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While writing this review, I was more than usually aware that I would be posting it on this website, where, every time I refreshed the page, I'd hope to find that it had clocked up some Likes and comments, each of which would give me a little rush.

That awareness leads me to think about how big a role the 'little rush' plays in my reading life—indeed in my life in general. What would I do if I couldn't write reviews anymore? Would I read differently, maybe give less thought to what I read since I wouldn't have an audience for my post-reading thoughts and discoveries?

Then I wondered what sort of person I have become that I don't read in the privacy of my mind anymore but need to air every reading thought I have in public? But at least I'm producing something with all this, I tell myself. I'm writing a reflection on books every week, and that can't be bad for my psyche, can it?

And so I feel grateful to live in this moment in time that allows me to write and be read, and to discuss and learn from GR friends' review writing and reading. After all, we can't all have review columns in newspapers as Virginia Woolf and many other committed readers did in the past. Readers like us could never have aspired to writing reviews in newspapers!

If you're wondering why this book prompted so much soul-searching, it's because it is about two people who live almost their entire lives on the internet. They are a couple, Anna and Tom, who work from home as graphic designers for websites—which means that every minute of their work day is spent online, and any breaks from work tasks are spent checking their social media profiles for Likes and comments on the well-curated images of their well-curated lifestyle which they constantly post on their social media platforms.

When they are not checking their own profiles, they are searching their virtual friends' feeds for new life-style trends, whether in furnishings, cooking, art exhibitions, or holiday destinations, which they then incorporate into their own lifestyle choices, ordering more and more trending 'things' for their apartment, refining their images of their lives further and further in the search for some ideal of perfection, a search that takes them from Berlin to Lisbon, where there are great sunsets but the food chosen from the laminated menus full of garish photos is served on grubby formica tables, and from Lisbon to Sicily, where the scenery is fabulous but the airbnb is dark and dusty and "crammed with what could only be a dead relative’s furniture", and then back to Berlin because, you've guessed it, the perfect lifestyle is not as easy to create in reality as it is on social media posts. But Berlin isn't the end of the road for Anna and Tom, and Real Life steps in and redirects their lives in an unexpected way.

This book is something of a reality check for the way we live now and yet the really surprising thing is that it was inspired by and based closely on a book from the 1960s—long before internet screens and social media. That book, by French writer Georges Perec, was called Les Choses (The Things).
Perec's book is about a couple called Jérôme and Sylvie who aspired to a particular lifestyle—a classic apartment in the heart of Paris full of rich fabrics, precious objects, fine art, and beautifully bound books.
Perec used a documentary style in presenting the couple and their lives, the narration like a camera panning across their surroundings with little close-ups of their day-to-day activities but never giving much glimpse of the interior thoughts of his two characters—they never speak—so that at the end of the book, they remain as opaque as they were at the beginning. He uses the conditional tense for the first part in which he outlines the life-style the couple aspired to, the present tense for the second part, and the future tense for the final part, their projected future.
Vincenzo Latronico does exactly the same thing—even to the three tenses and the lack of dialogue. And while we hear a lot about Anna and Tom's life, just as in Perec's book, we don't ever get to know them as people. The skill and discipline shown by both authors as they continually keep their characters at a distance from themselves and from us makes their texts a treat to read. At the end of Vincenzo Latronico's book, I still saw Anna and Tom as the blank avatars they were at the beginning, one short-haired, one shoulder length, both in dark grey on a pale grey background.

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I think it was interesting that Anna and Tom's story finished in 2019 when they seemed to have finally found their perfect lifestyle (far from Berlin) because the reader is aware of how their ultimate choice of a way to live would be impacted by the 2020 pandemic, something the author must have been aware of too because he wrote this book during 2020/2021 when he himself must have been living the isolating life he gave his characters though he had situated their story during the ten years leading up to it.