If you tasked an excellent writer with turning a tall stack of recent issues of The Economist into a novel, you might get The Capital. Somehow I mean this as high praise ... Perhaps what we have in The Capital is a great murder mystery ... It’s an unusual murder story, though, because the suspense lies not in discovering the identity of the assassin (we follow him as he goes on the lam) but the identity of the dead man. You come to suspect that the murder is a kind of MacGuffin, that maybe it doesn’t matter at all. I enjoyed The Capital so much that I could keep going like this. It’s possible this is a great Holocaust-minded novel for a new millennium ... The translation, by Jamie Bulloch, is adroit. Yet The Capital made me want to learn to read in German, where it is surely even better. This is a baggy book, with room for everything Menasse wants to put into it. It has its share of longueurs. But there is also pointed writing not just about politics but about subways and orgasms and woolly underwear and air conditioning and retirement homes ... this novel evidences a sharp awareness of the forces remaking European life, with Brexit as only one example.
The Capital is...in part an exploration of its own viability, a testing of the adequacy of literary realism to the task of understanding and presenting the large forces at work in contemporary Europe ... The mundane trials and pleasures of...work are beautifully etched. But whether or not the realist form can still contain 'the essence of an epoch' remains an open question. Perhaps it is appropriate that The Capital, for all its energy and brilliance, its intellectual ambition and literary skill, is saturated with uncertainty. It feels, in the end, less of a grand statement and more of a voyage into political melancholia, less realist and more gothic. It is a haunted book. Whatever his original intention, Menasse gives us not 'the essence of an epoch' but the end of an epoch—with the twist that he is not quite sure which epoch is coming to a close ... [a] kaleidoscopic tale, which swings between the banality of the lives of the commission officials and the pathos of a noble project trapped in political entropy. Hovering over the book is the melancholic question: Is the EU just the afterlife of a prehistory that is losing its grip on the European imagination? ... a remarkable success as a self-consciously European creation. In spite of himself, Menasse has given us a work in which a national identity and a European allegiance are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they blend into the very thing that the unfortunate bureaucrat found unimaginable, a gripping novel with an urgent political purpose.
... delivers, within a brilliant satirical fiction, thoughtful and instructive analysis of both the weaknesses in the EU that galvanise leavers and the strengths that motivate remainers ... recalls Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and The Capital, in scope and tone, suggests a fusion of Heller’s war comedy with his other masterpiece, Something Happened, a dark comedy of office life ... Lacking German, I can’t assess the accuracy of Jamie Bulloch’s translation, but the English prose has a panache and clarity rare in exported literature ... The jaunty playing with words are fittingly reminiscent of that most Eurocentric of recent British novelists, Anthony Burgess. Bulloch also trusts readers to grasp, or at least intuit, untranslated French, German, Czech and Flemish ... Readers may understandably feel that a novel about the EU is the last thing they need just now; but if so they will miss a first-class read.
... insists that compelling stories can be told about both Brussels and the eu itself ... [Menasse] created what might seem impossible: a readable novel of Brussels. The Capital is a mischievous yet profound story about storytelling; about the art of shaping a narrative by finding resonances in the messy stuff of life ... The philosophy also makes the novel momentous. It captures the glowing idealism of an era when the eu was run by people who remembered the war. Readers may see this school of thought as a relic of the past or a beacon for the future. Either way, they will not find a more spirited expression of it than Mr. Menasse’s unexpectedly delightful book about Brussels.
... [a] stinging office satire ... the jumbled, cacophonous narrative of The Capital is made up mostly of arguments ... despite Mr. Menasse’s pessimism—you close the book convinced that the only thing keeping the EU alive is the same inertia that dooms it—The Capital isn’t a polemic. An extended scene in a Belgian cemetery quietly invokes the countless lives lost to European wars. And even the most cynical characters have glimmerings of the 'interrelationships, entanglements and connections' that bind the continent. 'Something cannot fall apart without there having been connections,' Mr. Menasse notes, and it’s in tracing the deterioration of a very real fellowship that The Capital comes to resemble a tragedy after all.
The storytelling is clever but also dark ... Above all, the novel is European, far removed from our own Brexit chaos. It is about Europe reconnecting with its ideals via a tragic past, full of cemeteries and corpses. It’s a smart read, unlike anything being written in Britain today.
