Sixty years ago, if you wanted to see what an acquaintance’s living room looked like, you would have to find out the old-fashioned way: by pressing your face up against their window. You would see, perhaps, ‘a large sofa upholstered in worn black leather, with pale cherrywood bookcases on either side, heaped with books in untidy piles’. You might observe, on a console table, ‘a telephone, a leather diary, a writing pad’. You might get caught, but the danger didn’t stop the desire. We are nosy creatures. No wonder Georges Perec’s 1965 novel Things: A Story of the Sixties was an immediate success. It opens with a detailed description of a swish Paris apartment in which a black leather sofa and cherrywood bookcases are joined by prints, rugs, knick-knacks, a gramophone and more. The couple at the centre of the novel are secondary in importance to the objects they own, encounter or covet. Nothing much happens (although at some point the couple abandon their market-research jobs and move to Tunisia). It is a tale told in lists, full of consumerist tableaus, signifying the 1960s bourgeois boom. 

But that was sixty years ago. In the 21st century, it’s much easier to snoop. Forget scrabbling over fences; all it takes is a few clicks and the virtual curtains are thrown open. The rise of social media means we are now subjected to an endless barrage of pixels showing chic interiors and sumptuous feasts. As Vincenzo Latronico puts it in Perfection, his captivating tribute to Things, the images ‘blow in like a storm through the windows left open in the background.’

Like Perec’s novel, Perfection revolves around a couple. Anna and Tom – so inseparable they melt into a single unit – are ‘creative professionals’ who have moved to Berlin from an unnamed European city somewhere further south. Where, exactly, is unimportant. Their lives are as generic as the Danish furniture