Originally published in Italian in 2022, this is by Vincenzo Latronico, art critic, translator, and novelist. The English version (translated by Sophie Hughes) came out in 2025, and was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize that year. It's Latronico's fourth novel, but the first to be translated into English. And it seems a winning combo. Hughes's translations have been longlisted for the International Booker Prize five times, and this translation is her third shortlisting. According to Latronico, "Within a month in the UK, it's sold as many copies as in three years in Italy."

The novel features a millennial couple called (deliberately blandly) Tom and Anna. They're from an unspecified southern European country, and they relocated to Berlin in the 2010s (when it was still relatively affordable) to pursue careers as freelance graphic designers. They're the archetypal digital nomads, seeking cheap rents, creative freedom, and the buzz of an unrooted international community. At first, it's great. Then things start to turn sour. The Italian title is Le perfezioni, in the plural, "which expresses perhaps better the central contradiction at the heart of the novel -- perfection can't be several but one whole completeness".

Perfection is unlike anything I've ever read, and I found it very, very clever (and not a little sobering). There's no dialogue in this novel. And Anna and Tom form a kind of inseparable unit (they're always referred to in the plural, and we learn nothing about them as individuals, except in the rare disagreements we're privy to). But Latronico is super-observant, to the extent that many critics liken his role to that of an anthropologist.

Although the author is really smart at skewering the contradictions and superficialities of the Tom-and-Anna brand, he doesn't actually skewer THEM. He doesn't invite us to LIKE them, but he does want us to SEE them. And he doesn't want us to see them as just silly and misguided: "I didn't want," he tells Anthony Cummins, "a smug satire about the superficiality of millennial life -- it's my life!"



Perfection was inspired by Les choses: Une histoire des annees 60, by Georges Perec (1936-82). Giulia Kappelin Cingolani explains that Latronico was in Berlin when the covid pandemic broke out (he'd moved there from Italy some 20 years previously). To relieve the boredom of lockdown, he set himself the task of transposing Perec's opening chapter ("an inventory of the objects surrounding a Parisian couple in the 1960s") into a contemporary environment: "He began cataloguing the things around him -- silver laptops, designer lamps, culture magazines, bottles of natural wine -- and, by extension, the items that defined his circle of friends."

Note to self: Read Les choses...

***

All the sections of the book are named after Italian tenses. The first is Present, and it is taken up with the description, a la Perec, of photographs of the very chic Berlin apartment where Anna and Tom live. (I'd originally planned to read this book in Italian, but then spotted the translation in Douglas Library. Probably a good thing. Given its detailed cataloguing quality, it would probably have been quite a test of vocabulary.)

The opening goes like this: "Sunlight floods the room from the bay window, reflects off the wide, honey-coloured floorboards and casts an emerald glow over the perforate leaves of a monstera shaped like a cloud. Its stems brush the back of a Scandinavian armchair, an open magazine left face-down on the seat. The red of that magazine cover, the plant's brilliant green, the petrol blue of the upholstery and the pale ochre floor stand out against the white walls, their chalky tone picked up again in the pale rug that just creeps into the frame..."

There's lots more in this vein, and the description concludes: "The life promised by these images is clear and purposeful, uncomplicated."

And the life that goes on in it doesn't sound like a bad one. It's a life of coffee, New York Times headlines on your tablet, yoga, "a breakfast featuring an assortment of seeds"... (I just love Latronico's details. So many of them made me smile.) Working days are long, but "no one is counting hours, because in this life work plays an important role without being an obligation or burden. On the contrary, work is a source of growth and creative stimulation, the bassline to the tune of leisure..." In short, it's the digital nomad dream.

Which Latronico then starts to pick apart. These photos are for a post advertising the apartment for short-term rent, while its occupiers do a little travelling. The asking price is EUR 118 a day, "plus the fee to cover the Ukrainian cleaner, paid through a French gig economy company that files its taxes in Ireland; plus the commission for the online hosting platform, with offices in California but tax-registered in the Netherlands; plus another cut for the online payments system, which has its headquarters in Seattle but runs its European subsidiary out of Luxembourg; plus the city tax imposed by Berlin".


Munich, 2023. Another good centre for digital nomads, although it would probably be better to have got in earlier...

***

The bulk of the book -- Imperfect -- describes Anna and Tom's life in Berlin, and all the ways in which it is not, in fact, as picture-perfect as the opening would have suggested: "Reality didn't always live up to the pictures."

