Perfection – On soulless, Instagram-ready and perfect modern lives

In 1965, Georges Perec wrote ‘Les Choses: Une histoire des années soixante’ (‘Things: A story of the sixties’) a french novel about a couple, but more about everything they own, about all the things around them. Perec meticulously describes everything from their furniture to their carpets to their clothes to all their material wants. You know of the couple, but you never get to know them. But you do get to know all the things around them until they decide in vain to escape their life. Perec ends with a quote from Marx: ‘The means are part of the truth as well as the result. The search for truth must be true itself; it is the unfolded truth, whose scattered members come together in the result.’ Italian author Vincenzo Latronico’s ‘Perfection’ is, in my mind, a spiritual successor to Perec’s ‘Things’, with lots going on online – naturally. For anyone who has read one of these books, it becomes impossible to compare it to the other. Which is not to say either is not meritorious, rather…