Drew Basile writes: Susan Sontag writes in On Photography that ‘the practice of photography is now identified with the idea that everything in the world could be made interesting through the camera’. If photographs capture life, Sontag warns that they also flatten it. Mundane details transform into nuanced objects of aesthetic contemplation, but the real grist of life shrinks to that same banality. There’s not much to say about life in pictures – it’s interesting, indistinct, aesthetic (not beautiful) in a vague sort of way which reflects more on the photographer than the photo. Life in pictures becomes ‘a department store … in which every subject is depreciated into an article of consumption’. Sontag is especially evocative here. In a world of interesting pictures, we are ‘tourists of reality’.
Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection is first and foremost a novel of images. Published in Italian in 2020, the novel debuted in English translation earlier this year. Like many before him, Latronico extends this critique of photography to the social media era. In Perfection, pictures sell life. The novel tracks expat couple Tom and Anna as they work, scroll Instagram and take drugs in Berlin. Not much happens in Perfection. Tom and Anna are one character; they have no inner lives and are differentiated from each other only when absolutely necessary (that is when having sex). Neither speaks. Instead, the couple serve as a barometer for the Berlin zeitgeist between 2000 and 2020. Their feelings and problems are the problems of the time, and Perfection is an image of Berlin.
Images are important for Latronico, and he’s at his best as a writer when dealing with tangible material environments. Tom and Anna parallel him as image-workers. They’re freelance graphic designers, decorating the nascent Web with Scandinavian minimalist templates. They also rely on subleasing their apartment as a lucrative base of capital, and this apartment exists on the Internet as a better version of the couple. Perfection opens with a meticulous description of the apartment drawn from its online listings, and Latronico demonstrates early on his knack for building out the material feel of the novel. ‘There is only one picture of the bathroom, which has a single slit window but is nonetheless bright, thanks to all the reflective surfaces. A lush trailing ivy drapes itself across the window from the curtain pole, picking out the dazzling green of the mosaic floor tiles, which also run up the side of the inset bath.’ These precise descriptions aren’t especially pyrotechnic, but they are well-wrought object lessons that exemplify Perfection’s debt to Georges Perec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965). Crisp images and bijou objects come together to represent completion and perfection (The life promised by these images is clear and purposeful, uncomplicated.’). Sontag resurfaces as a useful reference. Pictures in Perfection sell not just a nice apartment, but an aestheticised world, available for easy consumption via short-term leases and social media.
It goes without saying that perfection isn’t real. The ideal Berlin apartment is a curated aesthetic designed to maintain Tom and Anna’s digital nomad lifestyle. But reality always threatens to confound its neat simulacra. ‘Before leaving Berlin,’ for instance, Tom and Anna ‘would devote several hours to taming reality to make it fit the images they had sold.’ Latronico performs the reverse manoeuvre. Perfection is a loose series of set pieces, wherein inconvenient realities deflate the formless exhilaration of life in Berlin. Tom and Anna revel in the gritty atmosphere of East Berlin, even though they live in West Berlin. They disdain gentrification, even though they are gentrifiers. They pause their jobs to assist refugees during the migrant crisis, even though they know they can’t help in any meaningful way. They go to sex clubs for the thrill of promiscuity but leave because they feel awkward. Latronico patiently sketches the Euro-Yuppie vibe of life in Berlin, only to hint at this vibe’s déraciné lack of substance.
This might all sound familiar. Between Perfection’s Italian publication in 2020 and its English translation in 2025, many of its best insights have become critical commonplaces. Jobs are unstructured. Everything costs more money. There’s no difference between the public and private. The authentic Instagram lifestyle is actually the product of a spectral multinational capitalism, the pictures on social media concealing ‘the fee to cover the Ukrainian cleaner, paid through a French gig economy company that files its taxes in Ireland; plus the commission for the online hosting platform, with offices in California but tax-registered in the Netherlands …’ This sentence keeps going, and it recalls Rachel Kushner’s much-ridiculed assertion in Creation Lake that ‘the real Europe is a borderless network of supply and transport’. These asides sound worldly and cool, sufficiently removed and intellectual to reflect back positively on the author, but they’re also not very insightful. In Perfection, Latronico adheres to a well-worn path of online social criticism that would’ve seemed trite five years ago and certainly rings hollow today.
At its worst then, Perfection peddles a reheated critique of globalism and staid observations about atomised contemporary culture. Latronico does deserve some credit for recognising that photographic images are the best medium for explaining this alienated condition. Photos shorten the world into a single frame, a uniform visibility, a universal objectification. But Perfection stumbles precisely because it subscribes to this same image-based logic. Latronico offers us views of the present which are toothless and tastefully ironic. Perfection is interesting in the way that photographs are interesting for Sontag. It gives us something to think about (what exactly?). It reminds us of our own lives. It homogenises the world into a general aesthetic, a kind of universal vibe, and this homogenisation gives Berlin an uncanny feel, but it also makes picking out what’s wrong with the modern world into a nearly impossible task. If Perfection prioritises capturing the feel of alienated modern life, then the novel itself equally feels unreal and insubstantial. It’s one long stream of social-media-inspired tropes which might elicit some nods but won’t provide food for thought. Perfection is merely interesting, and not much else.