At the most basic level, they find it hard to keep the apartment clean. There are "things absolutely everywhere"; there are "signs of slovenliness". But the rot goes deeper than that: "They lived in a country whose language they didn't speak, in a job with unclear boundaries and no fixed hours or base, and which was, to a great extent, subject to the whims of their clients and social media contacts... In itself, chaos could be joyful, creative; but in that context, it only seemed to signal impermanence."

When they first arrived they constructed a mythology: The search for illegal parties; northern sunsets; the Panorama Bar... "It was a mythology shared by all the Spaniards, French, Italians and Americans they met. It was the topic of countless lifestyle articles and documentaries, and circulated on the Facebook timelines and Instagram feeds of an entire generation. It was the admission stamp into a community bound by a shared reality, or quasi-reality." Friends back home are envious, mulling the possibility of following in their footsteps. When those friends then settle down with good jobs and young families, Anna and Tom wonder briefly, but then feel they're doing the right thing: "The kind of adulting called to mind by their families and so painstakingly staged by their friends followed another generation's script."

But over time they start to realize that hardly any of their friends are actually German. In fact, their circle is composed of people very similar to them. It's easy to make friends (is this "proof of a loneliness everyone was trying to exorcise"?), but these are not the people you would call on in times of need. Rather, these friendships have "something precarious and brittle about them". Whether they know it or not, they're living a highly artificial life: "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 spent all their time in plant-filled apartments and cafes with excellent wifi. In the long run it was inevitable they would convince themselves that nothing else existed."



They're also impacted by social media:

-- They live surrounded by images: "Those images would be on the phone that woke them up... Those images lit up their faces in the dark bedroom when they went to set the alarm. The faces of strangers. The faces of handsome criminals. Avocado slices."

-- In many ways they "perform" their identities, rather than living them.

-- They crave attention, and find it hard to detach themselves from the number of "likes" their posts engender.

-- They're part of a global culture wave, the upshot of which is to reduce everyone to a flat similarity. The cookery craze, for example: "Their interest hadn't been planted by sly marketers, but appeared as if by osmosis, as they observed the little differences all around them. It was part of their quest for freedom and pleasure... All their friends shared this interest. Mysteriously enough, they had discovered home-made fermentation kits, fire-roasted cauliflower and umami at exactly the same time as Anna and Tom." Their people discuss food in the way previous generations discussed films, books, and politics: "It helped define who they were."

Social media then ally with rootlessness and this insipid sameness to pull the rug from under any attempts at political action. Here's Latronico at his laconic best:

"They identified as feminists and spoke out against social injustices, which in practice meant they were willing to express outrage at instances of racism and sexism that took place in New York. Anna and Tom had publicly distanced themselves from a client which refused to publicly distance itself from a sexist ad. They donated ten dollars a month to a foundation supporting LGBTQ rights, which came to just under nine dollars after the Californian payment platform took its commission. Like their friends, they were unsure whether to admire Hillary Clinton as a woman or despise her for her ties to the pharmaceutical industry. Of course, all that was theoretical; in practice, their social commitment amounted to using Uber only if it was snowing and always leaving tips in cash. They didn't eat tuna..."

When the refugee crisis of 2015 breaks, the couple wants to help. But their situation has rendered them incapable of doing anything useful. They produce an "elegantly typeset phrasebook", which lies unused, but their lack of language skills frustrates other efforts. Eventually they volunteer to serve soup: "They would get home with headaches and chapped lips from the wind and post a photo of the lunch queue, or call for more volunteers. Warming their hands on a hot mug of genmaicha, they would watch the likes and shares go up and still feel sure they were doing the right thing. But despite what the pictures suggested, they weren't actually achieving much, and they would be the first to admit it."


Milan, 2019. The "Bosco Verticale" and a Milanese tram. Latronico, having returned from Berlin, now lives in Milan. He tells Anthony Cummins: "In the 00s, I was part of a collective in Milan that squatted a building to organise many activities: an after-school club, community gardening, free meals with leftovers from food markets, a collaborative gallery involving local schools and artists. It was an early anti-gentrification fight; of course, we lost. If you Google Milan, the luxury skyscrapers you see with the forest on top were built on our building"

Then there's the city of Berlin, which is changing around them. Younger, richer people are replacing the original inhabitants; prices are increasing; diversity is decreasing. This, of course, is gentrification, "a term used almost exclusively by the people who caused it". They realize that if they'd arrived now, they wouldn't have been able to find the kind of apartment they were living in at a rent 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. In such moments they would feel hopeless..."

