Perfection had me thinking of Huysmans. A novel which is self-consciously smart, driven by a notion of aesthetics as much as narrative. A sardonic take on modern urban living, lancing the boil of pretentious but vacuous hipness. Which is all very well, and a remit Vincenzo Latronico pulls off effectively, however, this is a dry text, and his targets, southern European designers playing at being sophisticates in Berlin, feel like easy targets. Of course the twee middle class mores of liberalism can do with bing taken down a peg or two, but the novel, (hotly tipped to win the International Booker), never seeks to address what underpins the aspirations of its feckless protagonists, and never looks to scratch the superficial surface it describes with such precision.
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