Vincenzo Latronico

Thought provoking and full of aimless disillusionment. This hits me personally due to my own status as an expat and numerous parallels I see here between text and life, making the reading experience at times painful, but the kind of painful like pressing on a bruise to make sure it still hurts in the way you have grown accustomed to.

This felt so close to my own life, or rather the life I came so close to living... While still at university studying Physics, I fell in love with HTML and CSS and spent a very pleasant winter break not studying quantum mechanics but instead delving into the similarly opaque nonsense of the box model, listening to Kid A while trying to get my page to look good both in Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.

Eventually my career took me in another direction, but the outcome has been so show more similar to that described by Latronico in this beautiful short book. It is astonishing how much life he squeezes into these pages, all without a single line of dialogue. There is happiness here, but for every silver lining it feels as though the clouds are only getting bigger. show less

A remake of Perec‘s Les Choses updated from the 1960s to the 2010s, and following a couple of freelance web designers from southern Europe living in Berlin. Like Perec, Latronico opens with a detailed description of furnishings and treats Tom-and-Anna as a single undifferentiated character for most of the book, as well as nodding to a number of other key themes in the original, but of course he also digs into a lot of topics that are more specific to the lives of expat millennials in show more Berlin. It‘s interesting to see how closely the world of Parisian advertising and marketing people in the sixties maps onto the coders, designers and trendy restauranteurs of fifty years later: when it comes down to it and the expat community are trying to do their bit for Syrian refugees, Tom and Anna realise that not one of their friends has a skill that translates into real-world utility.

Latronico is bitterer than Perec, and gives his characters a harder time. Even when they have a stroke of luck that leaves them in a position to build a successful business at the end of the book without getting onto the rat-race, he makes sure we realise that he is leaving them hanging on the threshold of the pandemic. But there are a lot of very telling observations here: I felt that he got an enormous amount into a very small canvas. show less

Oh boy, this novel is an update to Perec's 1965 debut, and its tone is simultaneously hilarious, repulsive, and fascinating. It is caustic and snarky, yet keeps an authorial distance from the zoo-like specimens he analyses. Honestly, it's almost entirely a book of "descriptions".
Descriptions you are going to recognize and think "fucking Instagram". At the same time, it serves as a go-to source for remembering the detritus of this era. The book is a zeitgeist describer; there is no show more meaningful story. They couldn't be more bland as protagonists go. Absolutely uninteresting and almost the last people you would want to read about...but that's what makes it weird to read a whole book about them. But it isn't really about them, but about us. People actually aspire to be as empty as these characters. Creating a lifestyle curated and managed to have peak appeal online. This is where we are at. These characters didn't grow at all. The novel has a lovely circularity in how Anna and Tom learn absolutely nothing.

Characters seeking authenticity while they refuse to break from an inauthentic world are not gonna turn out well. Far from them to realize that winning at the end is still, in the end, losing. But it's a losing some people would kill for...the banality of the modern aspirational couple. The one negative with this writing is that it feels highly artificial as you never get to enter their heads or know how they really feel...but there is still enough going on to recommend it. Oh, and it's short too. show less