That's when they'd start feeling nostalgic about the country they'd left, and their families: "It wasn't so much their home-town that they missed, but something they had taken for granted back when they lived there. They couldn't say precisely what that something was, but its absence made daily life in Berlin feel intense, draining -- more exciting, maybe, but ultimately harder."

Tom and Anna's problem is that they live in a bubble. But they struggle to see that. They can find no explanation for their sense of alienation.

***

So they travel. The third section -- Remote -- describes their trips to Lisbon and Sicily, as they seek to replicate the set of circumstances that made their early Berlin years so satisfying.

But it's disappointing. Lisbon is too similar to Berlin... They're bored in Lisbon: "The city was so charming, so rich with history that their explorations of it felt samey and touristy, which wasn't how they liked to see themselves. With nothing else going on around it, their work felt tedious."

They're definitely not finding what they want there -- which is "a cheap, comfortable apartment, a new community, the transformation and growth that Berlin had promised and failed to deliver. Lisbon failed too."


Lisbon, 2020

So they plan to go to Sicily. Again, Latronico is so clever in making this whole plan look ridiculous, without ever being cruel. Several friends had mentioned they were planning to go to Sicily next summer, so "it wouldn't be a bad idea to get ahead of the international arts crowd, find themselves a bolthole with a sea view, ... and work lazily on their projects from a sun-drenched terrace". All the cliches...

But they need a place to start out in. Which is hard to find when you're still in Portugal. Airbnb offers little, but they take this as a positive sign, an indication that "the area's potential was still largely untapped. If they asked around, talked to some newsagents and oldies in the local bars, they might just find somewhere with a difference -- one that hadn't yet been spoiled by the internet." Yeah, guys, the reader thinks: You're the people who didn't make any local friends in Germany. We somehow can't see you reaching out to newsagents and bar-propping old people...

But they select a cheap interim base, and rent a car. At first, they feel they're on an adventure again. But that initial accommodation turns out to be very dull, "at the far end of a long, dusty drive surrounded by similar-looking houses, which hadn't been visible in the photos" (so ironic...).

And -- horrors -- they don't find the cafes and food of their aspirations: "What they were looking for must have existed once upon a time, back when you only had to hop onto a train or a ferry to reach a whole other world, an authentic, uncrowded world of dark red house wine in carafes and quiet hideaways by the sea. But now they knew those days were over and that, whether due to a lack of foresight on their part or because they had simply been born a generation too late, they couldn't afford that world today."

New Year comes. They go off on day-trips in the car, determined to make the most of it. But something has broken: "Throughout all of this they continued to document their remote working life on social media. The pictures were always stunning, enticing -- prickly pear groves, Camparis on red plastic beach tables, sunsets over vineyards, carved tufa limestone facades, stray cats, their laptops usually somewhere in the frame to prove they weren't on holiday -- evidence of a life of freedom and adventure, one full of beauty and hard work, and with occasional surprises. Yet something in their spirits had changed. Back in the day, looking at images like those and knowing how frustrated and unhappy they had been when they took them made them feel ashamed, deficient, as if the reality presented in the photos should somehow be capable of triumphing over how they really felt, and that their inability to enjoy such a desirable life revealed a flaw in their character. They had outgrown this insecurity. Now those images just seemed like a con. They watched the likes and the envious comments from friends asking when they could join accumulate with a growing sense of imposture."

When issues arise in Berlin, they're happy to use them as an excuse to return early.


A bit of Etna, 2025. "They climbed Etna, feeling the searing heat from the lava on their faces, blinded by the glare that hit them from every direction, counting the greenhouses and abandoned housing blocks dotted inland as far as the eye could see..."

***

The final section -- Future -- is told in the future tense. It starts with a warning:

"They will try to settle back into their old life... In their downtime they will scroll through the profiles of old schoolfriends, looking for proof that they aren't doing better than them. They will sit around with their old Berlin friends discussing how hard it is now -- there, in the city of abundance -- to find an apartment, a spot at preschool, a table at the new Indian, an English-speaking therapist, an available charge point for the Tesla.

