The short story collection is a difficult and awkward form. It lacks the unity of the novel, and unlike a narrative that stands alone in a literary or cultural magazine, each story seems as if it should somehow be connected to the other stories around it. This, of course, is despite the fact that many of the stories in the collection will have already been published separately in the aforementioned magazines and journals.

Perfection is a modern-day myth. The recently translated novel, now shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, tells the story of Anna and Tom, a young European couple who move to Berlin around 2010, but beyond that I can’t tell you much about them. I don’t know where they’re from — one would assume Italy, like the novel’s author, Vincenzo Latronico — what they look like, or what happened in their childhood. I don’t know how they talk because there is no dialogue in the novel. I can barely even tell you about a single incident from their lives in any precise detail. This is not a weakness of Perfection, however, but a strength.