Reflections on Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico with Ross.

Sometimes, a book speaks, or reads, so deeply and fundamentally to your own thoughts and feelings that it is as if the author themselves has somehow, without your conscious awareness, plucked the top of your head off and peered down into the neuronic tangle now revealed, only to present you with your own thoughts expressed with more clarity and articulated with greater nuanced eloquence that you could ever muster. It is at once a thrilling, exposing and humbling experience and one of the true delights of reading.

Towards the end of this month, I found myself, unexpectedly but ecstatically, in this tryptic conflict on reading Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico and translated by Sophie Hughes. Having become aware of this title after its International Booker Longlist nomination several weeks before and, given the weight of the Fitzcarraldo publishing house behind it, I expected good things. The hook had been baited and cast. After reading a blurb that promised an examination of millennial life across several decades in Berlin, through the lens of a couple and their existential reflections, I was poised, ready to bite. By the final paragraph of page 5, there was no escape.

I find it difficult to describe exactly what it is I loved about this novel, or perhaps novella as the story doesn’t exceed 120 pages. This struggle is not present because I don’t know what I liked about it: the writing is expertly crafted and interesting, the translation is seamless and the themes of social media, home and purpose are both poignant and beautifully explored. Rather, I am finding it difficult to put into words how the many different aspects of this brilliant story come together synergistically to create something bigger than the simple sum of their parts. A story can be well written and translated artfully and tackle themes universal in appeal, all of which Perfection does, but there is an ephemeral quality to this book that was both the reason I love it so much and, also, why I can’t write about it.

Such an indescribably quality is, without doubt, in part a product of me as the reader. Coming to this book at an age similar to the protagonists in a world playing out the consequences of the previous decades they occupy, I saw fragments of myself within the pages. The thoughts of purpose, that existential creep of self-doubt and worry for an uncertain future have all resonated through me and played out in my relationships. Through Anna and Tom, our archetype of the millennium, I saw a version of myself that was terrifying to witness.

I realise in what I have written so far, I have not exactly sold this book for its gripping plot or thrilling, tense action but that is because it is not that kind of book. It is a book about a completely normal couple living a completely normal life, asking themselves completely normal, if unruly and existential, questions that each of us has thought when looking in the mirror, or when walking the streets and allowed our brains to wonder. It is a completely normal story told in an extraordinary way that captures the farce and maddening overwhelm that has become quotidian in our contemporary age.

Perfection is a book to feel, to become lost in only to have to work your way back from but on doing so you soon see you cannot come back to reality the same as you left it; you cannot return to your pre-Perfection self. It is vital, vital reading for the times we live in. I implore you to take the plunge.