Alienation, Desire, and the Spectacle of Modernity

2025 has been an excellent year of reading for me, and for the world at large, it seems. I haven’t read as much as I’d have liked to, but I’ve been more discerning with my choices and have ultimately, engaged with the work in a manner that’s left a deeper impression.

In this series, I’ll be talking about the books I’m reading and the ways I’m finding myself in them again.

The Destroyed Room, Jeff Wall, 1978

Alberto Moravia, the great 20th Century European stylist and one of my primary influences, once described the modern condition as a permanent state of discomfort; desire continuously thwarted by social convention, alienation eating away at intimacy, and bourgeois rituals masking a void. Recently,, these themes resurface with striking clarity in two contemporary works: Anne Serre’s The Leopard-Skin Hat and Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, both shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize. Though their registers differ—Serre turning inward toward the opacity of intimacy, Latronico outward toward the flattened rituals of cosmopolitan life—both inherit Moravia’s project of diagnosing modern alienation. They extend his legacy into a world fractured by globalisation, shifting sexual politics and social media.

To place Serre, Latronico, and Moravia in dialogue is to trace a genealogy of disquiet. From Moravia’s Rome of indifferent bourgeois families, wrapped in their neuroses, to Latronico’s Berlin apartments curated like Instagram feeds, and Serre’s elusive landscape of psychological deterioration and the true (un)knowing of the other, I encountered variations on a question that literature returns to obsessively: how do we live with others when the forms we inherit—marriage, intimacy, labour, even authenticity—are corroded? Lukács’s concept of reification developed in his work, History, Class, Consciousness (1913) and Barthes’s mythologies of desire (1957) provide useful scaffolding here, as do psychoanalytic theories of estrangement, in particular the concept of defamiliarization by Russian formalist, Viktor Shklovsky.

But what ultimately links these three writers is less theory than tone; a cool clarity, a refusal to console, and a recognition that the modern self is shaped not by resolution, but by fracture.

The intimacy of estrangement

The Leopard-Skin Hat is a novel of near-obsession that resists confession. Two friends, Fanny, and the unnamed narrator, orbit each other for decades in a relationship that is not quite friendship, not quite love. What fascinates is less the content of their bond than its unreadability: the narrator himself cannot quite decide what this attachment is, or whether it is sustaining or corrosive. Desire flickers but never crystallizes. The novel’s surface is deceptively light, but beneath it churns a profound meditation on intimacy’s unknowability.

“For a time, she was less bewildered and distraught. Her life even seemed to come together, her emotions to fall back into place. As if doing a little harm could do you some good, not because it gave you some unspeakable thrill—certainly not— but because it instilled a certain gravity in you, whereby you begin to resemble the rest pf the world, the ones who live who somehow manage to live.”

The leopard-skin hat functions as an object-fetish, a Barthesian myth. It is at once trivial—a stylish accessory—and freighted, the totem through which Fanny’s presence is remembered and narrated. Like Moravia’s use of symbolic objects in Boredom (1960) (where artistic objects fail to anchor meaning), Serre turns the leopard-skin hat into a stand-in for a relationship that cannot be fully articulated. The hat is fetish and absence at once: it testifies to desire’s opacity.

Julie Kristeva’s notion of abjection hovers: Fanny is both cherished and repulsive, magnetic and alien. Unlike overtly confessional autofiction, Serre refuses to resolve the tension. She dramatizes the paradox that intimacy, particularly between friends, is shadowed by estrangement. One senses in her work an echo of Moravia’s The Conformist (1951); the impossibility of totalizing the other, the way the closest relationships hover at the threshold of misrecognition.

Where Moravia often exposed the emptiness of heterosexual arrangements, Serre pushes further into how friendship bonds resist categorization. She offers not representation but opacity, a refusal to simplify. The effect is haunting; the reader, like the narrator, remains suspended in uncertainty. Intimacy here is not revelation but perpetual deferral.

