For the French writer Georges Perec, the world of consumer goods offered a glimpse into the desires, hopes and dreams of the young couple at the center of his 1965 novel, Things: A Story of the Sixties. Sixty years later, Italian writer and translator Vincenzo Latronico has updated Perec’s framework to examine the lives of 21st-century digital creatives. Perfection, his International Booker Prize-–nominated novel (translated into English by Sophie Hughes), follows a Berlin-based couple, Anna and Tom, as they constantly mediate between their picture-perfect lifestyle and the emptiness of contemporary existence: “They lived a double life,” he writes. “There was the tangible reality around them, and there were the images, also all around them.”

Rhian Sasseen: You’ve written three other novels, but Perfection is your first book to be available in English. What inspired Perfection?

Vincenzo Latronico: I was struggling for years to write something that captured the way that digital life intertwines with our everyday life and shapes our values and our view of ourselves, and somehow I could not. I failed for years and years. During the endless winter of the second lockdown, I started it out as a game—“Okay, let’s rewrite Georges Perec’s Things in today’s terms.” For a long time, I didn’t really tell myself I was actually writing something because I was just thinking, “It’s a game. It’s a way to pass the time, writing.”

RS: As a translator, how was the experience of being translated?

VL: Several people have told me that the English book is better than the Italian! I think that’s maybe because the book happens in English: The conversations that these characters have, the way they move through life, is in English. The translator is amazing. She found something of the original voice inside the book. I learned a lot both as a writer and a translator from her.

RS: How much does Perfection draw on your own experiences of having lived in Berlin?

VL: A lot. It’s strange because even though the book is fiction, every detail is real. Every one of those rooms is in one of my friend’s apartments.… It’s funny, if you think about it, how a book composed only of actual, factual observations ends up becoming fiction just because you have recombined them somehow.

RS: How has the reaction to the book been in Berlin—or in the English-speaking world versus the Italian?

VL: I’m not in Berlin anymore, but I know that when it came out in German, the reaction was muted. Completely uninterested. I got only one review in the major press, and it was super negative. And the kind of people whose lives look like the lives my characters lead are not very Italian, so in Italy my book was received as a kind of document about an exotic lifestyle that the Italians cannot afford. 

Whereas the reactions I’m getting from readers in English is that many people feel seen by it. It’s really surprising. Paradoxically, now that it’s in English it’s getting more of a reaction [in Berlin] than when it came out in German. I think the people I described are either invisible to Germans, or resented by them. 

RS: Many reviews have assumed the novel to be satirical. Was that your intention? I feel as though there’s some tenderness toward Anna and Tom at points.

VL: The word “satire” gets used a lot, and of course there is a satirical element. But I think it’s self-satire. I do it with a kind of niceness, in the way I might make fun of my friends. Something about one review in The New Yorker moved me in a really emotional way. The writer said that, at some point, yeah, these characters might strike you as privileged and cold, but actually they are normal people, and the author is kind to them. It touched me, because I did try to be kind.