Everyone Once in Berlin

On Vincenzo Latronico’s ‘Perfection’

Pablo Picasso, A Spanish Couple in Front of Inn, 1900, Pastel on paper

Perfection is a modern-day myth. The recently translated novel, now shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, tells the story of Anna and Tom, a young European couple who move to Berlin around 2010, but beyond that I can’t tell you much about them. I don’t know where they’re from — one would assume Italy, like the novel’s author, Vincenzo Latronico — what they look like, or what happened in their childhood. I don’t know how they talk because there is no dialogue in the novel. I can barely even tell you about a single incident from their lives in any precise detail. This is not a weakness of Perfection, however, but a strength. Anna and Tom must be vague ciphers so they can stand in for all millennials, so that a person like me — 32 years old, a “creative,” politically on the left — can look at them and feel the thrill, or the terror, of recognition.

The first thing you notice while reading Perfection is the style. Because the narration never comes very close to the life of Anna and Tom, their life is cast in a hazy glow, like a faded photograph. This is the point, of course, as they live a dual life: the filtered one on their social media feeds and the one in reality. This effect is achieved through the prose itself, and the novel exhibits an impressive marriage of form and content: in four sections respectively titled “Present,” “Imperfect,” “Remote,” and “Future,” the story is largely told in four different verb tenses. At times, this presents a challenge for the novel’s translator, Sophie Hughes, but she finds clever solutions. “Present,” which describes Anna and Tom’s Berlin apartment and the life one might lead there, uses the present simple — not the present of right now but the eternal, unchanging present:

It is a life of coffees taken out on the east-facing balcony in the spring and summer while scrolling New York Times headlines and social media on a tablet. The plants are watered as part of a daily routine that also includes yoga and a breakfast featuring an assortment of seeds.

To a certain type of person, this is an ideal lifestyle, and it’s one I might find appealing as well. “Imperfect,” which takes up the bulk of this short novel — just over 100 pages — frequently uses the habitual “would” to describe repeated actions in the past, such as Anna and Tom’s freelance graphic design work or their never-ending parties with a constantly changing group of friends. Their return home after nights out is described like this:

Emerging into the light, which hit them like needles in their eyes, they would look for a peaceful place to let the energy wash away, cracking jokes with hoarse voices on the U-Bahn. Sometimes they would make it all the way to Mauerpark to recover with a greasy breakfast from one of the fast-food stands. Other times, weather permitting, they would lie down to doze and drink cold-brewed yerba mate on Tempelhof’s grassy expanse. They would still be drunk and high, vibratile, the bass booming on in their ears.

“Remote,” which is the most straightforwardly realist portion of the novel, uses the past simple to narrate a failed move to Lisbon, and then to Sicily, as an attempt to resolve the ennui that has crept into their curated Berlin life. “Future,” the final section of the novel, describes what Anna and Tom “will” do for their next adventure — open a sort of Mediterranean Airbnb farmhouse that Anna inherits from her uncle:

The weather will be perfect — sunshine, a sea breeze, evenings just cool enough to appreciate the warm days. The nights will be filled with the song of the cicadas and the smell of wild fennel growing in the cracks of the dry-stone walls.

But will this really happen for Anna and Tom, or is it just an unfulfilled wish? Then again, do any of the events of the novel happen, or is the “Imperfect” section a collection of wistful, nostalgic, and inaccurate memories, the “Present” a sort of marketing copy articulating a domestic fantasy? If we accept the novel as a millennial myth — and not as something that may or may not have happened but as something that always happens — then we don’t need to ask this question. Anna and Tom really do live in a beautiful, light-filled apartment abounding with plants in Berlin, and they do turn their hobby of graphic design into a career. They do have perfect, lazy Sundays when they wouldn’t change a thing in the world, the record player on in the background, candles lit as evening falls. They also contribute to the gentrification of their adopted home, order too much takeout, and get the Sunday scaries. Such is life. As myth, or a sort of millennial ur-story, Perfection does an astute job of showing the challenges and anxieties faced by a hyper-online and downwardly mobile generation that values experience over traditional sources of meaning, such as religion, family, or stable work. Latronico, however, while describing this world in minute, accurate detail, is also intent on judging it, and this incessant need to tell us how to view Anna and Tom, rather than just showing us, breaks the spell cast by the novel.

