Max’s Reviews > Perfection > Status Update
Max
is on page 62 of 117
In other cases, their friends would simply disappear. The increasingly feverish pace of change in the city was turning against the people who had fuelled it. As they moved closer to their mid-thirties, their friends, even the old-timers, would suddenly decide to move back… but back where? They would use the term ‘back home’, surprising even themselves that Berlin was not it.
— Jun 23, 2026 07:58AM
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Max
is on page 81 of 117
The reason they had tolerated, even loved the work, they will tell themselves, is because the repetitiveness provided a counterbalance to the limitless growth and broad horizons of the rest of their days. Now, they will realise, nothing remains but the work.
— Jun 23, 2026 02:29PM
Max
is on page 55 of 117
Anna and Tom did not understand, or at least not explicitly, anyone who could be considered an expat, a term they tended to apply either ironically or judgementally. And yet that term did apply to them, and in the frenzy of their mobilisation and the meta-frenzy of their attempt to theorise that mobilisation, no one was able to say why that abbreviation applied to some expatriates and not to others.
— Jun 23, 2026 04:25AM
Max
is on page 31 of 117
Later on they would fall asleep breathing in each other’s smell, whispering little jokes, sweet nothings, plans for the next day. But really what they were saying was a prayer, a silent and strangely solemn prayer for things to remain exactly as they were. It was always answered.
— Jun 10, 2026 02:34PM
Max
is on page 25 of 117
They loved their families and were nostalgic for the streets they had grown up on, but that fondness would quickly give way to a feel ing of stasis and estrangement. Entering the departures terminal, each time they would glance at themselves in the glass doors and think back to the picture they had tak en when they left. The comparison never failed to move them. They were so different now.
— Jun 09, 2026 10:14PM
Max
is on page 21 of 117
Did they like the job? Yes, but they would reformulate the question. They did for money now what they used to do out of passion. This was a fact. From this fact they concluded that they had turned their passion into a job. This was a deduction.
— Jun 09, 2026 10:13PM
Max
is on page 19 of 117
The cliques were hotbeds of gossip; conformist attitudes fostered what Anna and Tom felt to be stifling expectations. And among those people – who never changed, who were content to hang out in the same sets they belonged to at school – Anna and Tom weren’t free to be themselves, or rather, they weren’t free to reinvent themselves.
— Jun 09, 2026 10:10PM