17/12/2025
Rarely have critics so readily admitted to not only resembling, but *being* the characters in a novel as they have when speaking of Vincenzo Latronico’s 𝘗𝘦𝘳𝘧𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯. Written in Italian and first published in 2022, set in Berlin and a few more destinations of the digital-nomad circuit, the novel has been widely praised for capturing millennial urban life with authentic melancholy and scathing precision.
Yet perhaps even more millennial is the anxiety that Latronico’s 128-page page-turner might itself exemplify the very condition it sets out to critique: sitting all too comfortably in the cracks of neoliberal cultural production shaped by the sensibilities and demands of the Anglophone market—a market ever on the lookout for narrative voices perfectly tuned to convert local realities into globally legible generics—at a time when the neoliberal order is coming apart.
In two end-of-the-year essays for Berlin Review, Lianna Mark and Cesare Sinatti look at Latronico’s International Booker Prize nominee as currency within an Anglo-dominated field—or even as case study in the “cultural imperialism” of our age.
Read both pieces in our No 16, now at
—> blnreview.de or link in bio
latronico
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