“This seems to be the book all the cool, smart people are reading this summer,” the friendly cashier remarked as I paid for my copy of Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection (2022) at the McNally Jackson in downtown Brooklyn. The compliment, I confess, had a somewhat discouraging effect on me.
Latronico’s lean novel follows Anna and Tom, a pair of multihyphenate digital creatives living in Berlin in the 2010s. Published in translation this year by NYRB and short-listed for the 2025 International Booker Prize, Perfection opens with a meticulous description of pictures of the couple’s apartment, which features a tattered art nouveau façade plus “honey-colored floorboards,” Scandinavian furniture, and “low-maintenance, luxuriant plants” within. Beneath the photogenic luster of Anna and Tom’s life—beyond the frames composed and cropped for display on a short-term rental platform—stir inner vicissitudes of loneliness and frustration.
A novel about the ennui of curated living bound for the meticulously curated bookshelves of the same cosmopolitan pro…
