Many book reviews today begin with an “I”. The scene is set through a personal anecdote, evoking an atmosphere of chatty intimacy. The reviewer’s experience will eventually cede the stage to the discussion of a recently published book that grapples with a similar theme or experience. This will furnish the review with its focus, but it is the critic’s familiarity with the topic, established in the personal opener, that will structure the piece and lend it authenticity. Seduced by the confessional register, the reader will find themselves immersed in the overlaps between a book and a life.

Embedded in the milieu of Vincenzo Latronico’s novel Perfection, I could start this piece with some anecdotes from my own early days as an expat in Berlin. I could describe my inability to discern the East from the West, or the registered-delivery complaints, addressed to me by neighbours, bemoaning the decibel-levels of my speaking voice and footfall. Alternatively, I could share the low-stakes dissonance of my heritage: Italian, like Latronico and—presumably—his southern European protagonists, Anna and Tom; but also British and anglophone, like the hegemonic cultural market that has ratified, with this year’s translation and International Booker shortlisting, Latronico’s international relevance as a writer. Finally, I could situate the novel’s engagement with a generational crisis of meaning in my own millennial delays in adulting, chains of iterative disillusionment, and nostalgia for a more wholesome, pre-social media world. More than my degrees in literature or childhood spent writing instead of socialising, the above would attest to the authority of my perspective.

Of course, my own privileged struggles—as a thirty-something expat, precariously underemployed in embattled literature departments that I commute to via dysfunctional rail networks from a rent-protected apartment in Berlin—play their part in my interest in Perfection, and explain why I, like many, found it “triggering.” But sustained engagement with the book and its journey—from Bompiani, via Fitzcarraldo and New York Review Books, to the International Booker shortlist—invites critical reflection on the commerce of authenticity in today’s literary markets, in which these kinds of confessional openers participate. At the same time, Latronico’s success suggests, I think, that you can critique something and get away with buying into it, as long as you do so winkingly.

Choosing

Heralded as the definitive representation of millennial angst, Perfection tells the story of a couple’s move from an unnamed southern European country to Berlin in the early 2000s. Propelling them is the search for a more meaningful life beyond the strictures of what is pithily described as “another generation’s script,” or what boomer parents expect should come easily to their kids. This leads them from Berlin to an unnamed region of their country of origin via Lisbon and Sicily, in a self-perpetuating loop of projection, idealisation, and disillusionment that, at the book’s conclusion, only looks set to continue. The narrative voice spares no one, but it’s the residual empathy with the protagonists’ delusions that makes its ruthlessness all the more effective. Outlining Anna’s and Tom’s heavily curated existence across what turn out to be largely interchangeable locales, it charts the protagonists’ increasingly desperate struggle to come to terms with the gap between reality and its images: the titular realm of (mostly online) perfection.