Writers Read: Lianna Mark on Perfection

00:00:03: Hi, I'm Tobias Haberkorn and you're listening to Berlin Review.

00:00:09: This winter Berlin Review published a diptych on Vincenzo Lattronico's novel Perfection which was originally published in Italian in two thousand twenty-two but got quite a bit of buzz last year after its English translation was shortlisted for the two thousand and twenty five booker prize.

00:00:27: if You haven't read it The book follows a millennial couple who moves to Berlin around?

00:00:33: They rent an altbau apartment, they attend galleries.

00:00:37: They go to demos and clubs... ...they work remotely.. ..they obsess about Danish furniture….

00:00:43: …they sublet their apartment travel & return.

00:00:48: And through all of this – they are curating a life that's better than where they came from or at least one looks-that way on Instagram.

00:00:57: The book has been praised but also intensely disliked.

00:01:02: One of the sharpest responses came from one of our contributors, The Italian British writer, Liana Mark who wrote about perfection in her January online edition.

00:01:14: Liana's essay Better Living Through Self-Curation goes beyond conversation.

00:01:18: whether the book is triggering to use a word that circulated alot and asks what it means perform and market.

00:01:26: authenticity especially in literary world that rewards stories, that are easy to package and export.

00:01:36: With this episode we wanted try

00:01:38: something

00:01:39: new.

00:01:40: You'll get to hear Liana read her essay in full And In Her Own Voice.

00:01:46: Enjoy the reading.

00:02:00: The reviewer's experience will eventually seep the stage to the discussion of a recently published book that grapples with similar theme or experience.

00:02:13: This will furnish their view with its focus, but it is critics' familiarity with this topic established in personal opener which will structure peace and lend authenticity.

00:02:24: Seduced by the confessional register, the reader finds themselves immersed between a book and life.

00:02:33: Embedded in the milieu Vincenzo Latronico's novel Perfection.

00:02:37: I could start this piece with some anecdotes from my own early days as an expert in Berlin.

00:03:00: like the hegemonic cultural market that has ratified, with this year's translation and international book a short listing, La Tronico's International Relevance as a writer.

00:03:18: Finally I could situate The Novels' engagement with a generational crisis of meaning in my own millennial delays in adulting chains of iterative disillusionment and nostalgia for more wholesome pre-social media world.

00:03:33: More than my degrees in literature or childhood spent writing instead socialising The above with a test to the authority of my perspective.

00:03:41: Of course, my own privilege struggles as a thirty-something expert precariously underemployed in embattled literature departments that I commute to by dysfunctional rail networks from a rent protected apartment in Berlin play their part in my interest in perfection and explain why i like many found it triggering but sustained engagement with the book on its journey to the International Booker shortlist, invites critical reflection on the commerce of authenticity in today's literary markets.

00:04:14: In which these kinds of confessional openers participate?

00:04:18: At the same time that Donnie Que's success suggests I think you can critique something and get away with buying into it as long as you do so

00:04:26: winkingly.".

00:04:30: Herald did us a definitive representation of millennial angst.

00:04:33: perfection tells the story.

00:04:40: Propelling them is the search for a more meaningful life, beyond the strictures of what is pithily described as another generation's script or what boomer parents expect should come easily to their kids.

00:04:51: This leads from Berlin into an unnamed region of their country of origin via Lisbon and Sicily in self-perpetuating loop of projection idealisation and disillusionment that at book's conclusion only looks set continue.

00:05:06: The narrative voice bears no one, but it's the residual empathy with the protagonist's illusions that makes its ruthlessness all the more effective.

00:05:15: Outlining Anna and Tom's heavily curated existence across what turn out to be largely interchangeable locales... It charts the protagonists' increasingly desperate struggle —to come to terms with a gap between reality and images—the titular realm of mostly-online perfection.

00:05:33: Updating Georges Pirexle's shores…and borrowing from it a motto and the use of third-person plural, The novel zeroes in on a couple as the smallest socially recognised unit of collective existence.

00:05:45: The heterosexual dyad becomes case study for gratifying conformity with generational groupthink reassuring those who were either treading or had trod the same path that it was right one.

00:05:58: To this end La Tronica's.

00:06:00: They acts as narrative counterpart to Berlin's urban sprawl inviting wide range people to recognise themselves.

