Interview by Nell Whittaker
Portrait by Sohrab Golsorkhi-Ainslie

NW Since Perfection was published in Italian in 2022, how have you accounted for the popularity of meme formats which do a similar thing to the novel – break down a typology of person by way of their consumer habits and anxieties?

VL While each meme satirises a specific kind of person, all of us are several kinds of satirisable people, which is the effect I wanted to have with the book too. One of the first reviews that came out in Italy was written by a journalist in her twenties. Even though she’s younger than my characters, she wrote, “This book can be read as a gigantic ‘tag yourself’ meme”. What I like about it is that the “tag yourself” meme is satire, but it’s also inviting. It does not make fun of its subjects in a way that feels cruel or cheap. I also wanted to be kind and generous towards the people who see themselves in my characters, because I see myself in those characters. All of the little details that make up their life come from the lives of my friends and people I know. I didn’t mean to just satirise some sort of shallowness.

NW The meme and the novel both show what’s there, but also about what’s not there – that’s the tragic element of the novel. There’s this huge sense of who Anna and Tom are, but also who they aren’t.

VL The characters are haunted by this sense of dissatisfaction, a lack of authenticity, which is something I also feel, and we all do to a certain extent. But we realise that any sense of belonging you can just simulate by acquiring a couple of signifiers has no deep connections. In my novel, the reason these characters don’t engage with their surroundings, and why their political activism is short and superficial, is because they don’t really belong there. They have no stake. The entry price was one easyJet ticket, and the exit price is also one easyJet ticket. So why bother?

NW The novel is the story of the social life of globalisation. You write that the friends Tom and Anna left behind in their own country in southern Europe would be out of a job if a factory closed, whereas Anna and Tom have “an entire network of international contacts they could draw on”. It began in 2008 – is that time period when globalisation was making itself visible in the cultural sphere as a positive thing?

VL At the time, Google’s slogan was “Don’t be evil”, and people believed it. The year 2008 was also when Facebook opened to everyone. All of a sudden, these people that I had lost contact with – wow! Here they are. You felt that your horizon was expanding. One of the book’s subtexts that not so often gets picked up is that this is also a story of a time when we thought that Europe was on a path towards unification. Anna and Tom were born using different currencies to the euro. There was still maybe a delusion, but perhaps a legitimate optimism: that this process of digitisation would also bring about a certain degree of freedom. 

NW Why did you make the couple graphic designers?

VL My book started out as a rewriting of Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965) by Georges Perec, which doesn’t steer too far from its model. His two protagonists, who are in thrall to the messages of consumer culture, are also part of it, because they work as marketing researchers for the same advertising companies that convince them that their happiness is only the right sofa away. Anna and Tom master the language of presentation through social media, which also makes them more vulnerable to it. Being graphic designers makes them powerful, but also more vulnerable to this kind of image culture.

NW They’re also more aware, because they’re producing the branding, of phases in commercial enterprises. The Neapolitan-style pizza of the 2000s giving way to the kombucha of the 2010s, for instance. There was a line that really stuck out, which was that food is their culture, and they discussed it in a way that previous generations would discuss film, books and art.

VM I’m happy you picked up on this, because this is one of the nastiest things I put in. This is a line that I’ve heard several times, that talking about food today is what talking about experimental cinema was in the 1970s. People tend to be conformist, but not all conformism is the same. One could legitimately say that in 1968, many of the people who demonstrated against the war in Vietnam did it out of conformity. yet, the level of engagement and intellectual investment that you have to put into becoming a foodie is much lower than what you have to put into becoming a movie buff. 

NW My final question is a big one. What, do you think, is happiness?

VL I’ve been thinking about this recently, because I am writing something loosely inspired by a couple of years I spent in the countryside renovating a run-down farmhouse with some friends. It was a project doomed to fail from the start, which is exactly what happened. We were running out of money, it was clear the project was going nowhere, and we were fighting all the time. It was winter. We were working on a construction site in the snow in northern Germany. It was always dark. It was really one of the unhappiest periods of my life. And yet, the single days were full of a different kind of very localised happiness. I was working construction all day, which is tiresome and dangerous, but it’s also very rewarding. You’re there working on a ceiling, and your shoulders are in pain, your neck hurts, and you’re covered in dirt. But at the end of the day, you look at the ceiling and it’s done. There is something there. So if I look back at that time, it was full of moments of happiness, but it was an extremely unhappy period in general. My novel describes exactly the opposite, because it describes some years of, by every measure, a happy life. Anna and Tom have a happy life, but they are lacking in happy moments, or lacking in moments of fulfilment or joy. Perhaps we should use two different words for that. .