Each time Anna and Tom seem to be nearing “perfection,” or the realization in their material life of the aspirations expressed in their online life, Latronico, in the voice of the narrator, steps in, dispelling the air of myth to remind us that they’re misguided. Referring to the empty apartments and abandoned warehouses that were available after the fall of the Berlin Wall — a time which Anna and Tom are “envious of” — Latronico writes that “it was history that had hollowed out that space. Anna and Tom understood this, or at least they would have if they had ever thought it through.” Emphasizing their lack of understanding, Latronico adds that “it never occurred to them, for example, that the distinction between Alt- and Neu- buildings in property listings had been drawn by the Allied bombings.” And about the life Anna and Tom have built in Berlin: “It did occur to them that, had they arrived now, they probably wouldn’t have found an apartment as good as theirs, or not one they could afford. Sometimes this realization prompted a flicker of anxiety, as if the solid life they had built was merely an accident of timing.” When they help Syrian refugees by using their apartment as a donation collection point and by spooning soup at a camp, Latronico writes that “their current efforts had been misguided, and probably pointless. Looking around, that was painfully clear to them.”

At times, one wonders if Anna and Tom could do anything that would be met with Latronico’s approval, or if, as an author, he could allow them to reach a level of maturity where they realize that life involves compromises, that perfection is impossible, that an acceptance of one’s limits is part of growing up, and that death and failure are inevitable. The novel can’t do this, however, because its purpose is to show — not without reason — that Anna and Tom and the class of people they belong to live fraudulent lives, more interested in the appearance of things than in their reality. That this is shown not through the events of the novel itself, but via Latronico’s editorializing as the narrator, is a weakness that may be ingrained in the style of the novel itself. In narrating Anna and Tom’s life from a distance, there is no opportunity for a set piece, a singular event, an exchange of dialogue that would show us rather than tell us of their doomed lifestyle, but the result is that Latronico himself becomes implicated in his criticism of Anna and Tom, albeit without seeming to realize it. They may be in search of perfection, but so is he. Is volunteering at a refugee camp “misguided” and “pointless”? Is anyone’s life not, in some part, “an accident of timing”? Latronico occasionally seems to have contempt for Anna and Tom, shown via ironic comments that reveal how delusional they are:

Like their friends, they were unsure whether to admire Hillary Clinton as a woman or despise her for her ties to the pharmaceutical industry. Of course, all that was theoretical; in practice, their social commitment amounted to using Uber only if it was snowing and always leaving tips in cash. They didn’t eat tuna.

This is funny, but the continual comments imply that Anna and Tom have made the wrong choice in life and that, if they’d just made the right choice — the one Latronico thinks they should make — all their problems might be solved. We get a sense of Latronico’s solution when he writes that Anna and Tom’s “idea of a revolutionary future didn’t go beyond gender balance on corporate boards, electric cars, vegetarianism” and that they “couldn’t even imagine” a “radically different world,” echoing the contemporary Marxist refrain that “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” But what radically different world does Latronico have in mind? He doesn’t tell us. Perhaps this is the point, but it’s also a cop-out, allowing Latronico to endlessly criticize Anna and Tom’s lifestyle, to posit it as the source of their malaise, all while remaining pure himself. Latronico is the judge who refuses to step down from his bench lest he, too, should be judged. In this way, Perfection exhibits what I find to be a flaw in much writing about millennials: the thought that our suffering is special and somehow different from the generations that have come before us. That suffering can be blamed on the phones rather than being a timeless human condition that everyone in every place must contend with. If we were willing to admit this — that life itself is the source of Anna and Tom’s ordinary unhappiness — then they would become real people, and Perfection would become the tragedy that it aspires to be.

To achieve this, however, Latronico would need to go beyond the dualistic thinking that characterizes much of the novel. The novel suggests that Anna and Tom have a limited understanding of their world as a result of being conditioned by the logic of social media, while the book itself accepts this very logic. If Anna and Tom think that their phones are “real” and that their material life only becomes significant when represented online, in criticizing them the book simply reverses this logic: phones are “fake” and real life is somewhere “out there.” The truth is much more complicated.

There’s a famous tourist slogan from Berlin, “Jeder einmal in Berlin,” which loosely translates to “Everyone Once in Berlin.” Some sources say this originated in the 1920s as a sly reference to sex tourism, while others say it was simply an appeal to general tourism. Either way, it’s striking that the idea that everyone who really wants to live must visit Berlin has persisted for a hundred years. Berlin is to Europe what New York City is to the United States. If you want to be an artist, that’s where you go. If you’re from a small, Midwestern town in the middle of nowhere, where no one understands you and anything outside a rigid set of norms is viewed with suspicion, you get on a bus and go to New York City — or at least you used to, when it was still affordable. Anna and Tom’s southern European city is the equivalent of that Midwestern town, and it’s not hard to understand their desire to escape the stifling confines of a provincial life. It’s also not hard to understand the desire for the comforts of home when the city becomes overwhelming, a tension that Perfection shows well.

