Perfection

This is a fairly unpleasant read, and, I suspect, deliberately so. Monotone, relatively eventless, without dialogue, the experience reminded me of watching a French film from the seventies, one of those film you know is worth watching even if it's boring.

The story is about a couple of creative freelancers from Southern Europe, Tom and Anna, moving to Berlin in their twenties, feeling very cool for it, but also never cool enough. They wish there was more to life, and struggle to appreciate what they have, which is, objectively speaking, a lot: plenty of free time, enough disposable income, a really nice flat, a lively city around them. Some brief windows of hope open when they get political engaged during the 2015 refugee crisis, or when they put their energy into work in the hope to be able to open their own design agency. Both are short-lived and end with a feeling of failure. As they get older, their friendships, never profound, fade, as does their desire to explore the city, which is also changing, becoming more and more gentrified and generic.

Of course, there were many, too many aspects of the book I related to. Something the book does very well, I think, is to convey the frustration generated by wanting to be 'good' and not knowing how, of striving for a fulfilling life but being stuck in a general lack of meaning, embodying all these 'hateable' cliches (owning monstera plants, playing Catan, hosting elaborated dinner parties) that are objectively completely harmless and fine. Something that I found problematic, however, is that the book veers between the general (the couple comes, generically, from Southern Europe, the friends have no name, time slips by without many orientating landmarks) and the specific (certain Berlin bars and clubs, the refugee crisis as a defining moment, etc.). In this picking and choosing of reality, I thought some important conditions get lost: for example the fact that a large share of our generation either graduated into, or faces as a newly employed person, a major financial crisis; or the fact that middle-class Southern Europeans may well move to Berlin in pursuit of cultural vibrancy and fun, but those left behind do not stay allured by financial stability (permanent contracts and pension? where does Vincenzo live?). And the idea that Berlin hipsters would import back vanguard ideas and taste is a little passé, and, even accounting for the fact that maybe that's the view of Tom and Anna, rather than Vincenzo, I think most Southern European hipsters would be too self-aware to subscribe to it.