Expat freelance digital creatives Anna and Tom live highly curated lives in Berlin. The novel describes in detail their tasteful, plant lined flat with Danish furniture and time spent at gallery openings, parties, cooking and experimental orgies in search of authentic experiences. They work from home in their flat as website graphic designers, filling their breaks with social media updates – so they spend most of their time online.
They lived in a country whose language they didn’t speak, in a job with unclear boundaries and no fixed hours or base, and which was, to a great extent, subject to the whims of their clients and social media contacts. The environment where they slept and worked, and which they themselves had chosen and shaped, was the one tangible manifestation of who they were. That apartment and those objects weren’t merely reflections of their personalities: they provided a foothold…
The couple spend 10 years in Berlin from the early 2010s and we follow them as their friends gradually move away, the city is gentrified, their youthful joy ebbs away and their lives begin to feel empty. Possibly because they are so focussed on their things and their image in the eyes of other expats that they fail to build real connections, not mixing at all with local people. Eventually they move to Lisbon, then Sicily, then back to Berlin in search for what is missing.
They flew, then drove. The sensation of winding their way through the Mediterranean hills with their bags piled up on the back seat immediately made them feel like they were on an adventure; but the landscape gradually lost its splendour the further they drove from the coast, until it looked like any old countryside, which was what it was.
Perfection is a tribute to Georges Perec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties set in Paris. How do we live when we become constrained by our own projection of an image of a perfect life? I was a little surprised that the story kept me engaged as not much actually happens. The reader is simply watching the couple’s years roll by through the disconnected gaze of the author. The search for perfection comes at the cost of authenticity. Read Perfection as a reality check on what is actually important in life.