I have my own Berlin story, although not nearly on the scale of Anna and Tom’s. In 2014, which Perfection casts as a time when Berlin was still a cheap place for artists — before they started to be pushed out by people from the world of tech and finance (again, think New York) — I met up with my friend from university for a weekend of tourism and clubbing there. I was studying abroad in France while he was in the Netherlands and flights around Europe were cheap. We rented an Airbnb and slept on mattresses on the floor while the couple who lived in the apartment were on their laptops in the living room, typing furiously to meet a deadline for Rolling Stone. Everyone who goes to Berlin wants to visit Berghain, the most famous club in the world, but my friend and I knew we wouldn’t get in (it has a notoriously opaque door policy), so we opted for a smaller club instead, called Renate. Both clubs are mentioned in Perfection, so who knows — maybe Anna and Tom were there that night, or more accurately, maybe we were Anna and Tom. Maybe we all were Anna and Tom.

At Renate, we met up with a friend that I’d made in France. He’d heard me speaking English on the bus and approached me, saying he didn’t know many Americans in the city. I gave him my number and told him to meet me and my other friends at the beach that night, which was a natural congregating place. He easily joined the group and became fast friends with our mix of Italian, Spanish, French, and Polish students. This is another thing Perfection captures well — the way young people in foreign cities find each other and fall in together, almost as if by a sixth sense. My friend, let’s call him G, left France after the first semester to try his luck in Berlin. He was an aspiring singer and Berlin, with its “artist visa” that allows practically anyone to stay long-term if they have some sort of creative hobby, was the logical choice. G was Black, gay, and from the southern United States; we never talked about it, but it’s easy to understand why he would want to live in Berlin. Whatever criticisms one can make of the city, it’s a place where people can be free.

Our night at Renate was similar to the way Anna and Tom’s nights out are described. We stayed there until it was light outside, although G left earlier than us, as he didn’t quite have the energy we did. Before he left, he thanked me for showing him the club — “I didn’t know places like this existed,” he said. My other friend and I, the bass still booming in our ears, still wide awake, decided, for some reason, to go see G that morning before returning to our Airbnb. We rang his doorbell, laughing at how stunned he would be at the sight of us, but to our surprise, it wasn’t G who opened the door, but his roommate, who we thought was out of town. Immediately our giddiness turned into embarrassment: What were we doing there, at 7 or 8 in the morning, laughing like idiots, while the roommate glared at us in her pajamas? Eventually G came to the door and we apologized, then sheepishly left to go have breakfast.

What, I think now, would Latronico have made of us? In describing a night at Panorama Bar (part of Berghain), he captures an iconic moment in the world of electronic music and club culture — the time when “the pearly-white dawn bursts unexpectedly through the huge glass walls at Panorama Bar” — before writing that, in fact, it “was an illusion, because on the other side of that dawn, the night would go on.” Would my story have been presented as an anecdote to show that, even as we thought we were doing something meaningful, it was just an illusion and we were mistaken, trapped in some sort of hedonistic fantasy, our true natures unknown to us? Well, sure, that’s right, but only if we insist that things must be either this or that, that images and reality are two different things, that life can be divided into neat categories. We were stupid, and we had a great time, and maybe I played a small part in helping my friend find a place for himself in Berlin. Social media tells me he recently became a German citizen. The DJ we saw that night, although I didn’t know it at the time, was the head of a music label that would go on to distribute my own music, producing a vinyl record that I can hold in my hands and share with my family and friends. If that night was an illusion, it still produced something very real.

But perhaps I protest too much, compromised by the fact that in Anna and Tom, I see so much of myself. That’s fine. There’s no shame in admitting one’s faults and acknowledging that everyone, everywhere, lives in a time and place that shapes them and which they also shape. Perfection itself is “a tribute” to Georges Perec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties, a 1965 novel depicting the alienation brought about by materialism and consumerism. This might alert us to the fact that Anna and Tom’s story is not special, that their predicament is not a result of being millennials but of being human. The mistake, then, would be to think that we can somehow escape this culture, this world, this life. Recognizing this is not an admission of defeat or resignation, but a sign of maturity and an acknowledgement that millennials can, in fact, grow up.

Derek Neal is a writer living in Hamilton, Ontario. His writing has appeared in 3 Quarks Daily, The Point, and The Republic of Letters. His Substack can be found here.