Book Review: ‘Perfection,’ by Vincenzo Latronico

Anna and Tom are referred to by a collective pronoun, “they,” representing at once a couple and an “invented community” of expats. Latronico, in a translation from the Italian by Sophie Hughes, makes heavy use of the conditional tense (“they would remember the supermarkets, closed on Sundays, their client calls scheduled for Monday, the work due by Friday”) to describe their activities, highlighting both their generic character and their evanescence. Anna and Tom slowly learn, to their peril, that a lifestyle, no matter how “curated” and “rarefied,” does not a life make, and that cosmopolitanism without politics is a dead end.

Anna and Tom’s social circle is drawn from countries around the continent, with the notable exception of Germany. Like all invented communities, it is structurally unstable. People leave after their first experience of Berlin’s bleak winters. They get job offers or fellowships in other cities. They develop drug addictions or have children. Or they simply miss home more than they expected. Every spring, a new crop of expats, most of them just as transitory, blooms in their place.

Their common culture is made not in Germany, but online. Anna and Tom use all the platforms — Instagram for work, Facebook to keep in touch, Twitter for infotainment — and “they would often end up discussing things they had seen online, which was to say somewhere else in the world, which usually meant in California or New York.” The “intellectual horizon” they share with their fellow Belgians or Poles or Italians is “largely formed from headlines in The Guardian or The New York Times.” As a result, “Barack Obama’s speeches and high school shootings existed far more vividly than the laws passed just a few U-Bahn stations away, or the refugees drowning two hours’ flight south.”

Trouble arrives in 2014 with the first large wave of Americans and Brits, who can more authentically lay claim to the language and culture Anna and Tom scroll through. Along with them comes a familiar litany of complaints: rising rents, evictions, housing shortages, price spikes and social homogeneity, as their friends’ art spaces are taken over by people with degrees from Bard and Goldsmiths.

When the refugee crisis — along with the sovereign debt crisis, the most significant political event in post-unification German history — comes to a head the following year, Anna and Tom are finally moved to participate in some other aspect of city life than its arts and culture scenes, only to discover that their shaky German and graphic-design skills render their well-meaning presence at humanitarian aid shelters more of a nuisance than a help. Soon, like so many of their acquaintances before them, they cast an exploratory glance at the exit: first to Lisbon (another sociologically accurate throw of the dart) and then to Sicily.