Perfection

Novel · 120 pages · Paperback · 2025 · Fitzcarraldo Editions

One perfection after another

Scandinavian furniture, a Berber rug, enamel dishes, a monstera, design monographs with their spines aligned. Nobody lives here yet. The apartment that opens Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection is photographed before anyone is shown in it. The objects do the introducing.

They report an education and a diet. Then the listing appears beneath the photographs, with a cleaner, a booking platform, a payment processor and a Berlin city levy behind it. The promised life is for hire. Anna and Tom are assembled from those surfaces, with money and mobility enough to hold another arrangement permanently within reach.

An entire circle discovers fermentation in one week, and each person takes the discovery as their own. Their tastes come from a feed everyone they know is watching. Anna and Tom sell difference. Their trade is websites, layouts, brand identities and interfaces, a habit formed on the personal pages of their adolescence. The novel is specific about the vocabulary, down to the Swiss typefaces and the microinteractions, and Sophie Hughes carries it into the language it came from. Latronico compares the scroll to “walking through the world’s most hectic street market on cocaine”. He tries further analogies and withdraws them as inadequate to something too new to have inherited a comparison.

What Anna and Tom do not see is that their room to reinvent themselves was supplied. Berlin was cheap. A grandfather’s money for a flat deposit topped up Anna’s income, and she never bought the flat. Alex Hyde’s Exhibition tracks that arithmetic through a private income, where failing an art degree costs one friend nothing. Money buys them out of everything except history. The refugee crisis puts it on the ground at Tempelhof and asks for physical work. Nobody there needs a designer. Their German is poor and the beautifully typeset phrasebook lies damp and unused. Later the field is contested land, wanted for public housing. They want it left open.

No dialogue. Almost no thought that belongs to one of them rather than both. Anna and Tom are watched from outside as a single unit. They work together and consume together. The method makes the argument without announcing it. A couple who spend their days asserting distinction are narrated as one social specimen.

Sicily is where the pictures stop working. Not at first. Lisbon promised a beginning and delivered the oat milk of the city they left. In Sicily the house is difficult and the work goes badly. The photographs they post from it stay beautiful, and that gap is the first they can see. Then Anna’s uncle dies and the farmhouse goes to her. The couple who spent years believing themselves self-made are in business on inherited property, and the whole vocabulary goes to work again as a hospitality product. Plants, linen, natural wine, branding, professional photography. The monstera travels with them. The first guests leave stains and laundry behind, and the guest review calls the place exactly like the pictures.

The gentrification passages state a diagnosis that the rental income and the vanishing shops made several pages earlier. The fault grows out of the strength. Speech and separate consciousness are unavailable. The narrator’s one route to naming a contradiction is to name it. Natasha Brown’s Universality has that trouble throughout, analysing debates recognisable from its first pages.

The debt is to Georges Perec. Perfection repays it by knowing what changed. Latronico names Perec in the acknowledgements and takes his epigraph from Things. Perec’s couple wanted the objects, and Latronico’s put theirs up for hire. The Italian title is plural. Le perfezioni names one perfection after another, each available for a while.