6/28/2023 0 Comments The capital by robert menasse![]() The backbone of Menasse’s plot is the quest of those Eurocrats for the proper and most meaningful way to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the Commission’s creation. Consequently, evaluating it is not a question of literary taste, but of political common sense.ĭramatis personae include a Belgian holocaust survivor, a professor and a pig farmer from Vienna, a Belgian police detective, a Catholic killer from Poland and numerous Eurocrats from the EU institutions. “Ceci n’est pas un roman” is what Belgium’s surrealist genius René Magritte would have said about Menasse’s book. In that sense, Robert Menasse’s cri de coeur for Europe is not a novel, but a manifesto posing as a novel. While the text has some merits in terms of its readability and humour, it is a complete failure as a political statement. ![]() ![]() Since it plays mostly in Brussels and richly depicts Eurocrats, it has also caused a largely positive stir in the so-called “Brussels Bubble“. With Die Hauptstadt ( The Capital), Austrian writer Robert Menasse has written the ‚first great EU novel‘, according to a review in POLITICO, and won the prestigious ‚ Deutsche Buchpreis‘ for the political bestseller of the season in Germany and Austria. ![]()
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