Successful lives, yet never meaningful. “Le perfezioni” is a portrait of a restless generation

Vincenzo Latronico’s “Le perfezioni” is one of the novels that best captures the contradictions of the present day. Although little known in Italy, it has become a publishing sensation abroad: walk into any bookshop in London or New York and you’ll find it prominently displayed amongst the bestsellers and on the recommended reading shelves. It is precisely "Le perfezioni" that sparks this conversation between two bibliophiles who, whilst pursuing other careers, believe that reading is the only true remedy for so many of today’s ills.

Federico Freni: “Le perfezioni” recounts the unease of a generation – our own, that of us forty-somethings today – which struggles to find its place in the world. An unease that goes far beyond each of our physical locations; an unease that speaks to us of a generation’s “place” in the flow of time. Reading it, it seems that many of the certainties that underpinned the 1990s and the early 2000s are crumbling.

Moreno Trisotto: For me, the central theme of the book is uprooting. Not just in a geographical sense – of those who leave everything behind to live elsewhere – but something deeper: linguistic, emotional, and even temporal. Anna and Tom – the novel’s protagonists – never seem fully present in the here and now, in the place and moment in which they find themselves. They live constantly looking towards a more fulfilled version of their lives, which nevertheless continues to change and shift ever a little further away.

FF: A sort of ‘Desert of the Tartars’: the days are filled with palliatives, a constant mise en place for a dinner that never arrives. Something which, as we were saying, goes beyond individual circumstances and spills over into a generational assessment.

MT: Rather, a collective generational portrait: a formally successful life, yet one in which every experience becomes almost an exercise in style. Is this not perhaps a reflection of how we tell our stories today through the filter of social media? The right pose, the perfect shot, in constant pursuit of an artificial authenticity.

FF: This message, however, implies a sense of resignation that we cannot and must not accept. It would mean giving up on the future. I, too, of course, see a sense of alienation which, for many, is veering towards resignation. I see it, too, in my own small way, in the urgent need to simplify at any cost anything that appears even slightly complex. However, the perception of all this cannot and must not lead to acceptance or, worse still, to resignation.

MT: Focusing on uprooting is, in itself, a first step towards breaking free from its grip: it is not a matter of recapturing certainties that no longer exist, but rather of accepting imperfection as a space for choice and, perhaps, even for freedom. Literature serves this purpose too: to give a name to our unease, before it ends up appearing to us as an inevitable fate.

FF: The feeling that remains with me, however, is that imperfection is not so much a choice as a painful, unconscious necessity. At times, it is a fate, in the broadest classical sense of ananke. And this is what I cannot and will not resign myself to. We can name this malaise and recognise it through the maieutic intervention of literature, but until we find the energy and the will to tackle the root causes of this malaise and resolve it, we shall remain spectators of a fate rather than its architects.

MT: But this is what literature is for: it accurately describes a sense of unease, whilst leaving the path from awareness to action open. Literature does not save us, but it reveals the cracks. It is up to politics to address those causes; it is up to us, the readers, to transform that unease into a collective demand strong enough to enter the public sphere and bring about concrete decisions.

FF: Right, politics. I feel this applies to me. But what do you think politics should do? Because politics, it’s true, gathers demands and messages and translates them into concrete decisions. But discontent is now a message that is far too widespread and terribly diverse to be captured in such precise terms. The risk is that, when faced with discontent, we focus more on the immediate nature of the problem than on its underlying structure. In short, translating this discontent into structural solutions is less straightforward than it seems.

MT: The role of politics is not to grasp every nuance of hardship: it is to recognise the concrete conditions that make it so widespread. Stagnant wages, precarious employment, housing that is increasingly difficult to afford without family support, and services that are insufficient to guarantee true independence. Our generation is not just more restless: in Italy, at the same age, it has accumulated less wealth than our parents’ generation. Starting from this point means setting a direction. Otherwise, we will continue to call ‘a choice’ what is often a necessity, including leaving to build an independent – and often better – life elsewhere.

FF: But is it the role of politics to provide these answers? Are we certain we are not prisoners of an outdated notion of the state? Because, let’s be clear, wages are not set by the state, but by the market; employment is precarious because – as everywhere else in the world – contractual arrangements and terms have evolved (for better or worse) towards a previously unknown fluidity. None of us expects to retire in the same place where we were first employed: the market is, by its very nature, fluid. Wealth is concentrated, but this concentration is a structural phenomenon born of the new mercantilism: nor is it a new phenomenon; it has been growing steadily since the 1980s. In every sector, we are witnessing a gradual erosion of the concept of ownership: from car-sharing to operational leases of computers and phones, right through to new forms of property management. In short, I would not want politics to be the smokescreen behind which we all hide our difficulties in adapting to changing times. Because today, more than ever, it is those who ride the wave of change who succeed (and survive), not those who stand still and look back.

M: That’s true, but the market isn’t a law of nature: it operates within rules and institutions. The same applies to ownership: sharing and renting are sensible choices, but they could also stem from a genuine lack of liquidity. Do I not buy because I don’t want to own, or because I can no longer afford it? Sometimes I get the impression that what we present as new freedoms are, at least in part, creative responses to a structural limitation.

F: The debate surrounding the market as an artificial construct dates back a few years now. And at the risk of coming across as the free-market advocate that I am not, I’ll tell you that any attempt to rein in the market or subject it to third-party demands is doomed to failure from the outset. We would, moreover, have to embark on a lengthy discussion about what the market actually is… And that seems a bit too much…

M: But you’ll agree that we’re living increasingly concentrated in large cities; we’re becoming ever more mobile, surrounded by people with whom we share spaces and services, yet with whom we share ever less of a shared history and a vision for the future. When the bond between the individual and the community weakens, it becomes harder to recognise ourselves as part of something. This sense of alienation also stems from this: from no longer feeling part of a whole.

Q: Because perhaps, as Chabod said, although we are a state, we have not yet fully internalised a complete concept of the nation.

M: That’s great, but it doesn’t solve the problem.

Q: To solve the problem, we should stop thinking we need to do more. Perhaps we should just do things differently.

M: Yes, but how?

Q: Think (as rather everyone is doing these days) of Ulysses: seeing an opportunity where for nine years everyone else had seen only impregnable walls. Politics today must provide the tools, not (merely) a ready-made set of possible solutions. Because it is only natural to erect walls in defence of what we have internalised as our deepest identity, but I truly do not believe we can afford to wait nine years behind these walls. In short (to borrow Citati’s translation of the first line of the Odyssey), we need a ‘colourful mind’. That, in my view, is our task today: to help shape colourful minds.

M: Exactly: reading also nurtures the imagination. Not least because, as Calvino would say, we must ‘seek out and recognise who and what, in the midst of hell, is not hell, and make it last, and give it space.’