Perfection

""Vincenzo Latronico is a writer who sees clearly and conveys it beautifully. In Perfection, he paints a stark picture of the conditions that have created a generation’s “identical struggle for a different life”: globalization, homogenization, the internet. Though on one level the novel is (pitch-perfectly) “about” Berlin and the “creative professional” expatriates who have sought a different life in, and inevitably colonized, the city, the story of Anna and Tom will be uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has tried to resist the flattening effects of whatever life is now. I can't recommend it highly enough."" — Lauren Oyler, author of Fake Accounts ""One of Europe’s most talented young writers, Latronico has written the great Berlin novel we’ve all been waiting for."" — Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New Yorker staff journalist ""Perfection gave me the gift of being able to hold a long span of time—in a relationship, in a city—and the experience of being young, and the experience of being not so young—all in my head at once. I could hold it there the way you hold a parable or fable, but with all these tiny details, too. It also functioned like a kind of murder mystery: what killed the magic? Was it their values, was it aging, was it... was it...? It’s such a beautiful, thoughtful, impeccably crafted book."" —Sheila Heti ""An important novel, innovative in its own way."" — Claudia Durastanti, author of Strangers I Know ""Perfection is a jewel of a novel: precisely cut, intricately faceted, prismatically dazzling at its heart. Vicenzo Latronico is the finest of writers.’— Lauren Groff ""A new master of Italian literature."" — Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung One need not look back a century for compelling depictions of Berlin. …Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, [is] notable for [its] deromanticized renderings of the city. — The Baffler ""This book gives startling form to the question of how to live a meaningful life; to the illusion that appearance is beauty; to the restlessness of contemporary society. I read it in a breath and I was captivated.""— Ayşegül Savaş ""Perfection is a generation-defining piece of literature, one that spares us nothing. To read it is to look in a mirror and finally, for the first time, truly see yourself and the culture you’ve helped create: the one that lurks behind the filters, algorithms and curated ephemera of selfhood that make up our public lives. Read it and tremble."" — Madeleine Watts ""The world of this horrifying novel has been built piece by perfect piece – honey-colored floorboards, a monstera’s perforate leaves, glossy white tiles, a breakfast of assorted seeds, a game of Carcassonne – the method of its construction likewise perfect, a perfection of prose that ends by releasing, miraculously, the very thing perfection is made to prohibit, the heavy stink of mortality.’"" — Kathryn Davis ""I recognize Anna and Tom in Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection because I am them. Never has a novel so incisively captured what it feels like to participate in the globalized culture of the Internet era: to consume it; to be overwhelmed by it; to try, futilely, to make it. The repeating symbols of homogenized good taste – potted house plants, reclaimed-wood furniture, post-industrial clubs – haunt the characters as their own poignant hopes to be original. I felt attacked, as they say online. Perfection is satire in the way that adult life itself is a comedy. By its end, the novel will cure you of any dream for authenticity."" — Kyle Chayka