Ennui ridden millennials. Bloodless hipsters. Shallow social media conquistadors. Poor old Anna and Tom have it tough in Vincenzo Latronico’s novel Perfection. They’re a couple of twenty somethings living their best lives in a Berlin, post soft revolution. Squats, socialism and alternative lifestyles ravaged by capitalist fundamentalism, blinking smartphones and bucket list goths. Anna and Tom blissfully unaware of ideology, topography, the end of history, “There wasn’t just an abundance of time in Berlin, but also of space. Of course, it was history that had hollowed out that space. Anna and Tom understood this, or at least they would have if they had ever thought about it”. The author sniffy about their hardwood floorboards, perfect food and imperfect orgasms. But how are a young tech bro and tech sis in their twenties supposed to live? If they can’t live selfishly, then when on earth can they? And if they’re lucky or privileged enough to live “a rarified, curated life”, or “inhabited a world where no one was a doctor or a baker or a taxi driver or a middle school teacher”, why not? Sure, some of us lived lives of precarity in our twenties which revolved around dole cheques, nicking stuff and playing in bands that were never going to make it. What deluded soul would have written a novel about our scruffy lives? Anna and Tom, however, have Vincenzo giving them the once over every page, always tapping away, never giving them a chance to figure out what the hell hours of social media were doing to them, “Even their moods were new, which is why they had no commonly recognised name. Instead, they would be described in terms borrowed from other, vaguely related types of experience, all of which fell short of expressing an inner landscape reconfigured by twenty years of the internet”. So, what gives? Where does Vincenzo take them from here? Five-star social media perfection? Millennial Luddism? Revolutionary socialism? Better read this novel and find out. Slickly translated by Sophie Hughes, and, admittedly, brilliantly written by Vincenzo Latronico, Perfection is as addictive as a twenty-four-hour doom-scroll. That’s a recommend…I think.

Perfection – by Vincenzo Latronico (translated by Sophie Hughes) publ. by Fitzcarraldo Editions - £12.99

Steven Long