Millennial expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin, in a bright, plant-filled apartment in Neukèolln. They are young digital creatives, freelancers without too many constraints. They have a passion for food, progressive politics, sexual experimentation, and Berlin's twenty-four-hour party scene. Their ideal existence is also that of an entire generation, lived out on Instagram, but outside the images they create for themselves, dissatisfaction and ennui burgeon. Their work as graphic designers becomes repetitive. Friends move back home, have children, grow up. An attempt at political activism during the refugee crisis proves fruitless. And in that picture-perfect life Anna and Tom feel increasingly trapped, yearning for an authenticity and a sense of purpose that seem perennially just out of their grasp.
Latronico’s conceit is clever and will delight anyone familiar with his source material, but his execution is ingenious ... His novel’s agility in English owes much to its talented translator, Sophie Hughes ... His novel is greater than the sum of its cunning substitution of signifiers.
Latronico is biting and withering, a funny critic of certain habits of mind and social conventions, which works especially well for the Berlin expat set ... What’s notable about Latronico’s experiment is that by borrowing Perec’s mode of caricature — exporting it into the present — he shows something universal about generations and their anxieties.
Trenchant ... The strength of Perfection is that it never succumbs to the temptation of ridiculing its protagonists ... Remains an insider’s critique: a young, left-wing European’s view of what was probably the high-water mark of European cultural integration.
