Review / Reminiscence : Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection and an ode to Berlin

By Nina Follows

If rumours of a new publication by Fitzcarraldo — the painfully chic modern publishing house scattering blue and white volumes across London's most pretentious bookshelves — weren’t enough to really excite me (they were), then the realisation that this was a novel about life in contemporary Berlin, by a writer, translator and art critic (ie. everything I aspire to be) had me running to my nearest bookshop with such anticipation that I beat the book to it; it hadn’t actually come out yet. It has since been published (on 13th February), and boy was it worth the wait.

Perfection is Vincenzo Latronico’s fourth novel, but the first to be translated into English. And Sophie Hughes’ translation (from the Italian original, first published in 2022) is wonderful — deft and lyrical to the point of invisibility, at no point does it read like translation. I eventually picked up a copy following a brief 29 hours in Berlin last week, on a financially motivated detour en route back from a study trip to Warsaw. Steeped in the weighty nostalgia naturally resulting from a day spent cycling around the city in the spring sunshine — reminiscing for my undergraduate stint there, raving to my poor friends (read: anyone who would listen) about its relatively low cost and high quality of life compared to London, the greater freedom and creativity tangible in its streets, fantasising about return to the joys of Wedding, Prenzlauer Berg, Tempelhof, Neukölln — I was primed and ready to indulge in an account of Berlin-based perfection. Latronico’s hit me where it hurt.

Combining uncanny lyricism and deadpan realism, the novel outlines the ostensible ‘perfection’ of the lives of Anna and Tom, an expat millennial couple working as graphic designers in Berlin throughout the 2010s. Initially, Latronico's evocations of sunlit wooden floors, abundant houseplants and mid-century furniture, ‘Visionäre, Renate, the illegal parties in Wedding sought but never found’ had me yearning for easily mythologised life in the Grey City, where winters might be bleak and harsh, but summers tap into a specific, unbeatable euphoria: of techno and electronic music throbbing 24/7 along the city’s many canals; U- and S-Bahns trundling through forests to lakes in its outskirts; infinite, fleeting encounters with young, beautiful folk from all over the world fuelled by Club Mate and Pilsner, Döner and Börek, Pueblo tobacco from local Spätis. Quickly, however, it reminded me of various darker undersides of this hazy dreamworld, sides that become increasingly hard to ignore amidst the city’s buzzing creative scene and charming flea markets, its scruffy glamour and world-renowned nightlife.

Anna and Tom’s lives are defined by this legendary bohemian city, or more precisely by the photos of it which they carefully curate and share worldwide: ‘The life promised by these images is clear and purposeful, uncomplicated.’ Beyond picture-perfect projections on Instagram, however, Latronico’s sharp prose lingers on the dust clinging to their monstera plants and books neglected in favour of mobile phones, the clutter shoved into storage when they sublet the flat for extortionate sums to fund periodic southern escapes, the claustrophobic rootlessness of lives lived freelance within the same four walls — professional lives which could plausibly take place anywhere, so detached are they from the city at large. Latronico somehow deals with social media — the central motif of modern life, but sometimes a cringe-worthy, on-the-nose addition to contemporary literature — with such smooth, glossy eloquence that the near-total blurring of online and ‘real’ life (whatever that might mean) to which the novel bears witness might go almost unquestioned. But likes and comments do not happy people make. Beyond ostensible perfection, something is missing for Anna and Tom. As the lives they show online feel more and more like outright cons, the novel asks what constitutes ‘reality’ amidst such social-media-dominated conditions, which is to say those of contemporary life in general.

Latronico’s narrative is tantalisingly poised somewhere beyond Anna and Tom, chronicling various broader trends of which their lives are generic examples. We glean nothing of their interiority or individuality, if any exists at all. Instead, they are defined by their carefully curated material possessions and surroundings (the work originated as a contemporary reworking of George Perec’s 1965 Things, a collective biography of the Parisian sixties told through material possessions and obsessions), the clichés they pursue and perpetuate, and perhaps even more so by the immaterial dimensions of these things, the vision of it all projected online. Much of their time is spent carefully constructing a collective mythology of the city and bohemian life within it. When not working remotely for clients based elsewhere, they move among Berlin’s vaguely evoked international arty crowd, from gallery parties (despite their lack of interest in or understanding of contemporary art) to nightclubs. Their interiors, haunts and party habits serve as ‘the admission stamp into a community bound by a shared reality, or quasi-reality.’ But Anna, Tom and their relationship are tellingly spectral. They become mere vectors for these trends, images and online presences, and there seems little else to them. Some indistinct dissatisfaction, some emptiness, haunts them and Perfection.

