They Really Love Their Twee Life in Berlin

Aaron Labaree reviews Vincenzo Latronico’s novel “Perfection,” translated by Sophie Hughes.

By Aaron LabareeApril 11, 2025

• Fiction

WE NEVER FIND OUT what Anna and Tom, the protagonists of Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, look like. In a way, though, the author paints their portrait in the first pages when he describes the couple’s kitchen:

Open shelves are lined with blue and white enamel dishes and mason jars filled with rice, grains, coffee, spices. Cast-iron pans and olive wood ladles hang from a wall-mounted steel bar. Out on display on the worktop are a brushed steel kettle, a Japanese teapot and a bright red blender. […] They are lit by an accordion wall-light mounted between a botanical lithograph of an araucaria and a reproduction print of a British wartime poster.

Anna and Tom are quintessential “creatives” of the mid-2010s, and their apartment is a kind of climaxed ecosystem of 2014 millennial taste: sleek, clean, faintly Nordic. Carefully curated but not flashy. If you’ve scrolled through Airbnb, if you’ve been to a coffee shop in Brooklyn—really, if you’ve ever been on Instagram—you’re familiar with this streamlined style. You may find it comforting. More likely, at this point, you may find it a little bland. You may think you’re sick of it. You may think so, but you’re not really sick of Instagram visual culture, of ficus plants and reclaimed wood tables and sans serif fonts, until you’ve read Perfection—which portrays these frictionless, aspirational aesthetics as not just banal and repetitive but also sinister, like a spell that enchanted a generation.

Latronico’s novel tells the story of this enchantment—and the subsequent disenchantment—through the experiences of Anna and Tom, young freelance designers. Feeling stifled by their provincial life in an unnamed city in Southern Europe, the couple moves to Berlin to get a taste of freedom and cosmopolitanism. There, they establish themselves quickly and experience the bohemian glamour of the city to its full. All their friends work in creative fields and their lives revolve around gallery openings, raves, and clubs; their weekends “would start on Saturday mornings and run into the following afternoon.” Their spacious, plant-filled Altbau apartment becomes a symbol of their success and happiness.

If all this sounds a little generic, it’s meant to. Perfection, first published in Italian in 2022 and now translated into English by Sophie Hughes, is a faithful adaptation of Georges Perec’s 1968 novel Things: A Story of the Sixties (published in 1965 as Les Choses and translated into English by Helen Lane three years later). Like its model, Perfection’s approach is entirely sociological. Anna and Tom are not fully fleshed-out characters: they’re composites, ideal representations of Europeans of their generation and class. They have no perceptible inner life, almost no distinguishing qualities, and not a single interest or passion that is not shared by every one of their peers. Most of the novel is written in the past habitual tense: “They would go for walks on endless summer evenings and freezing winter mornings when the blinding sunlight would reflect off the fresh snow. They would gaze up in awe at the vast and changeable northern sky, so different from the one under which they had grown.”

This kind of narration could get old very quickly, but Latronico moves the story along briskly. Most importantly, he maintains a perfectly neutral tone. In other hands, Anna and Tom might make easy targets for satire, but Latronico declines to take any shots at them directly. Instead, as the story goes on, the two appear strangely sympathetic. They’re innocents. They really love their twee life in Berlin: their curated apartment, their elaborate, Instagram-ready meals, their pan-European friends and the Americanized culture they share. Also, they love each other. Perhaps their one distinguishing feature is that they are unusually happy as a couple. Their sex life is gentle and routine, and their ventures into Berlin’s sex scene never go far; tellingly, they find themselves more attracted to the tasteful design of Berlin’s sex shops than anything on the shelves.

Anna and Tom’s online life is just as mild. For them, the internet isn’t a cauldron of envy, insecurity, and status-seeking but “a deluge of beauty.” The best chapter of Perfection is a kind of poetic essay about the internet as it existed in about 2014. Latronico perfectly captures the weightless pleasures of a past online life, the infinite variety of tame, albeit nonnutritive treats on offer. In 2025, internet usage is typically considered numbing and depressing (the phrase “doomscrolling” was popularized in 2020), but here it’s serene, beatific, offering a perspective akin to the way angels might view the world: “A man went around filming first kisses. A plane vanished en route to Beijing. A woman was beautiful. An apartment full of plants was beautiful. A vegan quiche was beautiful. A child needed money for chemo. Time disappeared.”

