The International Booker-longlisted Italian novelist on why he chose to rewrite Georges Perec, his preference for description over dialogue and being part of an anti-gentrification collective in Milan

Vincenzo Latronico, 40, was born in Rome and grew up in Milan. In 2009, he moved to Berlin, the setting of his fourth novel, Perfection, currently longlisted (in Sophie Hughes’s translation) for the International Booker prize. Ecstatically reviewed, it updates Georges Perec’s 1965 novel Things: A Story of the Sixties, about advertising’s impact on an aspirational young French couple, recast by Latronico as expat digital creatives whose first reflex “if they spilled some coffee... was to press Command-Z” to undo it. Speaking from Milan, his home again since 2023, Latronico laughs when I quote the line: “That happens to me all the time!”

Why did you want to rewrite Perec’s Things?
It was almost a way to keep my mental health in lockdown. I thought: “OK, you’re not managing to write anything creative, so just pedantically rewrite Perec.” It took on a life of its own but began as an exercise in keeping busy. I’d been struggling for years to capture the way our inner life is shaped by the flow of images we see online. My sexuality is defined by images I’ve seen of how people have sex; my apartment is defined by images of other people’s apartments... I read Things and immediately saw parallels. Perec was trying to describe the life of someone whose identity is defined by their relationship to objects. He flipped the hierarchy of a traditional novel by putting his characters in the background; the detail of their surroundings becomes the main stage, which was exactly what I needed.