That was such an interesting book, which charts the gentrification of Berlin through the experiences of two young “creatives”. The author has an astute, wry eye for the details and tech trends of the past couple of decades, and the general flattening of culture that has accompanied globalisation. This is not a book about character. Anna and Tom are like SIMS characters moving through this changing world and environment, where their choices are moulded and determined by the world around them and their time in history. It’s written in the present and the reader observes their lives within this historical context of Berlin and the huge changes it has experienced. I think this is a wonderful and fascinating book but I am reminded that we all have this feeling that the past was better, and that we have just missed the good times. When we look back several decades later we can see what an amazing time it was to be there, exactly when we were! There is no perfection except in nostalgia.

Short but sharply observed, this is an interesting exploration of the pitfalls of comparison as told through the story of Anna and Tom, living in Berlin. I enjoyed the overall themes, but found the characters extremely hard to root for.

Many thanks to the author, publisher and Netgalley for providing an ARC of this book in exchange for an unbiased review.

Wow okay so I feel like everyone who has moved to Berlin in the past 10 years has just been skewered by this 111 page book. Glad that’s not me!

Anna & Tom are a millennial couple who have been living the dream in Berlin. They have friends, a full social life, decent paying and flexible jobs and an apartment filled with houseplants. As time goes on they start to feel less satisfied with their lives. Is Berlin changing? Are they changing? Both? Is it both?

I enjoyed this more and more as it went on. It paints this really true picture of Instagram v real life, you can just imagine someone uploading a gorgeous photo while they sit in their house utterly miserable. Everything that needed to be said was said which is always so impressive for a novel so short!

This is just a novella but I gave up after about 20%. I just wasn’t interested in the lives of these boring people especially the way it was written. Maybe I’m too old for this sort of thing.

I could not connect with this book at all. I was not interested in the story nor the characters as I found them to be too insufferable. The writing and length of the book is what kept me motivated to finish it but it was not a book that I enjoyed reading.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the chance to read this ARC.

the translation into english was very well done.

the story itself wasn’t really for me.

it was basically a snapshot of the life of a couple that moved to Berlin from spain(? sorry i already forgot because it’s not mentioned as something important were they moved from more so that they came from a mediterranean country and how different life and land and people were to that to where they are now or when they go back) and how they try to appear perfect but are really nor and don’t really know what they are doing or what they are supposed to be doing and just keep on searching without ever really finding their place.


the descriptions were very clearly done and it’s a short book but the actual story was not that interesting for me.
maybe because the free spirited party scene that the couple lived in is not at all what i know or am interested in and can’t understand how anybody wants to do drugs if you don’t need them for health reasons.


so sadly the story wasn’t really good for me, i felt bored not even halfway through the 130 or so pages of this story and kept thinking something more would/should/could happen because nothing interesting was happening. i am not someone that loves reading about just everyday typical life stories, they need to have a little something more for me or be about a person i am really interested in to get invested in it.
which yes that’s real life but i have my own completely boring life so is don’t want to read about it in a way that i feel bored by that too.



that all being said i am sure that this little book will have its fan and become a favorite for someone.

if you love detailed descriptions that you can clearly imagine what places and settings look like? go for it!

if you enjoy going along for a little while people life their lives and you can „spy“ on them and experience that kind of life? perfect!

and as i said right at the start: rhetorical translation was very well done, is easy but nice to read and the word choices were very well done!

Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection is a sharp and unsettling examination of utopian ideals, privilege, and the pursuit of an aesthetically controlled life. Set in an eco-luxury community designed to offer its residents a flawless existence, the novel follows Anna and Tom, a young couple drawn to its promises of sustainability and harmony. However, beneath the polished surface, Latronico unpacks the contradictions of perfectionism—how the desire for order often leads to sterility, and how privilege enables a curated life while shutting out discomforting realities.

I very much enjoyed Latronico's restrained, precise prose - almost the language of a contemporary chronicle in places so that the plot felt both in time and timeless. It's very much a novel about the ethics of escape (from modern life/the self), the tensions between authenticity and artificiality, and the compromises required to sustain an illusion of perfection. I thought Perfection was a compelling, thought-provoking read, ideal for those interested in the intersection of design, philosophy, and social critique.

Not for me, but brilliantly written overall. I just didn't enjoy it but can definitely imagine someone else enjoying it far more. I felt unmoved by the characters, plot, and all of it in general.

Perfection
By Vincenzo Latronico
Translated from the Italian by Sophie Hughes

I was immediately drawn to this book because my lifelong regret has always been that I never lived abroad for any length of time despite the fact that it was my main ambition all through my youth and my twenties, and this is the story of an expat couple, Anna and Tom, from Southern Europe, presumably Italy, who have been living and working in Berlin for some years in the creative design world. My hope was that, through reading, I could capture a little of that continental "je ne sais quoi" that I have always felt so deprived of, vicariously.

