The perfection described in Vincenzo Latronico’s “Perfection” sounded pretty perfect to me. After reading a review of it in The New Yorker, I grabbed the last copy from the Yale bookstore, and for a couple weeks, Anna and Tom, the novel’s main and only characters, kept me company on my common room couch in the afternoons and evenings.
Anna and Tom live in Berlin, having moved there from their backwater, boring unnamed Southern European home. As digital nomads, nothing ties them down — so long as they have internet connection, they can build a life. So they are drawn to Berlin, which is young and lively, full of art and clubs and other young foreigners like themselves, with whom they can speak slightly skewed English and German.
Like many of my friends at Yale, I sometimes dream about living in another country. I wonder what it would be like to uproot my existence and transplant myself into a totally unknown place. I imagine the thrill of discovering that the world is larger and more interesting than the slice of the Northeast I have always called home. The grass is always greener, as the saying goes, and part of me truly believes the grass would be greener across the ocean.
In Latronico’s Berlin, Anna and Tom furnish a simple, sophisticated, humble and comfortable home. With plants and Scandinavian chairs and artistic, colorful magazines dotting the rooms, it sounds, again, like the fantasy life I have described to my friends. This apartment is not clinically clean, though. Uncluttered, yet homey nonetheless, it represents a perfection that somehow seems down-to-earth, because I can imagine myself picking out the herbs that grow on the windowsill in the kitchen and the “reproduction print of a British wartime poster” that hangs on the wall. It has shelves of blue and white enamel dishes, along with “mason jars filled with rice, grains, coffee, spices.” This is an attainable level of perfection.
It’s not perfect, though. Anna and Tom are unmoored: because they aren’t constrained by any community, by any working environment, they find themselves somewhat adrift in Berlin after a couple of years. Nothing keeps them tethered, and they miss that sense of responsibility, of obligation. Undeniably, Latronico has a good point. Without any sort of commitment or intentionality, without a path forward, life feels frustratingly aimless. It’s a rude awakening to read, hearing that the dream life I’ve always envisioned might just be a dream, might not be feasible — if I want to be truly happy.
Anna and Tom — do they end up happy? After bouncing around to Lisbon, to Italy, in search of a new digital nomadic lifestyle, they are saved, ironically, by the family they’ve left behind. Anna inherits a rambling estate from a deceased uncle, which they decide to turn into a bed and breakfast. They find purpose in running the property, in crafting a curated, delightful image of life for their visitors, so that when guests come to stay, they believe they have found perfection.
But this conclusion, to me, is tinged with a cynical undertone. Is this meaningful commitment? Or are Anna and Tom simply perpetuating the fantastical delusions that they’ve been caught in for years, now passing them onto others? In a way, it feels like they’re only going in circles, that they will never be free from reaching for an unattainably perfect future.
I reflect on my own expat dreams, which have, at various points, included studio apartments in Paris or evening bike rides along the canals of Copenhagen. But I haven’t chosen those cities for any particular reason, just like Anna and Tom didn’t choose Berlin for any reason. Berlin merely represented an exciting, exotic, new environment, a pool into which they could plunge headfirst and never emerge to the surface.
In reality, they — and I — will always emerge to the surface. The thrill of novel surroundings will diminish, and reality will take over. Then, the question is, do I like what I find at the surface? Anna and Tom did not. They found nothing. So I want to find something — meaning, intentionality — at the surface.
After all, my intentional connections and commitments center my life right now. Watching new movies with friends, attending College Teas in the afternoons, settling down at Book Trader Cafe with a vegan chai and an essay to write — my life is enriched by these things. Instead of being carried away by the unreachable depths of my surroundings, I want to bask in the meaning that I create in my life. And there, perhaps, is perfection.