The first chapter of the Sophie Hughes translation of this book refers to

a black metal side table with past issues of Monocle and The New Yorker stacked beside a brass candleholder

I read this book, a birthday present from a friend, while sitting beside a black metal side table with past issues of Monocle and The New Yorker stacked beside a refillable glass jar candle. I felt seen.

Latronico’s slim novel is a sharp and quietly devastating satire of modern millennial life: the digital nomad, the curated flat white, the performative relocation to Lisbon, and the self-congratulatory minimalism of the internationally mobile. The prose is clean and deliberate, and the tone is coolly distant: we’re watching a couple build their life (or their content?) through the lens of aesthetic choices and geo-tagged escapism.

I read it in a single sitting and found it enormously enjoyable. It felt very much grounded in the present, a 2020s blend of irony, yearning, and careful lighting. Latronico skewers the way social media distorts not just the image we present, but the choices we make: what we eat, where we live, how we frame our success. The characters are less people than case studies, which feels exactly right. The distance allows room for commentary.

I particularly enjoyed this observation:

Differences of opinion that, online, were expressed in sarcastic retorts and subtweets would feel far less extreme in person. Somehow, value systems that seemed completely incompatible on social feeds could find a middle ground around a table at a café.

This is a novel about what we trade away in the pursuit of beauty and belonging. The aesthetic lives described here are not soothing; they’re brittle, polished to the point of falseness. Reading Perfection made me think of We Had to Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets. Her book is very different in tone and setting, but is another short novel that explores the corrosive influence of online life on human connection.

If you’ve ever gasped as someone carefully crops a selfie to make their life look a little more like an ideal—only to see the flat sadness return the moment the camera’s away—this one’s for you.