Perfection

by Vincenzo Latronico

translated by Sophie Hughes

I wonder if it feels more painful or less to read a book like Perfection having lived in a major metro, or not. “It was that potential, that abundance, that had drawn them to Berlin.” If you were late twenties living in Somerville or Raleigh-Durham or Ithaca, does a nostalgia for a life not taken hit or miss? “They were all roughly their age–older than twenty-three, younger than thirty.” Perfection, even though the plot wildly diverges from how I lived in my twenties, captured the universality of large city living better than almost any book I’ve read. 

They would imagine how they must look to the outside world with their aching cheekbones drawn to fixed grins, their clothes smeared with cigarette ash and sweat, and still carrying the odd trace of dimly remembered adventures: a marker pen scribble on their face; a garland of fake frangipani in their pocket; a bunch of helium balloons tied to their jacket buttons and now trailing, half-deflated, like comet tails. They would feel decadent and enviable, alive. 

By early afternoon the first stirrings of anxiety would make themselves felt, then slowly build like a gathering storm. They would remember the supermarkets, closed on Sundays, their client calls scheduled for Monday, the work due by Friday. The would part ways without making plans and get on the U-Bahn to their one- or two-bedroom apartments with their plants and wooden floors, to the impending serotonin crash and warm, bath to soften the fall. They would send a few sheepish messages to assuage their guilt at some half-remembered thing they had said or done. Most of the time no one answered. They would take two aspirins before climbing into bed and by Monday morning everything would be fine, or almost everything, or almost fine.

The narrator tightly follows a stable romantic couple, which proves that you can not experience something and still have a fondness, a near-nostalgia (nearstalgia?) for it. Reading about Tom and Anna and their taken-as-a-given sort of relationship, one that is never in peril, is heartening. I cannot imagine being happily coupled off in my twenties. I cannot imagine tackling the challenges of youth in a world-market city as a team. The core of Perfection seems to be about Berlin, about capital and encroachment and consumption, “The collective upheaval of thee twentieth century was over and the vestiges had been translated into the language of individualism–that is, consumerism.”

their names were Tom and Anna in the Italian original.

But I submit that it is, in fact, a book about what it means to be a pair: “It did occur to theme that, had they arrived now, they probably wouldn’t have found an apartment as good as theirs, or not one they could afford. Sometimes this realization prompted a flicker of anxiety, as if the solid life they had built was merely an accident of timing. There were moments when they felt their identity was anchored not in their thoughts or deeds, but in something fickle and brittle, a roll of the dice.”

It is they, they, they the whole way through, no faltering, no questions, no worries. Life comes and goes and the false, image-based world of modernity ebbs and flows around Tom and Anna. As they bring their digital gloss into reality and force their physical circumstances into the shape of curated social media, back and forth, Perfection lays bare how simulacra and simulacrum inflect and infect each other until the boundary dissolves and you are left with, well, whatever we’ve got now. For Tom and Anna, no matter how untethered their life as displayed gets from their life as lived, what they always have is each other.