Book Review: "Perfection" by Vincenzo Latronico

Hmm. I’m honestly not too sure what I think about this book. I’ll admit I considered DNFing it a few times, but I kept waiting for something significant to happen. I will say that the book definitely made me feel old and uncool, lol.

Tom and Anna are freelance creatives and millennial expats living in Berlin. Like most of their peers, they are energized by taking advantage of all the city has to offer them, and of course, documenting their activities on social media.

The book follows them as they drift through life, friends, jobs, sex, political activism, and ambition. At times they want more than they have; other times they’re overwhelmed by it all. Should they consider polyamory? Should they move somewhere other than Berlin?

As they grow older and their friends follow different paths, they start to wonder about what their futures hold. And they realize that the things they are starting to dislike about Berlin and their lives are partially the fault of their generation.

“They realized they had contributed to the problem that was starting to affect them, but they knew it in an unacknowledged, almost imperceptible way, like smokers when they think about cancer…Gentrification, as they understood it, was something other people did.

This was on the shortlist for the Booker Prize last year. Vincenzo Latronico’s prose is beautiful, but often the story has paragraph after paragraph of description, to echo the characters’ obsession with conspicuous consumption. It definitely made me think, even as I didn’t really warm to it.

Book Review: "My Government Means to Kill Me" by Rasheed Newson

Rasheed Newson's debut novel is a moving, informative story of a young, gay Black man’s coming of age in 1980s New York City.

“…all great activists start off as young people who don’t really know what the hell they’re doing.”

Trey leaves his wealthy family in Indiana and turns his back on his trust fund and moves to New York City in the mid-1980s. He has very little money but refuses to compromise his values by hustling. He meets an interesting group of friends and explores his sexuality despite NYC being an epicenter of the AIDS epidemic.

After volunteering at a home hospice for those dying of AIDS, he gets pulled into the early days of ACT UP, an activist group trying to get the government to provide better support to those living with the disease. Along the way he tries to navigate his guilt about a childhood incident, deal with the demands of his family, and better understand the dynamics of sex and love.

This was a really good book that felt like a memoir. Trey is essentially dropped into an historical narrative and comes into contact with a number of individuals both key to the gay rights movement and those who caused trouble for it. Newson peppers the book with footnotes about different people and references in the book, and while many times I feel footnotes in books are distracting, these were really informative.

Having been a bit younger than Trey in the mid-1980s, I still vividly remember this time in history, and figuring out my sexuality a few years later was still as confusing, frightening, and complicated in the midst of uncertainty about AIDS. This was a fascinating story.