00:06:09: The abundance and precision of material references, from their M-Twenty-Nine bus to the beer garden on Paulinke Ulfer only augments a generic nature in narrative which is both about Berlin and largely independent.

00:06:22: La Trenika's focus isn't on localised fictional characters but on stylized backdrops for their lives that are as intimate an individual as algorithmic profiling thus broadly relatable.

00:06:34: Through clinical reconstruction detail and specific forms of unreality, the book sheds indirect light on what takes place against it.

00:06:44: The identical struggle for a different life – which Berlin at least for millennials remains the urban correlative?

00:06:52: The couple's struggle against entropic banality spans their scandy minimalist interior design, art world-adjacent social life & theoretical bicuriosity.

00:07:02: Undergirding all is the pursuit of collective identity able to lend substance.

00:07:08: Amid the pageantry of gallery openings, freelance work and attempts at political activism perfection appears within reach until The Cruise Ship Of Expat Life hits a range of icebergs that it had failed to anticipate.

00:07:22: Flocking To Berlin is suddenly in new type creative fewer aspiring artists from Greece more interaction designers from Portland bringing not only organic samosas and vapes loaded with CBD but also bed bugs rising rents housing shortage.

00:07:37: Berlin's poor but sexy lifestyle becomes harder to sustain, particularly for the non-native Anglophones among the expats.

00:07:44: For whom opportunities are scarcer?

00:07:46: Revealing a lack of futurity that had previously gone unnoticed Beneath the mirage over European hub Of international creatives capable of transcending The standardizing forces of capital like anglophone cultural hegemony and the magnetic field of Silicon Valley.

00:08:04: Over time many first wave expats go home.

00:08:07: some have children and disappear.

00:08:09: Others retrain as user-experience architects or SEO ninjas, giving in to the pull of company health insurance and pension plans.

00:08:17: In familiar spaces a younger crowd fresh out of Goldsmiths or Bard affords Anna & Tom a new sense of exclusion.

00:08:24: As their life grows flatter and hard Their quest for authenticity becomes increasingly dogged and desperate.

00:08:32: What fuels The Couple's quest is a generationally specific void hence perfection.

00:08:36: status as a millennial novel marked by the loss of a dial-up internet world that in retrospect feels impossibly vivid.

00:08:43: The millennial search for meaning, and its attempt to reconnect with the enchantment of an idealised offline past is as anachronistic as it is Sisyphean – believe me I've tried everything!

00:08:56: It's this lost authenticity that haunts Latin Oniqa characters and arguably many his readers.

00:09:03: La Tarnica's project, however isn't merely nostalgic and perfection is I think more than the map of millennial angst.

00:09:09: it has been celebrated as.

00:09:11: Rather it looks beyond the experience of coming-of-age a little too late into disenchanted world casting its gaze instead at commercial value.

00:09:19: authenticity in todays cultural marketplace.

00:09:23: For me this books most interesting critique and tragically ironic one since story with own success are once a verse rests on the dynamics that it eloquently exposes.

00:09:35: Authenticity is a ubiquitous cultural asset today, which derives first and foremost from a performative disclosure of The Real—one's self-truth or trauma —or the experiences that convouch for one's embodied

00:09:46: knowledge.".

00:09:48: In this instance I'm credible in my engagement with La Tronico by virtue all the ways i've told you on which I am like him…and his characters.

00:09:55: This is necessary but not sufficient to be recognised as valuably authentic.

00:10:00: The performed disclosure must come with a high degree of legibility.

00:10:04: It must ensure frictionless access through careful curation to that same ostensibly unmediated

00:10:10: reel.".

00:10:11: Anna and Tom are in many ways narrative avatars on this kind of authenticity effect, radiating an undefined Southern European exoticism –a welcome contribution to the collective expat identity– everything down their very names—presumably Tommy's short for Tommazel has been reconfigured for the easy access of an imagined, anglicised interlocutor.

00:10:34: La Trónico has a talent for biting brevity and in one his more fulminant aphorisms sacrificed somewhat in Sophie Hughes's more idiomatic translation he puts his finger on this paradoxical process.

00:10:49: The couple are confident that they're pursuing in Berlin la libertad de essere assistissi or the freedom to be themselves, which means the freedom re-event themselves.

00:11:00: The desire for authenticity is indistinguishable from performative self curation.

00:11:09: It involves repackaging one's sense of self for a foreign audience and within predetermined guidelines—the real life equivalent of the Helvetica.