Of course, Latronico’s novel is still well-crafted on a technical level, and it’s a reassuring reminder that, yeah, we’re all feeling a bit anomic. To give Perfection its due, the novel anticipates some of these criticisms. It clearly positions itself as both the product and expression of global capitalism and our image-based culture. Expats like Tom and Anna flock to Berlin in the early 2000s chasing a real and authentic cosmopolitanism. For Latronico, this moment epitomises a kind of End-of-History irenicism: ‘the collective upheaval of the twentieth-century was over and the vestiges had been translated into the language of individualism—that is of consumerism’.” Liberalism has won out, and Berlin – as the unique battleground between East and West, between capitalism and communism – becomes the archetypal playground for a new kind of hyper-consumerist and globalised knowledge-work. Unmoored from their local cultures and ungrounded by conventional jobs, Tom and Anna seek fulfilment in images, representations of what life should be like. They ‘spent much of their first year in Berlin carefully constructing this mythology’, an ethos of MDMA and sleek cafes and Instagrammable vistas, cultivating a picture-perfect aesthetic which would signal ‘the admission stamp into a community bound by shared reality, or quasi-reality’. This quasi-reality is in part the Internet—specifically, the economic freedom and unlimited consumption unleashed by the Internet—and in part the disappearance of history, or the replacement of Cold War conflict with a nebulous future of boundless possibility. At the End of History, work becomes play, life becomes consumption, and the real world is a representation of anything you want it to be.
Eventually though, reality intrudes. In the late 2010s, Tom and Anna are priced out. Berlin catches up to them, ‘as if reality were fighting back to reassert its superiority’. Their Yuppie paradise is revealed to be the product of distinct historical trends, and the spatial and temporal limitlessness of Berlin proves to have hard and firm boundaries. Tom and Anna decide to travel, to seek authenticity elsewhere. Nomadic life is disappointing, however. They bounce from Portugal to Sicily back to Berlin. They’re too old to drift between house parties like before. Wherever they chance on the glimmers of authenticity, their first instinct is to take pictures, but these chances are rare, and more often than not, the photos are deceiving. Tom and Anna become increasingly disenchanted by the image: ‘Back in the day,’ Latronico writes in an important paragraph, ‘looking at images like those and knowing how frustrated and unhappy they had been when they took them made them feel ashamed, deficient, as if the reality presented in the photos should somehow be capable of triumphing over how they really felt, and that their inability to enjoy such a desirable life revealed a flaw in their character. They had outgrown this insecurity. Now those images just seemed like a con.’ Reality is disorderly and messy. Life sucks, and images are lies to make you feel better. Pictures let you project a better and happier life to the world. Again, these aren’t particularly striking insights, but Latronico’s skill is portraying the corrosive force of this image-culture. Social media seeps into every aspect of life, and Latronico shows how pictures tie happiness to impossible aesthetic ideals.
Perfection ends abruptly. Tom and Anna inherit a nice house in the country. They move from Berlin and convert this house into a boutique hotel. They use their social media skills to market the hotel as an influencer’s paradise, an idyllic world of trellised vine, seaside breeze, and lots of avocados and orange juices. (Houseplants and avocados are everywhere in this novel, two readymade symbols from social media inspo posts). Where once they aspired for community and authenticity, the deception of the image teaches Tom and Anna to pursue profit instead, since it’s all really about money deep down. They game the algorithms with staged photos and buy botted likes to promote their posts. Similarly, while the hotel was initially intended as a home base for Anna’s family and friends, Tom and Anna monetise these relationships. ‘There will be no reason those friends cannot instead be paying guests,’ they reason. Before, Tom and Anna craved perfection and authenticity. Now they’ve given up those dreams. They produce perfection for profit, and the novel ends as they reap the rewards of their world-making. Early reviews are good: ‘It’s all completely perfect, the story will say. It’s just like it is in the pictures.’
There are a couple different types of nihilism threading Perfection’s conclusion. First, the gig-working Millennial generation can only find stability and grounding through inherited property, not through their own efforts. A boundless and shapeless world of possibility yields few footholds for Millennials to find their bearings. Second, wayfaring expatriates like Tom and Anna will eventually return to their home communities and import that same globalised and gentrified style. The whole world is hollowed out for Instagram likes and boho chic. Third, Tom and Anna recognise that there’s nothing real behind images. Or rather, anything real in images is nasty and bitter, like the shocking photos of a drowned migrant they encounter halfway through the novel.
There’s a deeper crisis of representation here, which affects both Tom and Anna as well as Latronico. It’s a doubt about art, about art’s power to feel real and authentic in a time inimical to authenticity. A time when authenticity itself has been commoditised. Aesthetic representations sell perfection, and even flawed representations are flawed in the right way, to connote depth, nuance, and nostalgia. Perfection attempts the same trick. Its ironic jibes are half-hearted. It always makes the safe choice, aesthetically speaking, either by zeroing in on tropey details or offering pabulary social critiques. Perfection is guaranteed to go down easy, because it takes on the unchallenging vacuity of the world it pictures. If there’s no alternative to commodified authenticity, then the lesson from Tom and Anna is that you might as well make some money.
Latronico sells an unvarnished snapshot of modern life, but Perfection is ultimately limited by its single-minded commitment to such barren aesthetics. We’re left with a novel which is merely interesting, a book that provokes flat recognition but doesn’t inspire any real feeling or thought. The moral seems to be that life is all about money, careerist style, and denuded affect, and Perfection assimilates these values, even under the ostensible cover of critique. But neglected here is a more expansive notion of art, a sense of literature as both productive and enriching, of the novel as authentic rather than merely interesting. At a trim 113 pages, Perfection is unambitious and eminently digestible, and it just landed on the long-list for the International Booker Prize. But I, for one, am tired of interesting novels. I’m tired of books with nothing to say. I’m certainly tired of perfection.
14/7/2025
Drew Basile is a Barry Scholar at the University of Oxford, where he is pursuing a Master’s in both English Literature and Intellectual History.
