Vincenzo Latronico: Perfection

 

There’s a particular kind of fatigue that sets in after your fifth pour-over of the day, while Spotify cues up the same washed-out ambient techno you swore you discovered before it was cool. Your linen shirt, perfectly wrinkled; your life, less so. You scroll through an Instagram feed so curated it might as well be a concept museum, and yet—somewhere between the Moka pot and the mid-century modern ottoman—you feel… nothing.

Welcome to Perfection, Vincenzo Latronico’s slyly brilliant autopsy of millennial aspiration, aesthetic overkill, and the quiet spiritual rot that comes from having everything and feeling nothing. It’s the literary equivalent of staring at a beautifully set dinner table and realizing you're not actually hungry.

A Novel for the Beautifully Bored

Latronico’s novel doesn’t shout; it murmurs in tasteful neutrals. Anna and Tom, our protagonists, are the kind of couple you’d double-tap without thinking—freelance creatives, continental, and effortlessly chic. They begin in Berlin, that haven of urban cool, sipping flat whites and discussing displacement over terrazzo countertops. Their lives are perfect. Immaculate. Brutally hollow.

There’s no juicy drama here, no torrid affair, no third-act twist. Instead, Perfection unfolds like a lifestyle blog with a subtle, existential scream beneath the surface. It’s what happens when your entire personality is a brand identity—and you begin to suspect the brand is bankrupt.

Latronico channels Georges Perec’s Things with surgical accuracy, stripping his characters of interior monologue, emotion, and even dialogue, rendering them as symptoms rather than souls. It's not that Anna and Tom don’t feel. It’s that they’ve outsourced feeling to aesthetics.

And let’s be honest, haven’t we all?

Minimalism as Diagnosis

If this all sounds a bit bleak, it is. But in the best way. Like that minimalist restaurant in Copenhagen where the plate arrives looking like a conceptual art piece and somehow tastes like your childhood. Latronico uses sparseness as an indictment. His prose is clean. It reflects the world he writes about: stark, stylish, and void of clutter, both emotional and material.

Critics have swooned. The New Yorker hailed it as “a perfect novel for an age of aimless aspiration,” which is about as close to a mic-drop as literary criticism gets. The Guardian went for the jugular, calling it “an object lesson in hollow hipsterism.” And they’re not wrong. But they’re also not giving enough credit to Latronico’s subtlety. This holding up a mirror with mood lighting.

Cool, Cruel, and Uncomfortably Familiar

Reading Perfection feels like seeing your own footprint reflected back at you. Not the real you, mind you—the currated / stylised version of you. The one with the matte-finished selfies, the right amount of political engagement, the book collection positioned just so in the background. You recognize yourself. You wince. You keep reading.

Latronico’s real trick is how he implicates you without accusing you. He doesn't hate Anna and Tom—he just lets them float, anchorless, through the consequences of their own curation. They chase authenticity across Europe—from Berlin to Lisbon to Sicily—only to find that authenticity, too, has become a commodity.

Who Is This For?

If you're still under the impression that minimalism will save your soul, this book might ruin you (in the best way). But if you’ve ever caught yourself re-editing a caption for emotional resonance, or paused mid-conversation to adjust a houseplant, Perfection might just be your next essential read. It’s not long. It doesn’t need to be. It hits like a perfect espresso: short, sharp, and unsettlingly precise.

The Takeaway

Perfection isn’t a warning—it’s a mood. A mood that says: what if everything looked right, but felt wrong? And it does it in a tone so smooth, you almost don’t notice the existential panic until it's too late.

So go ahead. Light the incense. Pour the natural wine. And read this book with your back straight and your eyebrows slightly furrowed. You won’t regret it.

Or maybe you will.

But it’ll look really good on your coffee table.