Young Ex-pats Anna and Tom are living the Millennial dream as "creatives" . Everything they do is calculated to look appealing on social media,artfully presented and photographed food,the "right" brands of coffee and proof of their enviable lifestyle as part of the gilded set of young professionals from around the world to whom "being in Berlin" appears to be as important as their work,invariably working very visibly in packs in swanky cafes around the city.
The problem is that the story they create for themselves isn't quite the reality, Berlin has lost it's edge as the anarchic party town of the immediate post-Wall period and they live sterile lives in a sterile apartment never quite fitting in.
While others move on the couple barely realise that they often appear to be the oldest people at social events and spend more time trying to give the impression of an amazing lifestyle than actually living one. They're too late to experience the concerts and squats,they go to sex clubs as onlookers and their attempts at helping refugees are half-hearted and naive as they do little more than stir resentment.
This short story reads as an allegory of Berlin,and too many other cities around the world ,with Tom and Anna as its mirror. The barren glass jungles of the soulless and increasingly over-priced apartments swamping old areas where anything of character is demolished to make way for them, lively and diverse populations pushed out of areas whose reputations and history they have created to make way for shiny,dull buildings populated by shiny dull people.
Buildings and a lifestyle carefully curated to look enviable that in reality are crushingly dull.

I love Fitzarraldo, I love Berlin and I love hating on millenials, so this was my fastest click ever. I enjoyed the prose style, with its mostly cold and ironic distance, veering occasionally into chilly pity. I enjoyed the horribly recognisable details of the digital and non-digital lives of Anna and Tom, cyphers who only exist as a pair, and I enjoyed the speed with which they are dispatched to the arid wasteland of their perfect future (the book was definitely well-paced and the right length). But in the end, it left me feeling sad and a bit dirty. Turns out witnessing another round of low hanging fruit being artisanally skewered is less enjoyable than I thought, no matter how fast it happens.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Look, you know what to expect of Fitzcarraldo Press. Let me introduce you to a slim literary novel with an emphasis on the prose which aspires to capture something essential about human nature, exhibit #247.

Perfection can be read in multiple ways. On the most obvious level, it is a satire of the older Millennial generation, adrift, uprooted, disconnected from the real world, seeing both the beauty of it and the terrible things happening around them through the prism of the internet and social media. We follow Anna and Tom, an everyman and everywoman from a 'Southern' country establishing themselves as freelancer digital workers in Berlin. They are from a privileged background back at home, which both enables them to have their current lifestyle and sets them up for failure, as their lives cannot measure to the stable and rooted livelihoods of their doctor/lawyer/accountant parents. They are at the forefront of the gentrification of Berlin in the 2000s, only to be consumed by the wealthier British and American 'expats' of the 2010s.

The novel starts with an instantly recognisable description of a sad beige early 21st century aspirationally minimalist apartment, paying homage to Georges Perec's Things: A Story of the Sixties. We then follow the couple, always referred to as a couple, never as individuals, across about fifteen years in Berlin in a whirlwind of parties, gallery openings, socialising, working, having (or not having) sex, all of this whilst never integrating into German society. The acerbic prose captures some of the most obvious (and often satirised) aspects of this generation's lifestyles, from inept and vague political involvement to constant use of takeaways. One reviewer called this type of immigrant life in Berlin a 'colonisation', and even though the author does not use that word, his critique of gentrification is very clear in the text.

In my opinion, satire should be punching up. The very deliberate choice to keep Anna and Tom as vague, generic and symbolic as possible removes many of the factors that might influence the embodied reality of their existence in Berlin. There is a reason why they are Anna and Tom, rather than Carlotta and Gabriele or Desislave and Yordan - Anna and Tom are much easier to critique, because they are not real. I've been to Berlin maybe a couple of times in my life, but one of my classmates has had a journey similar to Anna and Tom's. And this is where my discomfort starts. Yes, they have had some privilege growing up, people without any privileges do not get to leave our country of birth. But our childhood's are anything but those of an 'Anna' and a 'Tom'. Why shouldn't someone from one of those Eastern Block brutalist nostalgia videos you've probably seen on social media want to better their economic and political situation? Why would someone from rural Bulgaria or Lithuania be 'colonising' Berlin if they moved there and happened to not end up in the service industry? The kind of critique Latronico offers comes quite close to denying any social mobility to migrants. You're either educated and with some security 'at home', ending up in a sort of lifestyle that gentrifies Berlin and is worthy of satirical scorn, or you are an uneducated working class migrant deserving of pity, but not a closer look. It is telling that his 'migrant Berlin', supposedly representative of a multicultural Europe adrift in the German capital, almost exclusively consists of a Europe of Romance languages (although I would encourage anyone reading to look up Portuguese migration to rural East Anglia in the 2000s, not only Eastern Europeans end up in conditions close to modern slavery, enabling the Annas and Toms to have their takeouts). In reality, many migrants to Berlin, London or Paris from elsewhere in Europe have degrees, work experience and aspirations, and the division between 'working class' and 'professional' migrants is much more porous than it might seem, with many starting off as baristas or cleaners and working their way to office jobs in language teaching or logistics.

Perfection is not designed to capture any of this complexity by its very nature, and I found it (and the satire it offers) a bit boring because of that. Closer to the 70% mark, Latronico seemed to have developed some sort of a sympathy for his characters, missing the zeitgeist they rode in the 2000s, still adrift, still unstable, still not able to afford to settle down. The novel can serve as an archetypical but almost photographic portrayal of our generation, but I personally found it boring for that vert reason, as I see that life all around me. I wouldn't want to look at a photograph of my own flat, filtered or not. I wonder if this book would be of more interest to readers 50 or even 100 years from now, in the same way we read Berlin Alexanderplatz or Goodbye to Berlin for the sense of time and place. Weirdly enough, despite capturing this very specific time (even as a younger Millennial I could not relate to some of the opportunities people 5-10 years older than me had, my 20s were less plat pot full apartments and more crammed house shares with tiny bedrooms and, as a friend put it, 'smelly tea towels of houseshare kitchens'), something in the style felt very intentionally retro, the sort of European literature one might associate with the early 20th century.

I wonder if the description of Anna and Tom lodging around Europe and not finding the 'authentic' experience they were looking for was intended to be purely satirical, or whether the author had some understanding of the characters' melancholy. That was the only moment in the entire novel when I wanted to chop their heads off. Many people in those Eastern Block nostalgia videos would give so much to be able to hop between Portugal and Sicily, eating local food, however underwhelming, and getting to explore those places. Anna and Tom's privilege is never more apparent than in the last 20% of the narrative, culminating in hilarious but predictable finale.

Definitely worth reading, if only for the prose, but I expected a little bit more from this one.

Thank you, NetGalley, and the publisher for a review copy.

4,5

Le Perfezioni (the English translation titled ´Perfection´ will be published by Fitzcarraldo in September) is a short, sleek and sterile portrayal of the ‘perfect´ life that an Italian expat couple have built for themselves in Berlin. They are both ´creative professionals´ that work from home in their perfect apartment. They drink speciality coffee, visit art exhibitions, have lots of hipster ´friends´ and care about the right things. They feel they have moved upward in life from their provincial city in the Mediterranean. And yet, something is missing. Is it meaning? Is there too much form and too little content?

I enjoyed this very, very much – the minimalist style that reflects the clean lives, the lack of warmth (which I suspect is what other reviewers miss) and of dialogue that fits the narrative so well. And also, I have to admit, it is so very recognisable that it was almost confronting.