Shortlisted for 2025’s International Booker Prize, Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection has rightly gotten a fair amount of attention from avid readers. Between the premise and style of the book, there is a lot to like. Perfection is about two expats living as creatives in Berlin, creating templates for websites or doing graphic design work for other creatives. Plot-wise, it’s pretty thin. We get a chapter, for instance, about what their apartment looks like. We get a chapter about their work. A chapter on what they do for fun. A chapter on their sex lives. Then, the final few chapters see their friends leaving Berlin and, feeling creeping ennui, sees them leaving Berlin for lackluster-to-dreadful experiences in Portugal and Sicily before Anna’s uncle dies and them establishing a hotel from his property.
Character-wise, the book is a little bit thin there, too: Anna and Tom are consistently described as a unit. Perfection has two characters that never engage in dialogue and are distinguished from one another very rarely. They seem to experience the same joys, the same fears in leaving Berlin, the same sense of the present disappearing, the same hopes.
Describing the plot as thin and the central characters as uniform, though, doesn’t really do the book justice. Perfection is conducted in such a stylistically interesting way. The opening chapter of the book is just descriptions of photographs of an apartment at different angles. It’s a rich, imagistic tableau. The book is also divided into different verb tenses (present, imperfect, remote, future), and the style reflects the phases of AnnaTom / TomAnna’s lives. The book is replete with would bes and wills. The shifting verb tenses reflect the precarity of our lives and offer a commentary on our relationship to time in the present day.
I suspect the prime appeal of Latronico’s novel is the commentary it offers on modern life, which cuts both ways. Tom and Anna love their remote jobs…sort of. The isolation isn’t ideal, but they are able to connect with other creatives. At the same time, they obsess over social media and post photos from wherever they are with the express purpose of making other people feel bad about not giving up steady work to travel and operate as creatives. The recurring description of their work as creating slightly-off-centered boxes parallels and critiques Tom and Anna’s frustration of everything being the same: they are creating the uniformity that bores them. But it pays the bills. The book also speaks to the collective ennui of experiences and our need for the new, different, and challenging against the more likely satisfying regularity. Tom and Anna’s sex life exemplifies that experience: they are consistently satisfied by one another, sometimes try to add something new into the routine, but ultimately are not adventurous enough to really push beyond what they know. Even when they attend sex clubs together, they do not venture out of their dyad, grateful that they do not have to take any STD tests.
The end of the book is pretty interesting, too. In the final chapter, Tom and Anna take on managing a hotel. They host a number of clients for a weekend and then are set to restore the rooms to their previous condition. They must retain the image as presented on the website, which is a nice bookend to the first chapter. The reviewer to whom they offered a room publishes the piece with descriptions that they had agreed upon. The question is whether the effort that goes into crafting their lives is truly worth the detriment to the authenticity of their experiences. An open question.
All things considered, Perfection doesn’t quite live up to its namesake, but the thoughtful project is uniquely memorable. It’s part novella-length character study, part commentary on the gig economy and the lives of remote workers, part existential reflection. It is / would be / will be a good book to take on.
Happy reading!
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