00:11:17: neia light stencils informing couples' designs.

00:11:21: Their template alone however cannot sell without authenticating effect on individuals interactions with it.

00:11:29: In order to garner interest from prospective tenants, Anna and Tom's apartment — a granular description of which in the form an Airbnb advert occupies first chapter.

00:11:39: Must display not only generically legible style urban bourgeois minimalism but also project to authenticating effect vicarious belonging To become more than hotel A unique home away as is company promise.

00:11:54: It must be someone's home.

00:11:55: start with It must offer an aestheticized glimpse of the idea someone else's real life, minus herpes' cream.

00:12:04: Ironically very similar dynamics under Gerd Perfektion's book Market Success By La Tronico's own admission in a conversation with American expat author and literary critic Lauren Euler I attended at Berlin's Haus der Kulturen der Welt in June this year.

00:12:19: The project was fuelled by his desire to write a story that wasn't would be recognized as authentic without it being about pizza-munching utes in some coastal region of what Germans often refer to as an Ordlaubsland.

00:12:31: Through the mediation of Pilex's things based narration, a meticulously descriptive text born out of this desire reads like a millennial expat take on the genre of collective autofiction practiced most famously by Annie Arnault in The Years.

00:12:46: its narrative feels just as lived in as Anna and Tom's home come Airbnb and similarly packaged for a cosmopolitan anglophone audience.

00:12:56: While this is undeniably the case in its Fitzcarraldo New York Review books, English language editions—signs of it are present already on the original—perfection fuses the authenticity of its author's Southern European experience with accessibility to not only a sleek and highly idiomatic translation as was the case with Elena Ferrantes' novels but writing that in its very inception squeezes itself into an international mould.

00:13:24: It's more than a figure of speech to say that La Tronica's Italian is haunted by its future English translation.

00:13:30: As the author recounted at Hacavi, his editorial process involved in parts a self-translation into English followed via back translation into Italian To prune off the baroque exorcises of Latinx syntax.

00:13:45: as A result like Tom's abbreviated name la tronica was italian.

00:13:49: prose evokes The shortcuts and oddities of expats speak.

00:13:52: It's productively constrained by its own linguistic equivalent of the Hilvetic Anoyalite stencils, The Rhythms and Idioms Of International English.

00:14:01: Sforzandosi di generalti spiriti spendere l'estate in ways that will not only feel familiar to many participants on the Italian brain drain but also from a market perspective more importantly guarantee you books international book are prize worthiness As a literary-market product.

00:14:20: Perfection bespeaks Latronico's authorial desire To Be Himself Which means to reinvent himself, which means be different from himself while skewering the same desire in its characters.

00:14:31: Like The Anus of Authenticity at Its Heart ,the book both displays it's authors truth and packages that truth excessively for people all over them world .

00:14:40: Which mean as a novel itself caustically reminds us And has is confirmed by short list induced media coverage and reception From East & West Coasts Of

00:14:50: U.S.,

00:14:50: Berlin & London.

00:14:54: This irony in no way detracts from the novel's insight and acumen.

00:14:57: Rather, it acts like a Trojan horse to doubly expose the reader on their values.

00:15:03: We smirk at community for whom Barack Obama's speeches and high school shootings feel far more vivid than the laws passed just few urban stations away or The refugees drowning two hours flight south.

00:15:15: And yet if we're reading perfection following its English language translation and shortlist success were likely part of and dependent on that same Community.

00:15:25: And even if we're not, the success of Perfection certainly is.

00:15:28: As is this review.

00:15:32: This was brought home with iconic clarity during the author's conversation with Lauren Euler at The Hakavi A centre for showcasing and discussion contemporary arts from across the globe.

00:15:42: From its rooftop in the eclectic aftermath of a storm... ...the sunset over the river Spria on that June evening….

00:15:49: …was nothing short of perfection as La Thronico exposed to paradoxes and latent hierarchies of the expat dream with the bite of someone who has spent a decade mulling over them.

00:16:00: His own success, framed against Berlin's eclectic skyline and celebrated in precise if variously accented Englishes evoked that same mirage of a truly multicultural creative hub That as savvy readers of perfection we were gathered to dismiss.

00:16:17: No wonder it is triggering

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00:17:09: My name is Tobias Haberkorn Editor Of Berlin Review.

00:17:12: Thanks for listening.