2025 Readings 66

 I just blew through Vincenzo Latronico's Perfection in two days. Granted, it's a short novel, but mainly this is a testament to what a great novel it is. I picked it up several weeks ago at Northshire, another one of the books I  grabbed from their New York Review Books display. So, it was already in the queue, but then I read a BBC article singing its praises as books to read this summer, so it jumped the queue. It tells the story of Anna and Tom, an expat couple living in Berlin and the life that they think they're living. Essentially, they're the couple that Janet and I do not want to be when we head overseas. Yesterday I shared this section with several of my friends.

They lived a double life. There was the tangible reality around them, and there were the images, also all around them.

Those images would be on the phone that woke them up. An astronaut singing in outer space. A girl riding a wrecking ball. They would light up their pillows as they roused from sleep, and parade, one after the other, beneath their fingertips while they used the bathroom. They would be there in the kitchen on the tablet as Anna and Tom waited for their coffee to brew, then reappear seamlessly on their monitors in the home office. A jealous husband's threats graffitied across the front of a house. Goats teetering on a cliffside or at the edge of a highway overpass. Whenever they went out for lunch, the images would shrink to the size of the rectangular screen, and hover, midair, a foot above their plates. A tornado of sharks in the sky. While they waited for the U8 or the M29. While they took a piss. A famous woman spraying an arc of champagne backwards over her head into a wineglass balanced on her tailbone. Those images lit up their faces in the dark bedroom when they went to set the alarm. The faces of strangers. The faces of handsome criminals. Avocado slices.

Granted, millions of people live that "double life" here, without ever bothering to move overseas, but for some reason it seems so much worse if you've made the break with your home country and you're throwing away your time in your new dream. If you're living that double life in Kansas I guess that's just a form of self-medication, but if you're doing it in Italy or Portugal it seems almost criminal.

Latronico's Perfection is very highly recommended.