Very rarely do I feel the urge to write about my own life or in general write fiction but, occasionally you read novels like Perfection and immediately are reminded of the wonderful miracles of literature. When I read Perfection it spoke to me as an immigrant who lived in Europe for the past 10 years. And also being a programmer all of those years. I loved how comfortable Vincenzo Latronico is in mixing up technical jargon of programmers, designers, marketers with existential observations on life and modern work.

The book has the quality of a fable, everything is drawn in light, blurry strokes like an Impressionist painting, yet you know exactly what’s being hinted at. The writing has a beautiful sustained clarity that refuses to go in too close or to detach too far from its central characters: Tom and Anna. This precisely calculated distance feels like a dolly shot, the camera coldly and calmly tracking their lives. Where they live, what they eat, where they hang out and party, where and how they are intimate with each other. And ultimately how they try to be intimate with the world, their community. The camera only occasionally tells us how they feel, and the impact is greater for it.

Tom, Anna, and Berlin are the only named and specified characters; everything else is alluded to with a kind of quasi-indifference — as if to say, the specifics don’t matter here, these are the true elements of this novel. We follow the couple as they live through the city—transformed by it and watching it transform into something barely recognizable. Through it all we see them in search of something, something they can barely name or describe.

I think the book captures very well the alienation of living abroad. Of being in a country that’s not yours no matter how you try to fit in. His description of German bureaucracy is Kafkaesque in the best sense. But more existentially it illustrates what it means to be uprooted, watching friends move back to their home countries. Anna and Tom constantly compare their lives to those of childhood friends who stayed — friends whose lives, from a distance, seem richer and more meaningful.

It’s also startling how precisely and poetically he portrays this double life — one online, one real — and how meticulously the couple curates and presents everything, with the devotion of a religious order. The emptiness of it all is its perfection. Eventually life starts to feel boring and disappointing for not living up to its sister version in the cloud.