Menasse assembles his cast from the different member states – an ambitious Cyrpiot, a melancholy Austrian, a fanatical Pole, a patrician Italian, a wry Belgian – but he gives their inner lives a complexity that belies the satirical shorthand of simple labels ... He is brilliantly comic on the gladiatorial combats of careerist ambition and barely disguised national self-interest which engage the lives of Fenia Xenopolou, Kai-Uwe Frigge, George Morland and Romolo Strozzi in the Commission ... The crime story, a somewhat lurid Dan Brownesque yoking together of the Vatican and foreign intelligence services to track down and assassinate Islamic terrorists, does not convince. It does, however, give Menasse the opportunity to create two of the more memorable characters in the novel ... Robert Menasse has written an important and timely book, ably abetted and assisted in English by his translator, Jamie Bulloch. He is the latest in a long line of Austrian writers who put satire at the service of higher and more urgent truths.
... a thoroughly entertaining fiction that serves both as a sort of campus satire and a novel of ideas. For sure, Menasse has an agenda. His nicest characters tend to believe in the ‘post-national democracy’ of EU integration. Still, their efforts to sell the Brussels system as ‘the moral of history’ pass through enough comically convoluted byways to give succour to sceptics too ... With its zest, pace and wit, Jamie Bulloch’s translation serves him splendidly. Intermittently, The Capital soars above the citadel of intrigue to give a ‘bird’s-eye perspective’ from the past. It tempers satire with sympathy for the battered dream of unified Europe as ‘the realm of freedom’ and solvent of national hatreds. Yet its snaking plot, and scheming mandarins, gleefully run away with the novel. In Britain, I suspect, Menasse will gladden many hearts, but change few minds.
... Menasse is too humane a writer to see the world in such bleak terms as [Kafta] ... The strange charm of Menasse’s polyphonic story is in how it suggests that such an European Union is inextricably bound to its diversity of member countries and yet utterly dependent on their continued collaboration ... More often than not, this prison mentality plays out hilariously ... What reads as a thinly veiled rebuke to the British forces determined to sunder the country from the Union is in fact a humane justification for this massive, transnational, determinedly supra-political project ... At moments, the novel feels so sprawling that the only director capable of bringing it to the screen might be Cecil B. DeMille, and yet it feels intensely immediate, deeply personal. Even in light of the years Menasse spent in Brussels researching this novel, it seems rather extraordinary that such an abstract, amorphous entity as the European Union could have been rendered so intimately; that Jamie Bulloch was able to bring this same gentle, ironic humor to the English is proof positive of his formidable skill as a translator ... an accumulation of many small stories that, brought together, tell a broader, truly vital story.
Menasse’s novel is a satirical send-up of contemporary Brussels ... Menasse gets many details of the EU just right. His cruel caricature of the technocratic, self-important, and sometimes petty bureaucratic culture of the commission is largely accurate. He skillfully renders the bland life of the expatriate in Brussels—not surprising, since his book research required him to become one. More profoundly, he captures how in modern Europe, where historical memories tied to a specific time and place have grown less vivid, people invoke the Holocaust[.]
The 400-page novel, set primarily in the E.U.’s de facto capital, Brussels, is neither breezy nor orderly. But it presents a brutally funny and exhaustive tableau of both a continent in transition and the organization straining to hold it together ... Many of the characters never meet, but their story lines converge in astonishing, thematic ways ... The plot occasionally gets bogged down in granular detail. But Menasse writes with a wry, self-deprecating touch. He turns what might have been a dry lecture into a teeming epic that brings to multitextured life a continent undergoing an identity crisis.
As Europe remembers that history isn’t over, perhaps now is the time for a more careful discussion of what a post-national Europe could be. If that imaginative project is political, then The Capital is best read as a political novel, one that aims to imagine an EU that would allow Europe finally to supersede its terrifically violent history. But the novel also seems dubious of its own hopes. With its curiously shapeless plot and violent resolution, The Capital doubts that its ideals will ever be achieved ... This ultimately poignant view of the European condition and its deep sensitivity to its characters’ inner lives ultimately makes The Capital seem like something other than a satire ... The humor and pathos of the novel draw from this tension between enlightened visions of European citizenship and the ugly stupidity of the backroom dealing that actually shapes EC policy and the EU’s reality ... Against its pessimism, the novel offers a weird bit of hope ... This feeling that Menasse misses the real character of the nationalism he disdains—a nationalism that emerged under globalization rather than in the shadow of the Franco-Prussian War—is ultimately the most significant problem with a novel that attempts to assess the European condition ... What seems particularly naïve about Menasse’s political vision, however, is not that he wants to eliminate the nation-state, but the way he wants to transform democratic participation and bureaucratic power.
