Robert Menasse

‘Something cannot fall apart without there having been connections.’

Winner of the 2017 German Book Award, Robert Menasse’s novel gets a timely English translation amidst the chaos (in the UK political establishment, at least) of Brexit. Not that it gets much of a mention, which is no bad thing. Instead, this is an insider’s view of what Europe means, of how it runs, of its ambitions and tensions keeping so many different nations together with compromises.

Here we have a disparate show more collection of characters, whose stories overlap and intersect in subtle and different ways. Characters pass each other in the street, see each other through a window, hear about each other – but they may not actually meet. For some these various strands of stories may be frustrating, wanting a nice neat overarching story with a beginning, middle and end. But, given that the European project is indeed a collection of different states, of different languages and customs, I think this is an entirely apt approach to the narrative by Austrian-born Menasse, and for me it works superbly well. Here we have European Commission workers trying to some up with a grand project to celebrate 50 years of the establishing of the Commission; a Holocaust survivor forced to give up his own apartment and move into a retirement home; pig farmers up in arms over trade deals with China to export pigs’ ears; an assassin and a world-weary cop playing cat and mouse… Each of these stories mix with each other – some, perhaps, more successfully than others. And throughout it all is a pig, running loose on the streets of Brussels and which itself becomes a ‘universal metaphor’ discussed and debated in the press.

There are many fine moments of comedy, and of confusion. There are moments of interaction between characters that all add layers to the ambition of the European project: characters caught having to translate between others, angst over national identity and a European supra-nationalism, an idea to build a new European capital city in Auschwitz, and many more. There is tragedy, too, and the very real threat of terrorism. Connections. There is a fair amount of jargon and farce that writes itself, as we get tangled up in the endless bureaucracy of the EU institution, but this is not, for all its satirical broadsides, and anti-European novel. On the contrary, it is a clarion call for compromise, for togetherness, for without it we are somehow lessened.

I really enjoyed this, and I also think it’s an important and serious work. Thoroughly recommended, whichever side of the European fence you happen to sit. 4 and a bit stars. show less

When this came out, it was hailed as the first big, literary novel to focus on the inner workings of the EU bureaucracy. Given how many clever, imaginative people there must be sitting around in Brussels offices (or recently retired from them), it seems surprising that there aren't many more such novels: one is almost forced to conclude that the work they do there is so engaging that they don't have any energy left over to satirise it...

Be that as it may, as well as a core group of officials show more mostly working in the communication department of "DG Culture" of the European Commission, Menasse's cast includes an elderly Auschwitz survivor, an Austrian pig-farmer, an emeritus economics professor, a Brussels police inspector, a professional assassin employed by the Archdiocese of Poznań, and a possibly-imaginary, possibly-symbolic pig wandering through the streets of Brussels. The conventions of narrative tell us that the stories of all these people are going to fit together sooner or later, but Menasse enjoys teasing us by allowing their paths to cross repeatedly without anything happening. It's not for nothing that Kafka's name is dropped repeatedly: Menasse is clearly a fan of the absurd, and we look for logical connections at our peril.

Naturally, this isn't just a book about the peculiarities of living in Brussels, with its constant rain, building sites, demonstrations no-one pays any attention to, inexplicable police blockades, and baffling bilingualism, nor is it merely a detailed study of the sophisticated methods international bureaucracies can deploy to resist dangerous new ideas, although it does both of those things very elegantly. What Menasse really seems to be doing here is arguing that we have lost track of the great European Idea of the 1940s, the notion that if we want a world in which we can say "never again" to Auschwitz we have to get rid of racism and nationalism and move on to a post-national democracy. The institutions of the EU are arranged in such a way that it is almost impossible for anyone to take a decision that goes against the self-interest of any of the member states, and it often seems as though the only truly radical things the EU has ever done have been those needed to serve the prevailing ideology of liberal capitalism and the free market. Obviously there are holes to pick in this: the founders of the predecessor organisations of the EU were arguably more interested in industrial competition with the US than in preserving the postwar peace, and no-one ever seems to have come up with a workable way to create truly democratic European institutions. But I'm sure that Menasse is right in identifying the legacy of Auschwitz as the thing that is at the core of the way large numbers of Europeans — especially of the immediate post-war generations — have looked at the European Idea, and the reason why so many of us view the rise in populist nationalism in the last decades with such horror. But he's clearly also right about the difficulty of communicating that idea to people who've come to see "Europe" negatively.

An interesting and very clever book, in which I recognised a lot of types and professional manoeuvres I'm very familiar with(!), but also a rather sad and frustrating one. He ends with "à suivre", but it's not at all obvious at present where the story should go next, either in fiction or in real life. show less

Fenia Xenopoulos (ha, ha), EU bureaucrat par excellence, schemes to celebrate the Union’s first half-century with an Auschwitz theme. A contract killer flees to Poland, and somewhere a pig is running loose. There are notes here in all emotional registers, from nostalgic sincerity to office intrigue to glib misogynistic humor to a respectful veil over the horrors of the past. Every time things threaten to get too serious the author reverts to the general mood of jolly detachment, in keeping show more with the lives of these bureaucratic shot-callers which are impervious to very serious damage. It kept me from investing quite as much as I would have otherwise. show less

The officials in Robert Menasse's latest big Brussels novel are working with Albania and other West Balkan states to prepare them for EU membership, but some important Member States are blocking progress for their own domestic reasons. And the Albanians themselves are a bit miffed about having to sack all their corrupt judges while "respectable" MS like Poland and Hungary are busy turning the Rule of Law into a bad joke. But all this is fiction, of course, any connection with real life is show more purely coincidental...

A lot of the action this time takes place in Albania, mostly in and around the office of the Prime Minister, "ZK", an engagingly offbeat ex-basketball star who is trying to recapture ground from his nationalist opponents by identifying himself with the national hero, Skanderbeg. This is mostly fun, but it occasionally feels as though we're being taken through a condensed version of the complete works of Ismail Kadare, touching on all the key things we are supposed to know about Albanian history, from Enver Hoxha and the Kosovo war to sworn virgins, blood-feuds and the Kanun.

Like its precursor, Die Hauptstadt, this is a big novel with a lot of characters and parallel plot lines, and it feels as though Menasse may have been caught unawares by some major world events that caused him to shift the direction of the climax of the story when it was already half-written. It gives him a powerful symbolic ending, with Europe's political leaders sailing off into the sunset on a broken-down, epidemic-stricken cruise ship they have to share with a lot of rescued refugees. This works well, except that it seems to leave a lot of his characters and plot lines somewhat crudely tied up: one character is unceremoniously pushed off a cliff when no longer required, others simply drop out of sight. And there are two detectives we follow through most of the book who end up having to watch as someone else solves the main crime story...

An enjoyable read and a thoughtful book with some sensible things to say about politics and Europe, but maybe not quite as joined-up a novel as it might have been had the world treated all of us a little better over the past few years. show less