The question of ‘authenticity’ — what it means and how to ‘achieve’ it — lurks at the heart of the novel. Whatever this might be seems lost somewhere between the online portrayal and actual reality of Anna and Tom’s lives. Belonging, with all their friends, to ‘an imprecise political left,’ they inhabit a recognisable bubble of vague, self-serving online ‘activism’, where social justice amounts to ‘publicly distancing’ oneself from controversial figures, and political consciousness is skewed towards particular trendy causes: ‘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.’ At long last, Anna and Tom’s abstracted, detached lives are permeated by the harsh reality of Germany’s 2015 migrant crisis, of which they naturally become aware through photographs circulated online. A brief stint of impassioned engagement follows, but their attempts to help (and crucially to prove their ethical impulses) demonstrate their ultimate redundancy, unable to speak German or do much beyond posting more photos for a distant audience to scroll past. They ultimately wind up feeling more disengaged than ever. A spanner has been thrown into the aesthetically polished works of their lives, as the detachment and triviality of their pursuits and preoccupations comes into stark focus: ‘They had glimpsed — within themselves and those around them — a flakiness and vanity that they could not now unsee. They were restless.’

Perhaps most interesting is the question of authenticity in relation to the city itself and modes of inhabiting it. Speaking minimal German, Anna and Tom exist within a hermetic anglophone expat sphere, having little to do with any ‘real’ local life or culture. Rather than Der Spiegel or B.Z., they read The New York Times and The Guardian: ‘In their world, Barack Obama’s speeches and high school shootings existed far more vividly than the laws passed just a few U-Bahn stations away, or the refugees drowning two hours’ flight south.’ Regarding Berlin’s history, ‘really their awareness didn’t exceed a few anecdotes rattled off to make it look like their life their had more substance. It never occurred to them, for example, that the distinction between Alt- and Neu- buildings in property listings had been drawn by the Allied bombings.’ This is a life of showing and telling, but behind appearances it is unclear what is authentically felt. Though they adhere to a certain collective ‘Berlin’ lifestyle, their lack of true grounding in the city becomes increasingly apparent: ‘They spoke stumbling English with other non-native English speakers. 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.’ As waves of expats — problematically distinguished, as Europeans, from the unseen ‘immigrants’ elsewhere in the city — come and go, Anna and Tom find themselves asking what is keeping them in Berlin. What at first seemed like absolute freedom becomes a restless lack of direction, structure, or reasons to leave the flat, a detachment from any meaningful community or reason to stay. Beneath an ultra ‘smooth and manicured’ vision lurks a deadening, meaningless stasis.

Their increasing dissatisfaction is also tied up in anxieties about losing the ‘version’ of Berlin they initially pursued and created, risked by rising costs and demographic shifts: ‘what was happening to the city — the replacement of its historical inhabitants with younger, wealthier newcomers, and the resulting price hikes and decline in diversity — was gentrification, a term used almost exclusively by the people who caused it.’ This gentrification is presented as a lamentable, insidious force, exacerbated by a new influx of  American and Bavarian tech bros. But of course Anna and Tom were in fact earlier harbingers of this pattern: ‘They realised they had contributed to the problem that was starting to affect them, but they knew it in an unacknowledged, almost imperceptible way, like smokers when they think about cancer.’ They also become paralysed by a discomfort recognisable to anyone who has lived in Berlin: the unshakeable, tragic sense that everything would have been better and cheaper and more available had they arrived just a few years earlier, when space abounded and whole blocks in Prenzlauer Berg could be bought for mere pocket change.

