DR has published a feature on Italian author Vincenzo Latronico, whose bestselling novel “Perfektioner” ties millennial consumer culture to the loss of affordable housing in Europe’s big cities.
According to DR, the 42-year-old author recently visited Denmark, where the novel came out in May. It is already in its third printing and has been published in 42 countries.
Latronico told DR’s P1 program K-live that the idea came while he was scrolling Instagram out of boredom. He noticed that other users had furnished their apartments almost exactly like his own.
The Danish edition was published by Turbine on 21 May 2026, translated from Italian by Amalie Harder Hesel, according to the literary site Littuna. The Italian original, “Le perfezioni,” won the Premio Mondello in 2022 and was longlisted for the Premio Strega the same year, per the Einaudi listing on La Feltrinelli. The same listing states that the book was a finalist for the International Booker Prize in 2025.
The novel follows Tom and Anna, an Italian couple who have settled in Berlin. They work as freelance graphic designers from a cheap rental apartment they consider themselves lucky to have found. The flat is also let to Airbnb guests.
Their days mix interior design, galleries, gourmet food, gossip, freelance work and social media. Latronico described the mechanism to DR as ultimate consumerism, where what you buy says something about who you are.
A rewrite of a 1965 novel
Latronico said the book began as a study of social media, but ended up closely following George Perec’s 1965 novel “Ting.” He described his own work as simply updating the surface of a book about consumer culture and advertising on television and in magazines.
In Perec’s novel, the apartment is full of dark leather, sand tones and mahogany, and the main characters work as market analysts. In “Perfektioner,” the apartment has a light Nordic feel and more plants, and the couple are freelancers. Perec’s characters engage briefly with the war in Algeria; Latronico’s become short-term activists in the migrant crisis.
DR notes that the book describes the group Dutch journalist Jonas Kooyman named the “oat milk elite.” They have neither permanent jobs nor the means to buy property in the city, but acquire cultural capital through design furniture, natural wine and Aesop soap.
Latronico told DR that his personal indignation lies in current property prices. He grew up believing that a job would secure a home, a car and a family. He called what is happening on the housing market in every large European city an erosion of a right that workers previously won.
He said he fears the housing market is only the beginning, and that health coverage and the right to education could erode next. Drinking natural wine with friends, he told DR, is also a form of mourning for a lost worker’s right.
