This is a novel about Anna and Tom who arrived in Berlin fleeing the pressure of conformity in their Southern European home country. They were in their early twenties, and Berlin still offered “that potential and abundance” Anna and Tom craved for. They did not want to follow “another generation’s script” but find their own way in life. This was not a purely individual dream. Rather, there was “an identical struggle for a different life [that] motivated an entire sector of their generation.” Put another way, Anna and Tom’s life proceeded in the context of a certain urban sub-culture. They started living “in a bubble” as freelance “creative professionals” while the “internet came of age with them.” Anna and Tom lived “a double life. There was the tangible reality around them, and there was the [online] images, also all around them,” produced by their digital devices. “Anna and Tom’s conversations flowed seamlessly between the digital and the physical domains.” In this process, their “inner landscape reconfigured by twenty years on the internet” and by sharing a wide circle of cosmopolitan friends.

            But time did not stand still, neither for them nor for Berlin. As for them, with having spent more years in Berlin than new arrivals, and by being older than them, they moved up the social ladder by becoming “veteran expats.” That was by no means only positive since “Anglophony” became more obvious and since it became clear that English “was starting to belong to some more than others.” New arrivals were not only younger, but they also had more money, different tastes, and a career-oriented mindset. Soon enough, Anna and Tom’s Berlin environment changed. Old venues closed; rents increased; gentrification set in. “Though it remained unspoken, Anna and Tom would both feel the crush of nostalgia.” They became tired and frustrated, knowing that they had to adapt to the changing circumstances. Not that they did not try. Anna and Tom established a company to solidify their freelance existence. However, this did not sit well with the lifestyle they were used to. Questions became more fundamental: “For a long time, their crises had always been short-lived. Nothing had ever challenged their belief that they had made the right choices.” Yet, many of their friends seemed to think differently. Obviously, they were making those decisions that Anna and Tom were still reluctant to make. Neither of them wanted to move into steady jobs, to establish a family, have children. “Slowly but surely, Anna and Tom found themselves alone.” Their memories of their previous life in Berlin “were sweet but they seemed to belong to another life entirely.” Anna and Tom began feeling trapped. They tried traveling. But neither Lisbon nor Sicily made them feeling any better; “for whatever reason, they never seemed to find what they were looking for.” They did not seem to realize that the abundance they had experienced in Berlin “was the result of a specific overlap between the city’s history and theirs.” Nothing could bring back this unique constellation.

            Readers will see the latest quote on page 108, while the book ends on page 113. Latronico had written his protagonists into a corner from which they were unable to escape. So, I became a bit nervous about how the book would end. That last section of the book, which begins on page 107, is headlined “FUTURE.” For these last pages, the narrative does not any longer say what Anna and Tom do, but what they “will” do; it gives a gloomy projection of their possible future life. They could become unable to “access a version of their past unfiltered by nostalgia.” But for how long “will they be able to go on like this? In theory, forever.”

Leaving it at that, without proper closure, might have seemed unsatisfactory. Thus, Latronico comes up with a deus ex machina in the form of an inheritance that Anna “will” receive after the death of her uncle. The inheritance is a farmhouse that Anna and Tom “will” turn it into a guesthouse. They “will” finally leave Berlin, “excited and emotional, sad to be closing one chapter of their lives but eager to start another.” Comparing pictures from the time they arrived in Berlin and their final departure showed “two kids leaving, two adults returning.”