Much of this estrangement is in part due to Fanny’s unnamed psychological disorder (schizophrenia is alluded to) but she resists pathologization as much as the narrator does; instead the narrator completely humanises her, her ‘madness’ presented not as deviance but as an apt response to an unfathomable society. Serre refuses the medical gaze that would reduce Fanny to a case study. Instead, she allows her to exist in her full, contradictory humanity: erratic, magnetic, wounded, yet never stripped of dignity. In this sense, Fanny embodies a counterpoint to bourgeois normalcy—her instability exposing the fragility of those social conventions that pass themselves off as coherent. Where the world insists on diagnosis, Serre insists on relation, reminding us that what appears as madness may also be a lucid refusal of the false logics of modernity.

The architecture of Perfection

If Serre examines intimacy’s enigmas, Latronico dissects the rituals of a class obsessed with image, minimalism, and aesthetic coherence. Perfection follows a young Italian couple who move to Berlin in pursuit of a life purified of mess. The novel paints a forensic, surgical portrait of curated lives—stylistic with a quiet decay. Latronico’s prose is cool, dispassionate, measures every Ikea chair, monstera leaf and oat milk flat white to reveal profound emptiness beneath the aesthetic veneer. Anna and Tom drift through Berlin and Lisbon like ghosts of millennial ambition, forever pursuing perfection that eludes them. I found myself complicit in the couple’s curated drift, lulled by their clean lines and exits.

The novel is a study in reification, in Lukács’s sense; social relations become things, gestures become surfaces. The couple’s desire is mediated through ‘spectacle’: their lives are performances staged for the gaze of others and themselves. Their pursuit of “perfection” reveals itself as a hollow ritual. Objects—chairs, white walls, photographs—take on mythic weight, echoing Barthes’s account of how consumer culture generates signs emptied of substance.

The link to Moravia is immediate. Where The Time of Indifference (1929) exposed the ennui of Rome’s bourgeois families in the shadow of fascism, Perfection (2025) updates the diagnosis to late capitalism’s “creative class.” Both depict characters trapped by rituals that promise meaning but deliver voids. Moravia’s characters feigned passion while operating from indifference; Latronico’s chase authenticity while suffocating in inauthenticity. The surface has changed, but the structure—the bourgeois void—remains.

“And it is a happy life; or so it seems from the pictures in the post advertising the apartment for short term rental at one hundred and eighteen euros a day, plus the fee to cover the Ukranian cleaner, paid through a French gig economy company that files its taxes in Ireland, plus the commission for the online hosting platform, with offices in California but tax-registered in the Netherlands, plus another cut for the online payment system, which has its headquarters in Seattle but runs its European subsidiary out of Luxembourg, plus the city tax imposed on Berlin.”

In Perfection, alienation is no longer a by-product of repression but the logical outcome of consumer choice. The couple’s freedom to curate their lives only deepens their estrangement from each other. The novel becomes a parable of neoliberal intimacy; abundance yielding emptiness, connection mediated through surfaces. Globalization operates not as expansion but as contraction; a narrowing of life into seamless surfaces and lifestyle choices, where the very promise of boundless connection breeds a claustrophobic sameness

Alienation, desire & the bourgeois void

What links Serre and Latronico, even with their different tones, is how they share Moravia’s gift for cutting straight to the bone. He could strip away all ornament and expose the skeleton beneath bourgeois life. That same clear, almost merciless gaze appears in Serre’s elliptical prose and in Latronico’s pared-down precision.

In Moravia’s Rome, disconnection is the rule; in Serre and Latronico, the same failure takes on new forms—whether in friendships that only grow more unknowable the closer they are examined, or in cosmopolitan couples whose flawlessly curated lives hollow them out from within.

In all three, desire never matches its object. It is either excessive or insufficient, always misaligned. Lovers in Boredom or Conjugal Love, Serre’s Narrator, and Latronico’s Anna & Tom alike find themselves undone by wanting something that can never quite be possessed.

Whether it’s the rot of a fading aristocracy, a friendship that never settles into a name, or an apartment that looks like a lifestyle ad, the emptiness persists, reshaping itself with each new era.

Moravia in the 21st Century

Serre and Latronico each take Moravia’s psychological sharpness into their own landscapes. Serre turns it inward, looking at the riddles of intimacy and showing how even love between friends—seemingly outside the old scripts—remains touched by distance. Latronico turns it outward, into the architecture of contemporary life, where curated perfection conceals a hollow core.

Both suggest that Moravia’s questions—about alienation, desire, and emptiness—are still alive, only dressed differently.