Within a few months since its release, Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection had sold, according to its author, about three times the number of copies it sold in two years in Italy. Originally published by Bompiani under the title Le perfezioni in 2022, the book was listed as one of the twelve finalists for the prestigious Strega Award in 2023, but its popularity increased after the English translation was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize this year. At this point it would not be an overstatement to say that Perfection is one of the most internationally discussed Italian novels since Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. But unlike Ferrante’s books, Perfection differs significantly from the international readership’s presumptions about “Italian literature.” What, then, enabled its success abroad? And what does this say about the state of Italian literature and its relationship with the Anglophone world?

In 2024, Italy was invited as the guest of honor at the Frankfurter Buchmesse, but the story of the Italian pavilion turned out to be a rather messy affair, as the Meloni government somehow managed to exclude one of the most read Italian authors in Germany, Roberto Saviano, who was then personally invited by the Buchmesse director, Jürgen Boos. As Lara Ricci pointed out in an article published in Il Sole 24 Ore, the Italian pavilion was mostly empty, and the country seemed unable to promote its literature. In part, she explains, this is due to practical and financial difficulties: Italian institutions generally allocate less funding for translations than in other countries; the allocation process is slower and more complicated; foreign translators applying for funding must often go through the mediation of Italian publishing houses during the application process, penalizing small and medium-sized publishers.

On the other hand, difficulties arise from a market that has been built around a certain image of Italy, with the joint collaboration between foreign buyers and Italian sellers, as Latronico himself recently noted in an article for The Guardian. Italy is first and foremost a brand, and its most exported product is the image of a certain hedonistic southern European holiday lifestyle, replete with well-dressed people, good food, good weather, nostalgic old men and passionate young women. This commodifiable version of Italian culture also determines, of course, the kind of narratives Italy usually exports, since the export of goods goes hand in hand with the export of images and is often preceded and supported by it.

The Italian Expat Novel

The success of a novel like Perfection, which does not appeal to any of these exportable narratives, is therefore worthy of attention: indeed, Perfection includes so few stereotypical Italian elements that it could hardly be recognized as a work originally written in Italian, were it not for the name of its author. The story of Anna and Tom, millennials and digital nomads emigrating in Berlin in the early 2000s from the province of an unspecified “southern European city,” and of their aimless disappointment with the German capital as it becomes increasingly gentrified, resonated with many readers across the globe as a parable of upper-class millennial disillusionment.

Latronico is not alone, however: a wave of Perfection-like works has been on the rise in Italy for some years now, to the point that a recent a recent article on Rivista Studio described the Italian “expat novel” almost as a new literary genre. Narratives of displacement, career nomadism and precariousness, have made their way into Italian literature, given that emigration among the young has been a growing phenomenon for years, due mostly to the lack of work opportunities (about 20% of Italian youth are unemployed).

The “expat novel,” then, including, among others, works such as Spatriati by Mario Desiati and Strangers I Know by Claudia Durastanti, reflects on a certain experience of mobility that seems to be common to at least part of the Italian millennial generation. An interesting feature of these novels is that they often interrogate the relationship between Italian culture and the dominant Anglophone culture. The leap between countries, in fact, forces one to situate the duality between cultural centers and peripheries on an international scale: characters no longer migrate from countryside provinces to big cities within their own country, as they had in many twentieth-century European novels. Now, they hop between national cultures and, more importantly, between languages. This is particularly true of Perfection, in which cultural and linguistic shifts are so thematically central that the book could be considered a case study of the topic: not only do Anna and Tom move between countries; they are also forced, within the hub of allegedly multicultural Berlin, to experience firsthand how some cultures hold more cultural capital than others.