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)