No need to fear, this book gives all the feels. It's a story of imagery, of aesthetics, of being right in the heart of the zeitgeist, of realising how cool you are and how you have found the most amazing community a beat before you realise how transient it all is. How fashion changes, ex patriots come and go, how gentrification destroys more than it improves, how the digital arena transitions faster you can blink, how today's cool is tomorrow's passé.

The life Anna and Tom chose is an illusory one, where the grass is greener on the other side. You can move to the other side, but what shade does it appear from there?

I tore through this story so fast, it was impossible to stop thinking about when I wasn't actually reading it. I love the style of writing and language this translator used. I feel she did justice to the original work.

I hope it's not a spoiler to draw attention the date that Anna and Tom finally found their forever home, their perfection?

One you begin to chase perfection will you ever capture it? For longer than it takes for you to realise that you had there for a moment?

Publication date: 13th February 2025
Thanks to #Netgalley and #Fitzcarraldo for providing an eGalley for review purposes

Thoroughly enjoyed this short novel which, I learn at the end, is a form of homage to "Things: A Story of the Sixties" by Georges Perec (so another to add to the list).

Perfection is the story of Anna and Tom who we meet as twenty-somethings newly arrived in Berlin. They are a new breed of workers who deal with digital content. It means their work space and time is fluid. They are in the rapidly evolving city at the height of change. And everyone around them mirrors their own. Buy nothing stays the same and Anna and Tom must adapt as they age even if the city they fell in love with in their twenties does not.

Perfection is a deceptively simple story but it's possible to recognise something of ourselves in them - wanting to stay young but recognising it is impossible.

It's a really good read and even though I've still no idea what their job really was I could empathise with the characters.

Highly recommended.

Thankyou to Netgalley and Fitzcarraldo for the advance review copy. Much appreciated.

This was a short but really interesting meditation on yearning, satisfaction and the desire to curate a “perfect” life. The two protagonists, Anna and Tom, constantly strive for perfection in their work, their lifestyle, their sex life, their travels, and yet are left feeling unfulfilled. In the age of social media and curated images, this was a very poignant read. I also really enjoyed the detailed depictions of Berlin as well as the representation of the joys and challenges of expat life.

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes, is a brilliant and original portrait of contemporary life. Through a millennial couple whose lives unfold like curated Instagram posts, Latronico crafts a fast-paced narrative devoid of dialogue or overt conflict, yet brimming with depth. The lack of dialogue underscores the homogeneity of the couple, emphasizing their seamless, almost surreal harmony. Despite its specific setting, the story resonates universally, offering readers a mirror to their own lives. This varied and profound exploration invites immersion into the ethos of a generation, offering a stark, eye-opening reflection of modern existence.

I liked aspects of this book, especially around our charactcers. However some of the thematic work was quite week.

A striking and detailed snapshot into life of a couple who uproot their Southern European lives in favour of Berlin, set against the backdrop and consequences of our technologically infused world.

Latronico uses Anna and Tom (the couple) as everymen - their plight for "something more", for holistic satisfaction with their own existence, is tinged by the knowledge that the way we have evolved as a society (think capitalism, consumerism, fake wokeness etc.) makes this plight impossible.

At times this book reads more of a travel log, the chronicles of Berlin's streets and its array of shops and experiences serve their initial purpose of sarcastically gesturing towards style over substance, but this can sometimes get repetitive. As with most books that take social media as a prime theme, the discussions of "famous posts" and "insta vs reality" has a scent of the millennial and can feel a bit on the nose.

That being said, the sentiments that lie at the heart of this short book - the loneliness of a digital age and the feelings of immense dissatisfaction with the spaces and locations we inhabit - are commendable ones. Latronico has a easy way of writing that makes his point land seamlessly.

Tom and Anna have moved from the small town they grew up in to Berlin, where they work from their apartment for clients in the small town they grew up in. Their apartment never looks as perfect as it does when they rent it out for tourists as a short-term let, saving the best plates for the guests and hiding all evidence of an imperfect life being lived there. They spend their time going to art exhibitions they don’t understand, because everyone else is, and discovering new hobbies that just so happen to be the same hobbies that everyone else has discovered on Instagram.

‘Perfection’ is so well observed that it is almost disgustingly relatable. Tom and Anna search for a perfect life by following the crowd, only occasionally stopping to wonder if anything about their lives is actually going the way they want it to - and if they might be stuck, unable to change anything at this point anyway.