With protagonists this innocuous, you can’t help rooting for them even while suspecting that they have been created in order to go to their doom. Indeed, paradise doesn’t last; rents go up and friends move away as the next wave of gentrification floods the city. Sensing that their lives need a little purpose, the couple tries to become involved in relief work during the European refugee crisis of 2015. But, just as Perec wrote of his own protagonists, Jerôme and Sylvie, who work in marketing, Latronico cautions that Anna and Tom’s job as freelance designers is “not exactly a trade nor quite a profession.” They don’t know how to do anything useful; they can’t help the refugees. It’s downhill from there. The second half of the book is a chronicle of the pair’s disappointments and humiliations as they’re slowly but inexorably ejected from their youthful Eden in Berlin. It’s surprisingly affecting. Blurbs and promotional copy for Perfection describe it as satire and mention the book’s “wry humour.” I don’t know—maybe it’s funny in Italian. I didn’t laugh once. Instead, I felt a sense of increasing claustrophobia and dread watching the heroes try again and again to get some foothold even while, every time, they find themselves swindled or let down or having arrived just a year or two too late.

Despite their dopey conformism, Anna and Tom are all too relatable. It’s unlikely that many readers will fail to identify with at least some aspect of their meticulously cultivated taste—or, at the very least, the desire for it. Yet as the book goes on, the consumerism that defines Tom and Anna’s lives begins to look less desirable and more oppressive. The ubiquitous houseplants that at first suggested ease and luxury now seem to symbolize the generation that tended them: passive, inoffensive, populated by individuals indistinguishable from their peers. In the end, a deus ex machina saves these two souls from sacrifice to the god of capitalism. A lucky break allows them to start a business. After spending their youth as unknowing marks of the internet, they grow up and get in on the con themselves. But a feeling of failure and futility remains.

It’s interesting to compare Perfection to its French inspiration. In Things, Jerôme and Sylvie are less sympathetic and more materialistic. They come from lower-middle-class backgrounds, worship objects, and want to be rich; Perec writes that “they would cross all of Paris to see an armchair they’d been told was just perfect.” Tom and Anna, two generations younger, sit a couple of rungs higher on the socioeconomic ladder, and, despite their carefully chosen possessions, what they really worship—in archetypal internet-era fashion—are images of the good life. Still, what’s striking is how recognizable the world of Things still is: marketing, luxury goods, the lust for objects, status-seeking. Partly, it’s that these things are timeless; partly, it’s that the postwar boom that turbocharged them lasted decades. In contrast, the more recent era of Perfection—the agreeable, bloodless culture of the Obama years—feels a little niche. If Latronico’s adaptation has a weakness, it’s that the moment it captures was so short that you almost have to squint to put yourself back there. Already, the bourgeois, would-be bohemian paradise of Anna and Tom’s apartment seems less chic than it did when the book first came out in Italian three years ago. That “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster—how embarrassing! The words “Donald Trump” and “TikTok” do not, of course, appear in a narrative set in 2014. The hipsters in Anna and Tom’s circle “belonged to an imprecise political left. They identified as feminists and spoke out against social injustices.” Those were the days: full of vague optimism and “The Future Is Female” tote bags (can’t say I’ve seen one of those in a while).

Perfection is an accomplished, though dispiriting, book. There are limits to how entertaining a novel this impersonal can be; occasionally, the writing threatens to be as bland as the world it describes. Ultimately, though, it succeeds because Latronico sticks to his chosen track and doesn’t try to do too much. At 136 pages, the book is exactly the right length: just long enough for Latronico to methodically guide his characters to their fate. The effect of reading the story is akin to watching a perfectly average chess player lose—accordingly quickly—to a much better one, move by calculated move, until the inevitable checkmate. In this way, Perfection is a sharp portrait of a time of political complacency, curated consumerism, and the growth of an algorithmic omniculture. I wonder how it will read in the years to come, as all of this is swiftly replaced by something worse.