“The Perfections”: A bittersweet chronicle of expat life in Berlin
In this novel, writer Vincenzo Latronico portrays Berlin as the fragile theater of a globalized generation. A fine analysis praised by The New York Times, it blends social criticism with novelistic elegance.
In The Perfections (which has just been translated into English and will be published in French in 2023 by Gallimard), the Italian writer Vincenzo Latronico delivers, according to The New York Times , “ one of the most powerful portraits of expat life in Berlin” in recent years. Published in English in a translation by Sophie Hughes, this novel follows Anna and Tom, two thirty-somethings from a “large but peripheral country in Southern Europe,” who move to Berlin in the 2010s, at the height of the city’s rise as the unofficial capital of a creative, globalized Europe.
The couple, referred to throughout the book as they, embody a generation of expats shaped by digital platforms, startups, and the privileges of free movement. Their designer apartment in the trendy Neukölln district— “Danish chair on Berber rug, Radiohead vinyl” —became a showcase, an extension of their constructed identity. “Berlin was their main hobby. In many ways, it defined them far more than their profession.”
Latronico carefully examines an “invented community” of mobile urbanites, culturally connected but politically absent. “They often ended up discussing things they saw online, that is, elsewhere in the world, usually in California or New York.” The novel highlights the stark contrast between Berlin’s image as a free artistic capital and the reality experienced by these expats disconnected from their immediate surroundings.
The instability of this cosmopolitan bubble becomes evident as soon as external shocks occur: the massive arrival of English speakers in 2014, the migration crisis of 2015, rising rents, evictions, breakups, and returns home. Faced with this, Anna and Tom understand that “ cosmopolitanism without politics is a dead end.” Their attempt to engage with refugees is hampered by their linguistic incompetence and limited usefulness, reducing them to their status as privileged extras.
Without ever falling into mockery, The Perfections offers a subtle satire of this mobile, urban, liberal generation, “whose intellectual horizon was summed up in the headlines of the Guardian or the New York Times ,” underlines the same New York Times ! Berlin, even today, capitalizes on its image as an artistic El Dorado, while serving as a scapegoat for German nationalist discourses. This lucid novel thus captures, through the bittersweet wanderings of its protagonists, what was perhaps the apogee – and the twilight – of the expat utopia in Europe.