"They will find themselves less and less interested by their job... How could they ever have chosen to spend their days like that, hunched over a computer screen in their living room?" Once upon a time, work was balanced by interesting days: "Now, they will realize, nothing remains but the work."

Fortunately, fate intervenes. Anna inherits her uncle's farmhouse.

So they move. They set up in hospitality. It will be hard work. "But then they will receive notifications of the first reviews, and that weight will instantly lift. Three will have come in, all of them giving five stars. One will be by a woman with over three hundred thousand followers, who will have tagged them in a post praising, as per their agreement, the relaxed but impeccable welcome, the choice of natural wines, the simple, elegant decor -- Mediterranean and yet unmistakeably international. It's all completely perfect, the story will say. It's just like it is in the pictures."

So is this the "lucky" break that could lift them out of the vicious circle they'd been locked in? As readers, we're not reassured. What they end up with sounds peculiarly like a different form of the same, still driven by image and artificiality.



***

Quotes from observers illustrate how many of us are drawn to insert ourselves into this experience:

-- Petya Grady: "In writing a Berlin story, Latronico has also perfectly captured the current zeitgeist. It's not just Berlin that has become a caricature of itself. It's everywhere all at once. Reading this book made me both tragically uncomfortable with the protagonist's cliched choices but also left me kind of scratching my head because -- what is one supposed to do?!"

-- Angus: "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... 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 see] by the way they are living always in the shadow of images -- others' and their own. But neither, typically, are we..."

-- Andrew Blackman: "What happens when the quest for perfection becomes imprisoning? If you're constantly trying to make your life match an impossibly perfect image, how can you hope to find happiness? These are the kinds of questions that were prompted for me by Vincenzo Latronico's novel Perfection..."

-- Rosie Spinks: "I was so taken by the hyperreal depiction of Anna and Tom's life because I used to live a version of it. For a period of my twenties, about ten years ago now, I didn't live anywhere... I not only lived as that now-reviled term 'digital nomad,' I was one of the first journalists who wrote about it in mainstream publications. Later, I covered the rise of 'live like a local' travel in Lisbon (where Anna and Tom also visit in their story), which I think you could argue was a direct descendant of early digital nomad culture. I aged out of that peripatetic existence when I realized that not living anywhere was, at least in my case, the perfect fuel for an anxious mind... Back in my twenties, like Anna and Tom, I could live anywhere, do anything. But in effect I was rooted nowhere, because I was always waiting for perfection to arrive just over the horizon. Ultimately, what Anna and Tom seem to be pursuing above all else is a life free of friction... Though it's now possible to eliminate a large chunk of friction and obligations from our lives, that doesn't mean that doing so will help us thrive."

***

Nigel worked remotely while we were in Cote d'Ivoire, and I took my job to California while he was doing a training course there (in both cases, this was before that kind of work practice was really a Thing).


An incredibly cock-eyed photo of my work-from-home base in San Leandro, 2001

But we were never "digital nomads". Still, I felt an awful lot of this novel resonated rather uncomfortably, and I could definitely recognize myself in some of it. For 18-and-something years, we lived in places that we didn't really envisage staying in for ever, and there was a lot of temporariness in our lives up until the beginning of this year, when we returned to the place that one of us was born and grew up in. (And although the current plan is to be based here for a while, you never really know what will happen...)

So there has been enough movement in our lives for me to recognize the sense of political disenfranchisement, of dismay at gentrification, and of superficial attachment (its positives and negatives). We have very good local friends in Sarawak, people who really could be relied on in "brain tumour" scenarios. But the fact remains that those people are rooted in the community in a way we could never be. We were only ever going to be people looking in from the outside.

Not that the act of returning waves a magic wand, either. I still know people here in my birthplace, but I don't really have a community any more. I need to forge one. Even though we're down and dirty here, looking after land we actually own, and attaching ourselves to systems that rope us to one spot, it will be a while before we truly feel grounded.

I document it all. I don't think I can be accused of polishing up an image. My blogs have always been ruthlessly honest. But it's going to take time to work my way through all the confusion of the last few months. In the meantime, everything is just pretty pictures (images again!) and incoherent thoughts.

I have no regrets -- not about going, nor about staying away so long, nor about returning. I wouldn't have done anything different, if I had my time over again. But we always have to reckon with opportunity cost. As finite human beings, when we're doing one thing, we're not doing another. Full stop.

There can be no perfection, and Latronico's novel illustrates that perfectly.