Milan-based novelist. In his novel Perfection two Italian expats live in Berlin, and search for authenticity in coffee beans, clubs, crappy apartments and on Instagram. Reality arrives in the form of refugees, aging and hypercapitalism. 
SP
Vincenzo, you’re book is so close to why we started the ERB: the lives of your 2 Italians in Berlin are monoplized by an online world created in California, their intellectual horizon is formed by the NYT and The Guardian (we used that same sentence in pitching the ERB!). And now that we’ve noticed and are annoyed by this? EVERY conversation has just been hijacked by the President of the US. What will bloom in the shadow of the US?
VL
I think in some ways US culture lost the relevance it had two decades ago. I grew up admiring Franzen and Wallace and Delillo and Didion (they were mostly men, too); twenty-year-olds today would instead mention Tokarczuk, Ernaux, Han Kang, Bolaño. The canon is more decentralized. And yet I have the feeling that anglo-american culture still shapes the European conversation — not as a source of content, perhaps, but as the connecting hub between peripheries, the ultimate arbiter of what travels from one to the other. My novel had been published in seven European languages before the European Review of Books took note of it, upon its publication in English. This is not a criticism, it’s a fact of the way culture travels now. I also only discovered the above writers when they were published in English. (I hope you don’t see this as a criticism. I think it’s an interesting fact.)
SP
There have always been widely-read writers like Knausgård, Houellebecq, Isabel Allende. Maybe you’re detecting more space between English as a language and the countries England and America. But I am afraid we’re not just stealing their language, we’re staying hyper-focused on what happens in the US, its internet-culture, and all the fuss when Beyoncé has a new album out, or when the new Super Bowl ads are are shown (as you’re writing in Perfection). Trump is now bringing this to a next level.
VL
Well, I would say — at least concerning culture — it’s merely a result of a more optimized division of labor. Instead of having thousands of local musical scenes, made of local publics following local musicians, who were mostly mediocre but sometimes great, we have global hyper-stars reaching a global audience in a scene that is everywhere the same. This is bad for part of the public and for the local musicians and good for those few stars and for all those who take a cut in their profits, which are mostly technology companies based in California. Some are moving to Texas now, though, because of more favorable tax laws.
VL
This of course has also a political aspect. We know everything about US politics and the opposite is absolutely not true — so…
SP
How did you feel after finishing the book?
VL
I don’t know. I was quite sad and insecure. I didn’t even think it was publishable. I sent it to my agent only because I was seven years late on my contract for a novel, and the email I sent — I reread it every now and then, to laugh at myself — said something like « I’m sorry I’m sorry this is not a novel it’s the only thing I could come up with please don’t stop taking me to lunch every now and then. »
VL
But then it was in the middle of the second lockdown and I think most of my emotional reactions were off-kilter then. The fact that it was written in a time when social media was the only way to interact with the outside world probably played a role in determining that feeling of inescapability.
SP
Maybe Perfection is not actually a novel, maybe catching this situation we’re all in, in words, is not possible in the novelistic form, or are there new novels you want to mention?
VL
I think the building block of « realistic » novels since the 1800s — the theatrical scene, a unit of time and space where some people talk and do things — has trouble capturing the way our online life is structured. Online, you are always in several places at the same time, with several different flows of information and interactions overlapping.
Also, the temporality of it is different. When you scroll, you can spend minutes or hours reading or watching things that have no causal relation to each other: we call them « stories » on Instagram but they don’t build a « story » in the usual meaning of the term. The order doesn’t matter. This is something traditional novels fail to capture. Patricia Lockwood’s No one is talking about this found a great way to depict it, but then it’s also not a traditional novel.
SP
Can you elaborate on « the order doesn’t matter »?
VL
The idea of a plot, of a story, is that of a sequence of events (the scenes) that are somehow causally related, forming an arc from beginning to end. They have an order. It is the way we structure time in a traditional novel. This is the structure that, in my mind, is completely lacking in our experience of digital life. We can spend hours scrolling through Twitter or looking at Instagram stories, but each bit of « content » could very well be before or after all the others. They have no causal relationship, they don’t build up a plot, a narrative. It’s what makes it so easy to feel time disappearing when scrolling. It’s also what makes it so hard to capture this way of perceiving time in a novel.
SP
Please (I am all with you), try and explain exactly why no casual relations, no building of plot nor narrative, makes it easy to lose time.
VL
When scenes build up a narrative together, it makes it easier to remember. You might lose yourself for two hours in a novel, but you’ll end up remembering your thoughts about it, the plot, what it made you feel.
VL
In my experience, if you lose yourself for two hours on Instagram, you remember nothing. Because things are unrelated, they don’t tie together.
VL
Stories are a way we understand the passing of time. Before and after, cause and effect.
SP
In his ERB essay « Without cause », on the EU’s AI-act, Philippe Huneman writes, explaining Hume: « The fact that the words cause and effect could mean anything to us at all rests on the experience that makes it possible for us to have ideas in the first place. » But AI is making traceable cause and effect obsolete. Is that it? Is Instagram falsely creating experience?
VL
I think it does not create experience. It’s like reading a paragraph from a novel and then a paragraph from another novel and so on and so on. Maybe you remember a sentence or two, but you have no coherent memory of it all, no string to tie it all together, and this makes it disappear in your conscience.
VL
If you want me to get very nerdy, I could say that Kant’s idea of a precondition of experience was time as a necessary succession that we could only interpret as causality.
VL
And this is what is lacking in social media. We have a succession that we cannot interpret as causality.
VL
But nobody will want to read my book if I come across as the guy who quotes Kant on Whatsapp.
SP
I am just receiving the news that Perfection is on the longlist for the International Booker Prize. Rightly so! Smart jury! Congratulations! ❤️
