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?