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A review by chrisbiss
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico
3.5
I've never felt so completely nailed to the ground by a novel as I did by this short tale of a pair of elder millennials who accidentally fall into their careers simply by being of exactly the right age to take advantage of the rise of Web 2.0 and social media, only to have to deal with the fact that their bubble is bursting in their late 30s and they have no idea how to adapt to that change.
There's a sense of real jaded disillusionment and dissatisfaction here. It's a portrait of a world and culture becoming sanitised and commodified, flattened by a vision of "perfection" presented in Instagram reels and #sponsored captions, all rendered through the eyes of those who benefited from it and helped make it happen. I felt distinctly anxious and uncomfortable as I watched the perfect life Anna and Tom had built slowly tarnish around them, unable to ignore the parallels with my own life and my own anxieties about my future. I don't think it's an accident that the novel ends with a fluke windfall that sets the two main characters up for a future they've entirely failed to plan for - something that I think many people of my generation can sympathise with dreaming about.
What's most interesting to me here is the fact that we never hear anybody speak and never see any real interaction between characters. Everything is narrated to us secondhand, as something that's already happened, in a way that makes reading this feel a lot like experiencing someone's life through social media highlights. It's a fascinating approach to the subject matter and one that I think works really well.
This is really a novel about the end of an era, the crumbling of an age of excess where anything felt possible, the slow pulling back of the curtain on a golden age to reveal the tarnished subsurface. In some ways it feels like a modern version of <i>The Great Gatsby</i> - and that seems fitting, given that this English translation is arriving exactly a century after that novel.
Thank you to Fitzcarraldo Editions for the ARC of this novel. I liked it a lot and I'll be thinking about it for a while.
There's a sense of real jaded disillusionment and dissatisfaction here. It's a portrait of a world and culture becoming sanitised and commodified, flattened by a vision of "perfection" presented in Instagram reels and #sponsored captions, all rendered through the eyes of those who benefited from it and helped make it happen. I felt distinctly anxious and uncomfortable as I watched the perfect life Anna and Tom had built slowly tarnish around them, unable to ignore the parallels with my own life and my own anxieties about my future. I don't think it's an accident that the novel ends with a fluke windfall that sets the two main characters up for a future they've entirely failed to plan for - something that I think many people of my generation can sympathise with dreaming about.
What's most interesting to me here is the fact that we never hear anybody speak and never see any real interaction between characters. Everything is narrated to us secondhand, as something that's already happened, in a way that makes reading this feel a lot like experiencing someone's life through social media highlights. It's a fascinating approach to the subject matter and one that I think works really well.
This is really a novel about the end of an era, the crumbling of an age of excess where anything felt possible, the slow pulling back of the curtain on a golden age to reveal the tarnished subsurface. In some ways it feels like a modern version of <i>The Great Gatsby</i> - and that seems fitting, given that this English translation is arriving exactly a century after that novel.
Thank you to Fitzcarraldo Editions for the ARC of this novel. I liked it a lot and I'll be thinking about it for a while.