Everyone Once in Berlin

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.