Pigs make other appearances in this book. For the next few days, people will report seeing a pig wandering round, making him, if it is the same one, a very mobile pig. No-one knows where he came from or where he is going. This particular pig is wandering round, unattended. Investigating the murder, and therefore arriving a bit later, is Inspector Brunfaut, a Brussels police officer. Yes, he is wandering round the square, just like the others. He is a retired professor, visiting Brussels. He is staying in the hotel where Mateusz Oświecki killed the man. He has just killed someone in a nearby hotel, possibly the wrong person. Martin Susman is an Austrian national and works for Fenia Xenopoulou. There is David de Vriend, a concentration camp survivor, who is moving from his flat, where he lived many years, to an old people’s home. They are meeting for lunch but will later go to a hotel for sex. He is meeting Fenia Xenopoulou, head of Directorate C (“Communication”) in the Directorate-General for Culture and a Greek Cypriot. There is Kai-Uwe Frigge, principal private secretary in the EU Directorate-General for Trade and a German national. Several of our key characters are in the neighbourhood.

The book opens in and around Place Sainte-Cathérine, in the centre of Brussels. If I had to sum this book in four words, they would be Auschwitz, pigs and politics. As most of us do not know any senior EU civil servants and quite likely imagine them, probably not entirely inaccurately, to be stuffy, pompous and devoid of humour or charm, he can mock them, not just for their devotion to the cause but also for their different national foibles and for their total self-interest. Menasse falls partially into this trap though partially gets out of it by focussing his story on senior EU civil servants. The problem with satire is that when you satirise something like the EU or, indeed, people like Boris Johnson or Donald Trump, there is a grave risk that reality will be both funnier and more preposterous than your satire. do something that was not needed, not wanted, served no useful purpose and would cost money. One of the main reasons for believing it is that it was not entirely unlikely that the EU would do such a thing, i.e. This was, of course, like most of what he says, an outright lie. The current prime minister of the United Kingdom, in the days when he was a (sort of) journalist, famously claimed that the EU was to ban bendy bananas and require all bananas to be straight. Home » Austria » Robert Menasse » Die Hauptstadt (Capital) Robert Menasse: Die Hauptstadt (Capital)

Robert menasse the capital