Photography by Marcus Lieder  

Words ANDREW WRIGHT

“I think that the only sensible thing to do is to assume that this [success] is a one-off,” Vincenzo Latronico tells me. His fourth novel Perfection, his first translated into English, is, perhaps, the most coveted literary gem of the summer. The skinny 113-pager studies Berlin-residing millennial creatives, Anna and Tom – hipsters, essentially – with a life defined by the aesthetics of their internet consumption and stilted by a desire to contribute to it themselves. With lineage in Georges Perec’s take on consumerism in an advertising-laden ‘60s Things, similarly Perfection doesn't deal in plot, dialogue or interpersonal tension. The devil is instead in the detail, with each chapter offering an impassive framing of the key aspects of their life — their homes, sex lives, friendships, cooking habits – in granular specificity.

It has led the 40-year-old to the longlist of the International Booker Prize for the first time, and critical plaudits are piling around him when we chat over the phone on a March mid-morning. “I must say, every day opens with some good news,” he enthuses. Life events notoriously operate in clusters, though. And, as such, he’s also moving apartments as he’s suspended in the liminal space that precedes the release. “I’m literally opening boxes and selling books I won’t read again on Vinted.” He’s also writing again, however, seemingly unperturbed by the pressures that plagued many a literary great following their landmark international breakthrough. His perception of Perfection’s success as an isolated incident is perhaps serving him well. Although, he needn't worry – Instagram fortunes are ephemeral, but Latronico-style craftsmanship stands the test of time.

Perfection is a tribute to Georges Perec’s Things. How did your relationship with that book start, and what prompted you to want to translate that story for a 21st-century Instagram world?
It happened more the other way around. I spent years trying to write a story that painted a realistic picture of the presence of the digital in our lives. I was frustrated with reading contemporary fiction at how a big chunk of our time is spent scrolling and messaging, but it doesn’t get captured in realistic novels. Simply because the novel, in some ways, lacks the machinery to capture spending three hours scrolling stories on Instagram. But so much of our inner life is determined by our relationship to these digital technologies — our sex lives, diet, politics. They are inexplicable without getting into detail about the influence of the content I absorb from my phone, however it’s hard to find a place for this in the novel, because it’s in the background. So I had a hard time doing that until I read Things. Perec thought, ‘Okay, this is the background of life, so if I want to write a novel about this, I have to write a novel that is somehow made of background where things don’t really happen on stage, and the stage is left for a description of what is usually just the backdrop.’

You were leaning on Perec’s work, but did you always feel confident that writing with no dialogue, significant plot arc etc. would work for you?
Oh, absolutely not. This book started when I had not been able to finish a novel in eight years. I was quite close to giving up [on writing]. But it was the second lockdown, and I did this as a way to pass time. When I finished it, I sent an email to my agent. It was an apology. I was like, ‘I know this is unpublishable, but this is the only thing I could finish. I’m just sending this to you, in case you want to read it.’

What was the first sign that you knew that actually you were wrong, and this was going to do really well?
The fact that international publishers were immediately interested. That is something that doesn’t often happen in Italian literature. I was struck by something that several editors said in the emails that accompanied their offer, which was, ‘I was reading this book and then raising my eyes from the page to my apartment and saying, “Fuck, this is talking about my apartment right now.’” That’s the moment where I thought, ‘Okay, maybe there’s something in here that speaks to a broader audience.’

Your Instagram account has just one post. Has your relationship with social media or Instagram changed over time?
I was a Twitter person. I like to think that if you associate every social network with one of the cardinal sins, the sin of Instagram is envy and the sin of Twitter is [wrath]. Definitely, my scene was Twitter. But luckily or unluckily, [these days], I no longer waste my time there.

When telling Anna and Tom’s story, how did you find the sweet spot between taking their aimlessness in a digital world seriously, and not portraying it as a significant plight? They live quite a privileged life after all.
I tried to be both realistic and kind. If you have a wealthy friend who is in perfect health and has a great relationship, and then their parents die, you can empathise both with the objective pain that they’re going through, but also with the pain that is in some ways universal and isn’t in any way made easier by owning a beautiful apartment. However, in other ways, it is much easier to be in pain in your beautiful apartment. In general, I try to make fun of my characters because there is a lot to make fun of. I make fun of myself a lot. But this does not preclude empathy. I was very happy and moved by a review in The New Yorker that said something like, ‘Initially, Perfection reads as an ethnography, but then she realised that the characters are normal and the author is kind to them.’ You know, it would be easy to understand this book as a satire of millennial superficiality, and to an extent, it is, but it is not just that. There is something warmer there, and I’m very happy that it’s being seen.

Have your books ever been covered in The New Yorker before?
Absolutely not. I know that this is an expression that is often used emphatically, but I mean it in the most literal sense – this is a dream come true.

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes, is out now and published by Fitzcarraldo Editions