Anna and Tom are the type of Berlin-based creative professionals who've aestheticized their lives into oblivion. Lush monstera plants, Danish furniture, natural wine—every detail is painstakingly curated. They freelance, they party, they experiment, they post. But as the years pass and gentrification tightens its grip, their lives start to feel like a mood board they can’t escape. The oat milk is the same everywhere, the warehouse parties are blending together, and their vague attempts at political engagement are eclipsed by insecurity.
In Perfection, Vincenzo Latronico skewers the hollowness of curated millennial existence with forensic precision. The Italian author’s first book translated into English, the novel catalogs a life built around taste, where possessions and experiences are meticulously selected yet ultimately meaningless. There’s no dialogue, just a relentless inventory of a couple slowly realizing that they’ve designed themselves into a corner. It’s sharp, bleak, and eerily familiar—because we’ve all met Annas and Toms. Maybe we’ve even been them.
If your book is adapted, what actors do you imagine as Anna and Tom? Ha, this is tough. In the book, I go to extreme lengths in order to say nothing specific about them as individuals. You don’t see their faces, you don’t hear their voices, you don’t know their backgrounds. I wanted to encourage readers to project on them, so they needed to be smooth surfaces. I guess my ideal solution would be to have different actors play them over the course of the movie. I suspect my agent will be unhappy to read this. Let me rephrase: Renate Reinsve, definitely, and a young Jason Schwartzman with a manicured moustache.
What is your favorite time and place to write? Early or very early mornings. I’d like to be that kind of romantic figure writing deep into the night, but I get sleepy.
Did you outline Perfection or wing it or somewhere in between? Perfection came about as a rewriting of Georges Perec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties, and the original’s structure can still be perceived in filigree, especially around the beginning and the end. This acted as a ready-made outline of sorts. It was so liberating to not have to come up with one myself that I keep thinking I should do it again.
What media were you consuming while you wrote this book? I was listening to a lot of ambient music - I have a hard time writing if I hear words. My most-played albums at the time were 76:14 by Global Communication and Grand River’s Blink a Few Times to Clear Your Eyes.
Do you share Anna and Tom’s eye for aesthetics? Is your living space perfectly designed? To a certain extent I do, or at least I’d like to. When I wrote Perfection I was living out of a suitcase in a sublet in Berlin, one in a long string of sublets, and started each day by browsing with increasing dispiritedness listings for rentals I couldn’t afford. I guess there is a measure of wish fulfillment in the detail of my description of Anna and Tom’s apartment. Sometimes I ask myself if this makes the arc of the novel a kind of revenge fantasy.
What is the best writing advice you’ve ever received? When I was 17, I interned at a publishing house through a program ran by the public high school I was attending, and I had the chance to meet Umberto Eco. I asked him what I should study in college if I wanted to be a writer, and he said “Anything that requires very little effort and time, because you’ll need time to read.” I don’t know if that counts as writing advice. Also Joan Didion’s “Careful drinks at careful hours,” which as I’m editing this answer looking for a source turns out to have actually been about meals. No matter. Both versions are true.
Where’s your dream writing retreat? A house in the forest perched on the cliffs of the coast of Catalunya. It’s called Sanià and I spent a month there in 2024. I was very lucky.
What’s a book that made you want to write? I spent my childhood and early teens only reading comic books, in a slightly obsessive way. In one of my favorites, called Gunnm, a sequence featured lyrics from an album by the Alan Parsons Project, which made me look them up at the library (at 15! Quite absurd in retrospect) and get obsessed with them, which eventually made me look up the book they had based one of their albums on - Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. I read it through a whole afternoon and by evening I knew that something had happened that would shape much of the course of my life.
What’s your relationship to self-promotion? Like flying in Peter Pan. I can only do it gracefully if I’m unaware that I’m doing it, which means I very seldom manage to. But I try, Anna. I’m trying now.
Have you noticed a difference in how English-speaking audiences are receiving this book versus Italian readers? How about in Berlin? It’s not out in the US at the time we’re talking, but feedback from the UK has been exceedingly good in this first week after publication, better than in any other country, which of course points to much of the credit going to my incredible translator Sophie Hughes, and to the publishers, rather than to the book per se. In Italy the reception was lukewarm except for a very small but also rather passionate niche - in many ways the lifestyle I describe is quite rare there. In Berlin, where that lifestyle is commonplace, the reception was below freezing.
What’s one word to describe what you’re working on now? Lies.
