Berlin-based Latronico self-consciously recreates Georges Perec’s 1965 novel, Things: A Story of the Sixties in the 21st Century.
Anna and Tom are an expat millennial couple whose carefully curated existence in Berlin is painstakingly itemised across two decades.
They live in Instagram, under Danish angle poises, on honey wood floorboards, with first edition Kraftwerk LPs and Taschen-crammed book shelves.
Their days pass in cafés with excellent wifi. The notion that the digital space has created a homogenised “authentic” visual ideal replicated across bars and coffee shops and social media feeds from London to New York isn’t new, but this sly, savage little novel, written in the third person plural without dialogue, apes the same surface-driven aesthetic it satirises, ramming it home.
Somehow it all feels slightly unfulfilling until reality arrives in the shape of the 2015 migration crisis, gentrification and tech bros, and our protagonists’ yearning reaches a crisis point.
Do they actually desire, or just desire to desire?