... a thoroughly entertaining fiction that serves both as a sort of campus satire and a novel of ideas. For sure, Menasse has an agenda. His nicest characters tend to believe in the ‘post-national democracy’ of EU integration. Still, their efforts to sell the Brussels system as ‘the moral of history’ pass through enough comically convoluted byways to give succour to sceptics too ... Menasse has sly fun with the ‘Babylonian gibberish’ of the Commission and the Yes, Minister ruses of its staff. With its zest, pace and wit, Jamie Bulloch’s translation serves him splendidly. Intermittently, The Capital soars above the citadel of intrigue to give a ‘bird’s-eye perspective’ from the past. It tempers satire with sympathy for the battered dream of unified Europe as ‘the realm of freedom’ and solvent of national hatreds. Yet its snaking plot, and scheming mandarins, gleefully run away with the novel — like the fugitive pig trotting around Brussels as a grunting emblem of the mystery and mayhem that impede every masterplan to straighten Kant’s ‘crooked timber of humanity’. In Britain, I suspect, Menasse will gladden many hearts, but change few minds.
... a traditional, broad-shouldered, omniscient, almost Balzac-ian, but with terrorism part of a plot centered satirically around an all-too-plausible Brussels idea.
... a merciless W1A meets Yes, Minister send-up of the worst excesses of choking Brussels bureaucracy ... juggles a multitude of wryly amusing storylines and skewers the commission’s 'comitology-speak'. Lively pen sketches of characters are skilfully done ... an unexpectedly downbeat ending.
The many storylines do somewhat water down the novel as whole: the Auschwitz ideas could easily have been built up at considerably greater length before being cut down, while some of the meandering -- characters wander around lost, and lost in thought, rather more than necessary -- could have been cut back. The murder-mystery, and the great powers with an interest in it, is a bit of an odd fit, too -- though it too might have benefitted from Menasse going into more depth regarding it ... a substantial novel, but there's easily room for more here. Menasse tackles a big subject, and in expanding it even more, beyond just the confines of the EU offices and Brussels, can't quite give all his storylines and many characters the attention they demand (if not necessarily deserve). It is a good EU novel -- an interesting examination of political order and memory, and our failure to sustain the lessons of history -- but falls short of being a great (or the arguably necessary) one ... Menasse juggles a lot of ideas and stories (including many of the characters' backstories), but he's much better and on firmer ground with the ones of greater immediacy, particularly the office- and bureaucracy-scenes than in his big-picture efforts (no matter how sympathetic his admirably anti-nationalist message is). Certainly, the many stories are well-juggled and presented, making for an enjoyable and engaging read -- but it all goes down almost too easily, connected and converging, but not coming together as a truly greater whole ... Menasse seems to have tried to avoid making The Capital a polemic, without being able to keep himself from polemicizing; he might have done well to go whole hog.
To write a novel about the turgid, bureaucratic goings on in the headquarters of the European Union—the so-called Commission, based in Brussels—is as difficult a subject as one can choose. Menasse has a good stab at it. It is a wry tale ... The digressions spoil a reasonably good novel.
Mixing sincere (if at times sanctimonious) apologia for the EU with an acerbic critique of ambitious bureaucrats, the novel is at once an ensemble of European stereotypes, a satire of patriotic lobbyists, and a love letter to people who Menasse has earnestly called the 'enlightened' civil servants of the EU. Those years of elbow-rubbing in Brussels were evidently well spent: The Capital is so effectively ironic that it could almost be a pseudonymous dispatch from an idealistic EU whistleblower. Yet, no matter how well engineered this novel may be, its moving parts never quite cooperate—which is an ideal metaphor for Menasse’s chosen subject ... [a] sprawling, grotesque and at times, gnomic, novel ... Menasse sketches a fictional solution to this real political situation so believably vapid and grandiose it surely lays dormant on some actual bureaucrat’s flash drive ... Ultimately, The Capital says little about whether the EU will endure, and even less about whether it should.
... utterly unique ... Menasse pairs a hapless Belgian detective story line along with satirical depictions of the modern workplace that bring to mind Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End (2007). In constantly blending styles and genres, Manasse captures the wonderful diversity of cultures that the EU has brought together. Winner of the German Book Prize, this is part celebration of the EU and part farce, a strange, timely novel emphasizing the benefits of international institutions at precisely a moment when they are increasingly under stress.
The tension between a supranational European vision and a rising tide of nationalism is at the center of this trenchant political satire. Given that increasing nationalism is not a strictly European phenomenon, this German Book Prize winner may well find an audience on this side of the Atlantic.
This is a smart, entertaining sprawl of a book that dissects, chides, and pays homage to the European Union ... Through it all is the steady message that more unites the people of the European Union than divides them. The narrative reinforces this with personal histories that cross borders and intersect ... Intelligent, fun, sad, insightful—an exceptional work.
... witty but humane ... All the characters bumble through bureaucratic meddling, language differences, and competing ambitions toward an open-ended yet rewarding conclusion. The massive cast never becomes unwieldy thanks to Menasse’s delightful prose. This epic, droll account of contemporary Europe will be catnip for fans of mosaic novels and comical political machinations.
