![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() What you will find are ambitious, unscrupulous climbers up the Berlaymont ladder and folk of an integrity sometimes verging on the naive. It's also educational: did you, for instance, know that the Commission's department for culture is a graveyard for careerists, since it gets a tiny budget? Don't expect much timewasting on Brexit, though - all you learn is that for most EU employees other than the Brits it's a side issue. But it would be wrong to pigeonhole this masterwork of literature as merely a satire, or taking a sideswipe at the EU, funny though it can be. Inevitably there's more than a whiff of the satirical about Menasse's handling of "Brussels bureaucracy". The obvious attribution holds good until a surprising twist. "The Capital" ("Die Hauptstadt" in the original language - it won the German Book Prize in 2017) seems to imply the main centre of EU activities and its headquarters, the Berlaymont building on Rue de la Loi. Austrian Robert Menasse's novel is the first I've read to bring to life the complexity of such a difficult balance, and to root it in Brussels (though there are also scenes in Vienna, Krakow - and Auschwitz). She also saw the difficulties ahead in holding the centre of European solidarity over and above the immediate national concerns of the Union's members. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |