Latronico / Hughes Perfection

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80427-105-6
Verlag: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 120 Seiten

Millennial expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin, in a bright, plant-filled apartment in Neukölln. They are young digital creatives, freelancers without too many constraints. They have a passion for food, progressive politics, sexual experimentation and Berlin's twenty-four-hour party scene. Their ideal existence is also that of an entire generation, lived out on Instagram, but outside the images they create for themselves, dissatisfaction and ennui burgeon. Their work as graphic designers becomes repetitive. Friends move back home, have children, grow up. An attempt at political activism during the refugee crisis proves fruitless. And in that picture-perfect life Anna and Tom feel increasingly trapped, yearning for an authenticity and a sense of purpose that seem perennially just out of their grasp. With the stylistic mastery of Georges Perec and nihilism of Michel Houellebecq, Perfection, translated by Sophie Hughes, is a sociological novel about the emptiness of contemporary existence, beautifully written, brilliantly scathing.

Vincenzo Latronico was born in Rome in 1984 and currently lives in Milan. He is an art critic and has translated many books into Italian, by authors such as George Orwell, Oscar Wilde, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hanif Kureishi. Perfection is his fourth novel, the first to be translated into English.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Latronico, Vincenzo

Hughes, Sophie

Weitere Mitwirkende

Hughes, Sophie

Leseproben

  The friends they made in Berlin were mostly French, Polish, Portuguese, sometimes Israeli or Belgian, occasionally American, but almost never German. They were all roughly their age – older than twenty-three, younger than thirty. They had come to the city for no particular reason and found each other as effortlessly as kids on the first day of school: meeting on Facebook groups where people swapped battered old sofas and tips to navigate German bureaucracy; or asking to borrow a laptop charger in a café with vintage formica tables and lush banyan trees; or in clubs as they waited for the bathroom, where people would leave the cubicles in twos or threes, their pupils enormous. They all had related professions. They were graphic designers and front-end developers and artists who eked out a living either working for other artists, dabbling in graphic design or mounting drywall booths at art fairs. They were video makers and head chefs, gallery assistants and freelance journalists leveraging Berlin’s aura to imbue their articles back home with a touch of worldly sophistication. They were PhD candidates in molecular biology, musicians, copywriters and illustrators who huddled together against the winter and formed an unofficial network, an invented community. The form that community took was more of a lattice than a circle, with relationships based on affinity and emulation, affection, intimacy, similarity, Schadenfreude and support. They had their rituals, their common references. Bloody Marys with potato latkes on Saturday mornings on Weinbergsweg. Burgers under the U-Bahn overpass on Skalitzer Straße and that other joint in the middle of nowhere, run by and for Americans, which served a burger so big it was free to whoever could finish it. They would sing ironic renditions of Oasis at karaoke beneath the Wall, watch the sun go down from the little fortress in Viktoriapark or from the Wasserturm. They would read culture and lifestyle articles written in that elegant, easy style of Anglophone magazines, which they identified with even as they ridiculed a particularly American obsession with money. In the evenings they would gravitate towards the same cluster of streets – the pedestrian bridges over the Landwehrkanal around Maybachufer, the leafy avenues in Schillerkiez, the first few blocks of Weserstraße. They would crack the same jokes about Winterdepression and the fact that they had never been to West Berlin, even though they all lived between Rixdorf and Kreuzkölln. To newcomers, almost like an initiation rite, they would pass down the rumour that the swans under Admiralbrücke were the souls of some Spanish Erasmus students who drowned in the canal during their first winter, fooled by the ice on its surface. They would spend long weekends together that would start on Saturday mornings and run into the following afternoon. Their group would expand and contract like a living, breathing thing. The morning crew would start small, with more and more people trickling in to play table tennis in Arkonaplatz or bocce on Paul-Lincke-Ufer. They would play absent-mindedly – sometimes competing in teams, but usually all together, loosely orbiting the table and taking turns to have a go. The losers would wander off among the market stalls to browse acetate tracksuit bottoms, jars of home-made granola and funny-shaped cacti. Once the group had reconvened, they would go and get eggs and salmon (or asparagus, when it was in season) in some café, where they might stay for thirty minutes or several hours, leafing through magazines they had already read online and commenting – with barely disguised sarcasm, with suppressed rage, with nostalgia or disappointment – on the latest news from France or Portugal. The late afternoon would be spent going from gallery to gallery. They were all signed up to the same newsletter listing the latest art events, which included icons to denote whether there would be free drinks or if the crowd would be mostly German- or English-speaking. Having exhausted the openings on offer that day, some of their friends would slope off home, but they knew they would pick up others along the way – people who had spent the morning at the Turkish market, maybe, or gone for food at one of the Thai street-food stands in Preußenpark. You could tell a gallery from all the way up the street by the little huddles of people under a neon glow, by the empties piled up around plastic beer crates on the pavement. They would spend a few minutes wandering through the gallery space and commenting on the works in whispered Greek or English – which were interesting, which derivative. Then they would plan their next stop: an independent art space above a car wash in Friedrichshain; a former furniture shop on Torstraße; the basement gallery on Graefestraße whose parties were so notoriously packed with new arrivals that it was nicknamed ‘the Italian Embassy’. They would plan their route and set off, leaving any stragglers behind, confident they would catch up again somewhere along the way. Some of their friends were artists or curators, meaning for them such occasions were professional opportunities. They would pop up among random groups like mayoral candidates on the campaign trail, dishing out compliments and handshakes. But for the rest of them, contemporary art was not, strictly speaking, a passion. Over time they might have learned how to talk the talk, but Anna and Tom were aware they didn’t actually ‘get it’. They couldn’t even say how it had come to be such a big presence in their lives. Before moving to Berlin, they had never had any interest in art, or not beyond going to see the odd big retrospective – of Hundertwasser, say, or Man Ray. And even in Berlin, if it were down to them, they wouldn’t go to all those shows, just enough to keep abreast of the visual styles their clients back home would start requesting in a few years’ time, when vaporwave would trickle down from the Berlin galleries to southern Europe. But that wasn’t to say they were playing the game, like the people who went along to galleries with the sole purpose of networking: Anna and Tom went because art was the pulse of their life in Berlin. It kept the oxygen flowing, kept them in the loop about parties and the latest upcoming neighbourhoods, as well as giving them a sneak preview of the new arrivals from Lisbon or Palermo or Malmö. The galleries were a stage and a social hub. The more refined among their friends referred to them as ‘salons’, pronounced the French way. Those pilgrimages could last until well into the evening, and included refreshment breaks to refuel with takeaway sushi or falafel. But at each new stop, the sizeable group amassed over the afternoon would grow slimmer and more streamlined for the night ahead. By now there would rarely be anyone from the morning left, but like the Argonauts’ ship, something of the original group would remain, a particular style of dress or an in-joke repeated so often it would become a sort of secret handshake. Those still standing would assess their finances and energy levels, try to convince their friends to join over text, and make a final decision over whether to hole themselves up at one of their houses for a game of Carcassonne or venture on to Renate, to Homopatik, to Sisyphos. When they got there, the group would disband in order to get past the bouncers and then reconvene under the loudspeakers or in the bathroom queue. They would move in and out of each other’s radar through the early hours, somehow always finding each other in the morning, with the exception of those who had called it a night or hooked up. 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 more 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. They would imagine how they must look to the outside world with their aching cheekbones drawn into fixed grins, their clothes smeared with cigarette ash and sweat, and still carrying the odd trace of dimly remembered adventures: a marker pen scribble on their face; a garland of fake frangipani in their pocket; a bunch of helium balloons tied to their jacket buttons and now trailing, half-deflated, like comet tails. They would feel decadent and enviable, alive. By early afternoon the first stirrings of anxiety would make themselves felt, then slowly build like a gathering storm. They would remember the supermarkets, closed on Sundays, their client calls scheduled for Monday, the work due by Friday. They would part ways without making plans and get on the U-Bahn to their one- or two-bed apartments with their plants and wooden floors, to the impending serotonin crash and the warm bath to soften the fall. They would send a few sheepish messages to assuage their guilt at some half-remembered thing they had said or done. Most of the time no one answered. They would take two aspirins before climbing into bed and by Monday morning everything would be fine, or...