Moreau in Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, driven by the randomness of the stock market, here too do we have a sense that one of the essential features of modernity is precarity, a total exposure to forces, good and bad, that we do not influence ourselves.

Anna and Tom’s “good life” is not the “perfection” of the novel’s title, and there is much missing in it. But it is interesting for me, as a young mildly rootless person myself, (albeit admittedly one who speaks German at a high level and volunteers locally partly to ensure I integrate), to see its overlaps with my own life and those of my friends. While it’s easy enough to dismiss the two Berliners’ lives as failing because of, say, their failures to integrate, the evidence of my own circle of friends and acquaintances, spread across many countries and professions, seems to point much more towards a more general malaise, rather than some gentrification-specific one.

People coming out of good universities and feeling entitled, perhaps, to good jobs, when they have missed the silent signals that the pathways to such jobs are the “spring weeks” and internships. People who have come from good families and are determined to maintain the positions of their birth by forcing themselves into jobs they hate in law or banking. People refusing all that and working in the fields only to feel a growing distance from everyone they knew before, without being able to replace them with anyone else. Even my own employment contract lasts until the end of August. Everywhere is precarity, not enough money, mute misery. In between the two gods – money and authenticity – nearly everyone decent is stranded somewhere, and few in the right place for their own happiness. Anna and Tom are not living entirely authentically, which we are told but also notice ourselves, by the way they are living always in the shadow of images – others’ and their own. But neither, typically, are we.

Modern life is tiring – witness My Year of Rest and Relaxation, whose narrator wishes to check out from the world for a year. It’s also strangely fragmented, as in the novels of Sally Rooney, where often we find ourselves constantly needing to shift between times in order to give interactions weight because by themselves individual scenes just feel light, airy. In the past I would have complained – have indeed on this very blog complained. Perfection’s numb descriptive style, without its dialogue, without its differentiation of character or action into scenes, is not enjoyable in the way that a rollicking drama is. But now, getting up each day to go to the office, struggling in the chinks of time when I’m not working to find space for authentic life, I can no longer criticise something that seems so manifestly true.

It’s not the writers who are wrong – it’s life itself. If you want good fiction today you need to change the world.

(this is referring to tales of middle and upper-middle class professional lives. I am aware that good fiction about other lives, and by other lives, continues to be produced on a regular basis)