The Italian author has only been at the Gothenburg Book Fair for "like 20 minutes" but has already been interviewed for "Babel" and managed to take a selfie on the fair floor with an admirer before it's time for the next interview.
This is not what he thought it would be like when, during the pandemic, after a crippling bout of writer's block, he began copying Georges Perec's "The Thing" sentence by sentence and giving the story a modern context.
With a cold, observant eye, the privileged, Instagram-friendly existence of millennial couple Tom and Anna in Berlin in the 2010s is described object by object. But where Perec satirized 1960s consumerism, Latronico's depiction of modern man's dream of the perfect life is rendered with more sympathy, almost tenderness.
"I have also lived a life that is very similar to the one they live. The people in my book not only resemble my friends, most of the details in the book are also real," he says.
I took them from other people's lives. And I think you're allowed to do that if you're a writer - but you also have a responsibility to treat them generously, not just use them to make fun of yourself.
“We are compliant”
"Perfection" takes place a number of years ago, but could just as easily have been about a couple in Stockholm or Gothenburg in 2026. Why do our dreams look the same everywhere in the world?
We conform. We learn to dream by copying other people's dreams. It's always been that way, I mean why did the Romans want to wear purple tunics? Well, because other Romans wore them.
The difference now is that the transfer of ideals is super-precise and instantaneous, like an avalanche. This makes the homogeneity more striking today.
Left Berlin
Vincenzo Latronico himself lived in Berlin for a total of twelve years and thought he would stay there forever. But a few years ago he moved back to Italy.
I spent many years trying to establish myself in Berlin. I took myself to new levels: you have to have a stable economy in Berlin, you have to speak good German, you have to have German friends, you have to get a book published in German, you have to undergo psychoanalysis - in German. I did all that, but as soon as I had ticked all the boxes and felt 'now I actually belong here', I moved back to Italy," he says, laughing.
... writer's block:
I called it writer's block, but I think it was because I was trying to give myself the task of writing a "real" novel with dialogue and well-crafted main characters - all that. I wrote 100 pages of project after project and then I stopped. I thought it was because I wasn't good enough, but it was probably because I got bored with what I was writing.
... the love of a Swedish author:
She is present in this book. Her tone, her style, her way of looking at things - that is Lena Andersson. I'm sure you can see that there is a lot of her here.
... the difference between "Perfection" and his other books:
"Perfection" is extremely deliberately superficial, I try to explain based on surfaces. My way of writing doesn't usually work that way. But there is something in "Perfection" that recurs and that is my "coldness", my way of describing things - that is also found in my new book. But it also has no dialogue, I hate dialogue.
... their favorite authors:
In my teens it was Borges, in my twenties it was Bolano, Didion when I was 30 and in my 40s I started with Janet Malcolm. She tries to understand things through her writing rather than represent them.
Born: In Rome, Italy, 1984.
Lives: In Milan.
Occupation: Writer, art critic and translator. Has translated works by George Orwell, Oscar Wilde and F Scott Fitzgerald, among others.
Books: “Perfection” is Latronico’s fourth novel and the first to be translated into Swedish. The book has been translated and sold in more than 40 countries.
Current: Participating at the Gothenburg Book Fair. Appearing at the International Authors' Stage at the City Theatre in Stockholm on September 28th. Has just published the new book "Una splendida rovina" (Approximately "A splendid ruin" in Swedish) in Italian.