The contemporary moment, by contrast, is defined by increasing precarity: evictions, rent increases, and painful nostalgia for this past ideal moment just missed. The myth of bohemian Berlin which Anna and Tom initially helped create becomes increasingly inaccessible as prices rise and the formerly half-socialist city feels the costly effects of dollars and globalisation. Cold-footed Berliners are constantly haunted by a sense that things are only getting worse, the city less affordable and inhabitable, corrupted by the influx of which they were a part. Such nostalgia is perhaps universally recognisable (in Britain, for example, nostalgia for the nonchalance and supposed limitless promise of the nineties is practically institutionalised), but also raises interesting questions about movement, authenticity and belonging. Who deserves to call where home? How might one inhabit a place not just authentically, but also ethically? Is ‘rootedness’ a thing of the past in an increasingly ‘remote’, virtual world?

Questions of nostalgia become increasingly pertinent in light of Germany’s recent election results, which demonstrated sympathy for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party unprecedented in Germany since the age of Nazism. Such conservative tendencies, resounding across the world, emerge in part from such nostalgia for a more stable, affordable, generally habitable past — not necessarily in Berlin, but across the country and world at large. But of course no government can bring back the Prenzlauer Berg of the nineties. This prelapsarian haven of creativity and general freedom fell swift victim to neoliberal homogenisation, and the city’s transformation is part of a much broader global pattern of the ‘pricing out’ of that which initially constituted the very treasured fabric and ‘character’ of such places — ie. flourishing creative, bohemian scenes.  

If the Berlin of the past is irredeemably lost, Latronico challenges any straight-forward romanticising of the present-day city, the kind of rose-tinted indulgence I was hoping to find in the novel. Rather, I was reminded of the less glamorous realities, the various uncomfortable or cynical undersides, that I started to glean during my brief semester living there: the impossibility of finding a long-term lease, and all the paperwork required for visas or registration or anything else for that matter (I still shiver at the mention of an Anmeldung or Aufenthaltserlaubnis); the exploitative sublets catalysing the gentrification process in which you are constantly aware that you are at once victim and contributor; the collective mourning of the nineties, the sense that you have come a bit too late, you’ve missed the city’s post-Wall-fall glory days, when rent was so low that the majority of one’s days could be spent on creative pursuits; the difficulty of meeting ‘authentic Berliners’, and then the shame felt upon meeting them at your relative lack of right to the city that is their actual home; best friends made on dance floors, followed on Instagram with the promise of an imminent trip to Berghain, then never to be seen again; the figures, no doubt drawn to the city by the seductive promise of an endless party, encountered with disturbing, desperate regularity in the dark streets of Kreuzberg, adults shivering in bondage gear asking for your help to find their way home, after their polycule left them in KitKat or Tresor or wherever…

I could go on, but ultimately none of this is enough to quash my affection for this scruffy, grey, slippery sprawl of a city and people who flock there, however idealistic it all might be. And there is still great pleasure to be taken in Latronico’s vivid evocations of patterns of life in Berlin: ‘The warehouse parties. The house parties at Jugendstil apartments in Prenzlauer Berg with bay windows and period mouldings. Berghain. The gallery parties. The barge parties on the Spree. The blurry journeys home on the U-Bahn, which ran all night. … The blood-red light of northern sunsets.’ Such cinematic montages resemble the infinite flux of images reeled off in a scroll through Instagram, with a similarly alluring, addictive pull.

Such ‘snapshots’ of life in Berlin might be painfully recognisable and enchanting, but they do ultimately remain just that: snapshots within wider lives that come with wider needs and the existential questions that plague all of us, to which Berlin itself cannot reasonably be expected to provide every answer. Anna and Tom’s malaise, while bound up in anxiety-inducing woes of gentrification and the decreasing habitability of the world at large, is symptomatic of a much wider spiritual condition, in an age when outwardly projected images have come to count for more than interior lives and authentic reflection and connection.

Ultimately, though, Perfection’s cynicism wasn’t enough to suppress my urge, when I heard some unknown undergrads talking about their reading-week study trips in the lift the other day, to object to a certain Will’s declaration that he hadn’t been particularly fussed by Berlin, it felt like an industrial park, it reminded him of Milton Keynes. I found myself jumping in, outrage uncontainable, to defend my persisting personal myth. Of course, Berlin may not in reality live up to the charmed mythological status it holds in our collective nostalgic psyche — in fact, it likely never was actually so perfectly idyllic — but it will never, ever, be on a par with Milton Keynes.