"These days, when I meet someone, the first thing I ask is whether they have plans to move to Berlin," says the long-haired Turkish standup comedian popular among the professional and chattering classes. Who, among us, has not lost a friend to Berlin? The author of "Perfection," Vincenzo Latronico, takes this as his starting point and tells us the story of what these friends get up to.
Recognizing that "losing friends to Berlin" is an international phenomenon, the Italian author does not name the warm and sunny country the couple he’s writing about hail from. Latronico starts his novel by describing the couple’s Berlin apartment, which they can afford by not living in it for several months in the year. They periodically go somewhere cheaper and sunnier, like their native country and rent it to other young people who want to get a taste of Berlin. Although the couple depicted in the novel is of a younger generation, I immediately recognize the sparse Berlin chic of the apartment. I may not have left for Berlin (I was beyond the pale, in Heidelberg), but I have German friends who live there, who themselves left their German hometowns to live in Berlin.
The fact that Latronico decides to open the story with a description of the apartment should have prepared me for a novel and a characterization technique that allows the reader to get to know the website designers (sorry, "digital creatives") Anna and Tom only as a product of their time and the circles in which they move. Still, well into midpoint of the novel (it is a very short book) I expected them to speak to us directly, tell us how they were feeling. "They would read culture and lifestyle articles written in that elegant, easy style of Anglophone magazines, which they identified with even as they ridiculed a particularly American obsession with money ... They would crack the same jokes about Winterdepression and the fact that they had never been in West Berlin, even though they all lived between Rixdorf and Kreuzköln." This is the style in which Latronico goes on for pages, and while it alienates us from Anna and Tom, we recognize this lifestyle: consuming ChatGPT-like prose even before its invention and trying to gain cultural capital from living in the ex-communist part of town. "That is not East Berlin, darling, you couldn’t bear it if that was East Berlin," if you don’t mind me appropriating a popular Turkish expression.
"They hadn’t actively chosen their line of work," Latronico says in the beginning, and this seems to seep into every aspect of the couple’s life. They are two people who have left themselves to the currents of the digital age, letting the algorithm and/or international finance decide their next move – digital nomads, in the parlance of the 2010s. As such, Anna and Tom are ciphers and we remain trapped in Latronico’s narration that never lets us get close to them. Latronico prefers to talk about their environment, chronicling the changes they witness in Berlin and their industry. It is fun to tease out the cultural references Latronico peppers the novel with, and which act as a time code: "a famous woman spraying an arc of champagne backwards over her head into a wine glass balanced on her tailbone."
Being a Berlin novel, the book describes succinctly the liberal consensus that has brought us to 2024 and genocide: "Until such time as someone claimed English as theirs, it belonged to everyone ... News and language created a sort of shared ideological koine. They and all their friends belonged to an imprecise political left. They identified as feminists and spoke out against social injustices, which in practice meant they were willing to express outrage at instances of racism or sexism that took place in New York." A whole international class of creative white collar workers who live in their virtual Brooklyn. Latronico then adds the coup de grace to the description: "Like their friends, they were unsure whether to admire Hillary Clinton as a woman or despise her for her ties to the pharmaceutical industry." A kind of liberal imagination that can be against the destruction of the planet and exploiting disease, but not war crimes and genocide. "That ideology is not left, my darling, you couldn’t bear it if it were left-by any stretch of the imagination."
Anna and Tom’s class’s totem America finally comes to Berlin as the ultimate gentrifier. Latronico narrates how the second world digital nomads who gentrified parts of Berlin start to get outpriced by the Americans, whose reign is heralded by the appearance of bedbugs in Berlin. There are many reasons why young professionals from warmer and sunnier climes start to return "home," and Anna and Tom fear this will be their fate too. In the end, after many trials and a pit stop in Portugal, the Berlin to Lisbon pipeline is a real thing- they once again conform to the trend and return to their "home country."
From the “they would” of most of the book, Latronico switches to “they will” in the last section, where he describes Anna and Tom’s plans to open a B&B, giving us the exact timing of an event he’s recounting for the first time in the novel, and letting us know this project of theirs will not bring satisfaction either: "And just like that, they will open. In May 2019, they will welcome their first guests." And just like that, Latronico closes an era and makes his novel an epoch-defining book: from a decade of abundance and freedom of travel to lockdowns and layoffs and more war. So while their smugness and carbon copy lifestyle may have annoyed us from the beginning, there is, in this passage, a pathos: that this manner of living is now at an end. In the final analysis, the novel reads like an elegy for the digital nomad of the years of plenty.
