“Now, if you’re someone inclined to pick up new fiction in translation published by New York Review Books, it’s probably pretty likely that you actually are Anna and Tom.” 🙋♀️
Love! This review is brilliant and made me laugh - especially this line "I would post the Homer Simpson “It’s true, it’s true, we are so lame” GIF, but I fear that would only further indict me as a terminal millennial." and the fact that yes, all of us who want to read this are probably Anna and Tom. Arguably, this is the best Perfection review I've read! It has made me more interested in reading it.
Your capsule summary of the kind of people they are reminds me of the one decent observation David Brooks ever made: of the "Bobo" the Bourgeois Bohemian, consuming furiously yet convinced they are uniquely -- ethically, even -- sensitive and personalized in their desire to explore and seek sensation rather than mere consumption or gentrification. Funny that he was talking about Boomers, though, and yet the trope lives on. It's not a good book, but his specific limning of that category of person/consumer was surprising apt for a guy who's mostly a tool.
I wonder if both of your proposed readings are really right, at least in the sense of defensibly existing in the same narrative, and that part of the reason for picking the first is the crushing literalness someone else was recently describing in all of our cultural production, a sense that audiences can't be trusted to figure it out and should be told what to take from the art.
Finally, NYR published another Berlin novel that is considerably more anarchic and weird, because it is set literally between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification. Star 111 by Lutz Seiler is both an amazing time capsule in terms of a time and place but also of a consciousness formed by the times without any pollution by the present day's recollection of it. It made me realize how even my memories of my youth have been retroactively affected by the Internet. Highly recommend.
There’s a little bit of having your cake and eating it too with this type of cultural product that both satirizes and flatters (flatterizes? Did I just coin something?) its dual subject/audience. It allows you to perform public penance for your privilege (excuse the alliteration) while also casting that privilege as a burden for which you deserve some degree of sympathy. If capitalism hadn’t trapped me in this gilded cage, I would’ve done something important! What, exactly, is unclear. But I think millennials in particular feel that they should’ve done something *more* with their lives than simply sought a comfortable, middle-class life—an anxiety that I think most members of prior generations did not share and find kind of unfathomable. I think it speaks to the genuine attractiveness of Anna and Tom’s lifestyle (and the weakness of the conceit that it’s self-evidently empty) that Latronico’s narrator has to quite often be explicit that you’re not supposed to aspire to it. That said, I did really like the book, precisely because it invites this kind of discussion.
Well, it's also just ambiguous and ambivalent, two qualities that are out of vogue these days (due to AI, data, Internet, etc.?) but used to be considered rather desirable, at least in some circles. Certainly it's what always drew me to Surrealism and noir (which is a weird line of implicit moral certainty blended with extremely a- and un-moral characters and situations, hence the existentialist appeal) as well as weird poetry that seems to dance between two or more meanings at once (such as early John Ashbery but also Lautreamont, Rimbaud and Corbiere and LaForgue, and Anne Carson, Bernadette Mayer, or CD Wright or George Oppen) even though I also appreciated the more concrete ways of a WCW or Gary Snyder or Blake).
A major reason that I liked Star 111 is that as much as it is obviously based closely on the author's life and experience, it isn't only autobiographical, and much of the best moments are the throwaway asides that come from the moment of the character's situation rather than from some attempt to wrest meaning or significance from events.
One (of many) reasons I dislike the current sad literary boys pretend problem of "men just aren't writing men anymore" is that it so desperately presumes there is some one way to write (approximately mimetic) and some one way to depict characters/characterization, and anything else is "wrong" somehow. All of which is implicit and they all pretend isn't there. We would do better with more ambiguity and more ambivalence about. . .well, everything perhaps. Anyway. Sorry. I'll shut up now.
“Now, if you’re someone inclined to pick up new fiction in translation published by New York Review Books, it’s probably pretty likely that you actually are Anna and Tom.” 🙋♀️
Love! This review is brilliant and made me laugh - especially this line "I would post the Homer Simpson “It’s true, it’s true, we are so lame” GIF, but I fear that would only further indict me as a terminal millennial." and the fact that yes, all of us who want to read this are probably Anna and Tom. Arguably, this is the best Perfection review I've read! It has made me more interested in reading it.
Thanks, Martha. Glad you enjoyed it!
Your capsule summary of the kind of people they are reminds me of the one decent observation David Brooks ever made: of the "Bobo" the Bourgeois Bohemian, consuming furiously yet convinced they are uniquely -- ethically, even -- sensitive and personalized in their desire to explore and seek sensation rather than mere consumption or gentrification. Funny that he was talking about Boomers, though, and yet the trope lives on. It's not a good book, but his specific limning of that category of person/consumer was surprising apt for a guy who's mostly a tool.
I wonder if both of your proposed readings are really right, at least in the sense of defensibly existing in the same narrative, and that part of the reason for picking the first is the crushing literalness someone else was recently describing in all of our cultural production, a sense that audiences can't be trusted to figure it out and should be told what to take from the art.
Finally, NYR published another Berlin novel that is considerably more anarchic and weird, because it is set literally between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification. Star 111 by Lutz Seiler is both an amazing time capsule in terms of a time and place but also of a consciousness formed by the times without any pollution by the present day's recollection of it. It made me realize how even my memories of my youth have been retroactively affected by the Internet. Highly recommend.
There’s a little bit of having your cake and eating it too with this type of cultural product that both satirizes and flatters (flatterizes? Did I just coin something?) its dual subject/audience. It allows you to perform public penance for your privilege (excuse the alliteration) while also casting that privilege as a burden for which you deserve some degree of sympathy. If capitalism hadn’t trapped me in this gilded cage, I would’ve done something important! What, exactly, is unclear. But I think millennials in particular feel that they should’ve done something *more* with their lives than simply sought a comfortable, middle-class life—an anxiety that I think most members of prior generations did not share and find kind of unfathomable. I think it speaks to the genuine attractiveness of Anna and Tom’s lifestyle (and the weakness of the conceit that it’s self-evidently empty) that Latronico’s narrator has to quite often be explicit that you’re not supposed to aspire to it. That said, I did really like the book, precisely because it invites this kind of discussion.
Well, it's also just ambiguous and ambivalent, two qualities that are out of vogue these days (due to AI, data, Internet, etc.?) but used to be considered rather desirable, at least in some circles. Certainly it's what always drew me to Surrealism and noir (which is a weird line of implicit moral certainty blended with extremely a- and un-moral characters and situations, hence the existentialist appeal) as well as weird poetry that seems to dance between two or more meanings at once (such as early John Ashbery but also Lautreamont, Rimbaud and Corbiere and LaForgue, and Anne Carson, Bernadette Mayer, or CD Wright or George Oppen) even though I also appreciated the more concrete ways of a WCW or Gary Snyder or Blake).
A major reason that I liked Star 111 is that as much as it is obviously based closely on the author's life and experience, it isn't only autobiographical, and much of the best moments are the throwaway asides that come from the moment of the character's situation rather than from some attempt to wrest meaning or significance from events.
One (of many) reasons I dislike the current sad literary boys pretend problem of "men just aren't writing men anymore" is that it so desperately presumes there is some one way to write (approximately mimetic) and some one way to depict characters/characterization, and anything else is "wrong" somehow. All of which is implicit and they all pretend isn't there. We would do better with more ambiguity and more ambivalence about. . .well, everything perhaps. Anyway. Sorry. I'll shut up now.