A BARELY PERCEPTIBLE WHIFF OF CONTEMPT laces Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection. This slim, elegant novel was originally published in Italian as Le Perfezioni in 2022—Sophie Hughes’s sleek English translation was released by New York Review Books earlier this year. As the story unfolds the reader at first suspects and then finally finds herself praying that Latronico does not like his protagonists, Anna and Tom. Anna and Tom are human beings in the way the plants that accent their sparse Berlin apartment are living vegetation: undeniably but almost incidentally vital, uprooted, replaceable. They do not need to be here. “Here” is a liminal space.
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