Perfection is a short novel about Anna and Tom, a couple of "digital creatives" living and working in Berlin during the early 2000s. They alternate between feeling self-satisfied with their expatriate life and feeling anxious about the mismatch between that life and the version they curate on social media.
It is a life of coffees taken out on the east-facing balcony... while scrolling New York Times headlines and social media on a tablet. the plants are watered as part of a daily routine that also includes yoga and a breakfast featuring an assortment of seeds. ... And it is a happy life...for rental at one hundred and eighteen euros a day, plus the fee to cover the Ukrainian cleaner, paid through a French gig economy company that files its taxes in Ireland; plus the commission for the online hosting platform, with offices in California but tax-registered in the Netherlands...
Their social circle consists of young people just like them, meeting in clubs and galleries and speaking (non-native) English. They are in Berlin, but it could be any cosmopolitan city in the world. Anna and Tom eventually get bored and look for a way to recapture the excitement of their earlier adventure.
What was happening in the city—the replacement of its historical inhabitants with younger, wealthier newcomers, and the resulting price hikes and decline in diversity—was gentrification, a term used almost exclusively by the people who caused it.
The author has a delightfully droll way of describing modern life, where we gain aspirations from online sources and desire authentic experience as long as we also have a good WiFi signal. He captures the contradictory desires for unique lives and shared culture.
Anna and Tom stand in for an entire cohort of young online professionals: "an identical struggle for a different life motivated an entire sector of their generation... Mysteriously enough, they had discovered homemade fermentation kits, fire-roasted cauliflower, and umami at the same time..." Their symbolic nature means that they lack individuality as characters, much like Berlin is flattened into a generic global city.
The comparatively brief length and the lack of character development make Perfection feel more like a long short story.
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