Latronico’s prose (in Sophie Hughes’ translation, acknowledged by the author in the end pages as having written the book as much as he did) is funny and the observations ring true; Tom and Anna are a little older than me, but everything they feel serves only to prove that in a world where we are all chronically online, there is no such thing as an original thought. Everything from the hangxiety they feel the morning after a night of drinking, assuaging their guilt with a text and reassuring themselves that “by Monday morning everything would be fine, or almost everything, or almost fine”, to their fleeting thoughts of deleting all social media but being unable to sever ties with people from their home that they no longer even know, feels so real and makes the novel a perfect time capsule of life in the social media age.

Ultimately this was a little sad, examining what it’s like to be projecting a perfect life online and striving to compete with other people’s projections of perfection, while really just feeling a bit lost and insecure. I liked it a lot.

Thank you to Fitzcarraldo and Netgalley for the e-ARC.

This novel explores the lives of millennial expat creative professionals grappling with their 30s and the shallowness of their carefully curated lifestyles. It delves into the mounting pressures of social media and the performative existence it demands. While the book offers sharp satire and critiques the superficiality of modern life, I found myself wishing for a bolder take than "social media is superficial."

The prose is highly descriptive, with detailed explorations of creative processes, technology, architecture, and art. While this level of intricacy might be overwhelming for some, as a graphic designer I ate this up.

Interestingly, I only realized after finishing the book that it contains no dialogue—a testament to how seamlessly it holds your attention despite the unconventional choice.

I recently received a couple of ARCs from Fitzcarraldo Editions - Merry Christmas to me! For the past couple of years, I have increasingly enjoyed their books, and this was no exception. Latronico paints a very vivid picture, a picture that is both colourful and blurry at the same time.

Throughout the course of the book we learn very little about Anna and Tom; they are always discussed as a couple, never as individuals, and we only get glimpses into the inner workings of their relationship. We are told that they are dissatisfied with some things, but we never learn if it’s both or just one of them. In reality, they always remain slightly out of reach.

While this would probably be a slight in any other book or context, it works wonderfully here. Both the protagonists and we, as readers, always remain on the surface, this marginal place that grants us limited access, if any. It complements the overall feeling of disconnect and discontent of the book, and allows us to experience the same feelings of being at once there and far removed that Anna and Tom seem to experience throughout the book.

As someone who has lived abroad most of my adult life, I could relate to some aspects of Anna and Tom’s life all too well; friends move away, your city stops feeling like your city, you desperately try to replicate the feeling, only to realise that you can spend your entire life looking for home without realising that what you thought of as “home” was a product of the circumstances, and of being very young and very hopeful, at the right place at the right time. The facelessness of the protagonists allows the readers to project ourselves onto them, to see in them our own experiences, anxieties, and fears; and it does so without it feeling lazy, but rather planned out and intentional.

I've never felt so completely nailed to the ground by a novel as I did by this short tale of a pair of elder millennials who accidentally fall into their careers simply by being of exactly the right age to take advantage of the rise of Web 2.0 and social media, only to have to deal with the fact that their bubble is bursting in their late 30s and they have no idea how to adapt to that change.

There's a sense of real jaded disillusionment and dissatisfaction here. It's a portrait of a world and culture becoming sanitised and commodified, flattened by a vision of "perfection" presented in Instagram reels and #sponsored captions, all rendered through the eyes of those who benefited from it and helped make it happen. I felt distinctly anxious and uncomfortable as I watched the perfect life Anna and Tom had built slowly tarnish around them, unable to ignore the parallels with my own life and my own anxieties about my future. I don't think it's an accident that the novel ends with a fluke windfall that sets the two main characters up for a future they've entirely failed to plan for - something that I think many people of my generation can sympathise with dreaming about.

What's most interesting to me here is the fact that we never hear anybody speak and never see any real interaction between characters. Everything is narrated to us secondhand, as something that's already happened, in a way that makes reading this feel a lot like experiencing someone's life through social media highlights. It's a fascinating approach to the subject matter and one that I think works really well.

This is really a novel about the end of an era, the crumbling of an age of excess where anything felt possible, the slow pulling back of the curtain on a golden age to reveal the tarnished subsurface. In some ways it feels like a modern version of <i>The Great Gatsby</i> - and that seems fitting, given that this English translation is arriving exactly a century after that novel.

Thank you to Fitzcarraldo Editions for the ARC of this novel. I liked it a lot and I'll be thinking about it for a while.

I loved this book. It was definitely more character driven than plot. The Berlin setting was also part of its charm.

I really enjoyed this modern novel. Nothing really happens but the process is so pleasurable that I was drawn to keep reading anyway. Anna and Tom felt extremely relatable in their thoughts and conflicts and I very much could envision them and their cohort in my mind.