Desire and Difference
Review: Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, by Noah Perez
Jade ash trays, a silver fob watch, a horn-handled shaving brush, an oblong mirror in a mahogany frame, a Provençal armchair and all other manner of objects and luxuries glisten in the fantasies of the couple in Georges Perec’s Things. Set and written in the 1960s in a France humming with the flurry of economic change – a resurgent industrial sector, increased trade, an expanded consumer economy (a greater number of things for a greater number of people) – Things trains its sights on our proclivity for dissatisfaction in times of plenty. In his latest novel, Perfection, Italian writer Vincenzo Latronico updates Perec’s classic. Latronco’s first translation into English, Perfection takes Things as a template in both subject and form to tell the story of a similarly afflicted young-creative couple living in Berlin in the 2010s.
We are first introduced to the world of the couple in Perfection by a description of the manicured agency photos of their rented apartment. Walls tastefully distressed and coffee tables gleaming with Taschen books, ‘the combination of turn-of-the-century luxury and raw modern grittiness’, as Latronico puts it, ‘lends a feeling of freedom and decadence, with a hint of eroticism’ to their rental home. It is a scene familiar to a certain class of well-educated artistically-disposed young person. Anna and Tom, whose lives we follow in Perfection, are not tourists to this aesthetic vision; they are both its residents and exponents. Working freelance as graphic designers, their life in Berlin is soft with leisure: gallery openings (contemporary, not retrospective), wine bars (natural, not vintage), food (granola, not bacon), clubbing (techno, not tech-house), drugs (experimentation, not compulsion), sex (loving, not reckless), and coffee (oat, not soy). It is a world ripe with abundance and freedom, a salubrious cocktail of indulgence and hobby.
After a comprehensive enumeration of the contents of the apartment – copies of Monocle, a double mattress resting on a Tatami base, a Herringbone tweed blanket, an exposed lightbulb with a twiddly filament, and so on – we are left with a suggestion of what’s to come. Latronico emphasises that it is the photos, not the home they depict, that speaks of a happy life, an intimation, if somewhat heavy-handed, that the perceived gap between the virtual and actual, or aspiration and reality, will form the subject of the story. Indeed, Anna and Tom struggle to preserve the aesthetic harmony of their home: as if haunted by the platonic ideal of the chic-Berlin-apartment, things just don’t seem to fall in the right place.
Anna and Tom moved to Berlin in their early twenties from an unnamed southern European city whose character is implied to lack the worldliness of their new place of residence. The backdrop of their youth was digital: teenage years spent on Photoshop designing personal web pages to display their precocious taste. By adulthood, they had learnt that ‘individuality manifested itself as a set of visual differences, immediately decodable and in constant need of updating’, and that difference is desirable. The arrival of social media sharpens this. Within the borders of Instagram, a world of self-promotion where username comes paired with a soup of signifiers, options for exhibitions of difference are unending. Of course, this comes to contaminate their offline reality. The engine of desire ceaseless, Anna and Tom’s perfect world begins to fissure.
In their longing to be different, Anna and Tom attempt to swim against the homogenising currents of globalisation. They believe their friends from home to be parochial, too rooted, lacking cosmopolitan sensibilities; but deracinated in Berlin, despite the garb of counter-culture, they helplessly reproduce existing fashions that also pervade the likes of London, Paris and New York. As Latronico observes: ‘the visual points of difference [Anna and Tom] sold to others round the world were also sold to thousands of others by creative professionals all over the western world, an identical struggle for a different life motivated an entire sector of their generation.’ In Perfection, a desire for authenticity – for Anna and Tom, the true vector of meaning – is set against the imperatives of economic and cultural liberalism, a fertile ground for weariness.
When war in the Middle East prompts Germany to take in an unprecedented number of refugees, Anna and Tom, along with many other like-minded Berliners, volunteer to help organise and distribute provisions and resources. It is initially a revelatory moment for them. Having fantasised about watching the fall of the Berlin Wall or participating in the May 1968 protests, they finally get their own confrontation with History. The opportunity to be part of something bigger than oneself, to acquire a concrete identity tethered to the struggle against the injustices of the day, promises the couple a reprieve from the neurosis of self-construction. For all that, Anna and Tom’s noble mission is quickly frustrated by their shared sense of impotence. It becomes clear that distributing tents and translation-manuals lacks the world-historical impact they were pining for. As the fervour of the moment subsides, recognising their self-interested motivations, a full-bodied ennui descends on Anna and Tom. It is a disaffection that exposes an existential precarity, a feeling left unresolved by the novel’s close.
Told in a detached third-person voice, as in Perec’s Things, we are denied access to Anna and Tom’s interiority: there is no dialogue, and the protagonists are treated as a single homogenous unit deprived of specific thoughts and feelings. Needless to say, this is a formal conceit that mirrors the dearth of meaningful identity depicted in the characters. It is as if Anna and Tom exist as placeholders for a disquisition on identity under the conditions of capitalism, a sort of sociological case study. In this regard, they are tragic figures, fated from the outset to service Latronico’s discursive regime. To read this as cynical is not unreasonable: Latronico created hollow contemporary characters precisely to demonstrate the contemporary’s hollowing of character. It is in this sense that Perfection feels almost like an allegory or morality tale.
But is this what the contemporary novel should look like? It seems unlikely that a novel so disinterested in its characters' psychology could capture the experience of life under digital capitalism with its sprawling relationality and befuddling entropy. It would be a mistake, however, to treat Perfection as a stab at a contemporary realist novel, as conventionally understood. Instead, we should take seriously the fact of its indebtedness to Things, insofar as Latronico’s story and structure comes determined. Plausibly, Latronico is insinuating that late (or digital) capitalism is not so different from the postwar industrial capitalism of Perec’s sixties: both modes of capitalism should be understood as the inevitable unfolding of historical forces, expressed by both novels’ hard and purposeful constraints. As in allegory, there is no place for contingency here. If this is how Latronico conceives of our age then, for all intents and purposes, Perfection is realistic, even if departing from realism as genre. In this context, it is a folly to attribute cynicism to Latronico’s story. Perhaps the novel is in fact hopeful: we have no new problem, only the old one.