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Robert Menasse

Auteur de The Capital

32+ oeuvres 827 utilisateurs 31 critiques 3 Favoris

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Œuvres de Robert Menasse

The Capital (2017) 357 exemplaires
Die Vertreibung aus der Hölle (2001) 106 exemplaires
Don Juan de la Mancha (2007) 74 exemplaires
Wings of Stone (1991) 58 exemplaires
Schubumkehr. (1995) 41 exemplaires
Die Erweiterung (2022) 30 exemplaires
Bar Hopeloos (1988) 20 exemplaires
Erklär mir Österreich (2000) 16 exemplaires
Das Land ohne Eigenschaften (1993) 15 exemplaires

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You don’t get very far into Robert Menasse’s “The Capital” before pigs start to appear.

A pig is seen rattling around in downtown Bruxelles, the European capital. A wealthy Austrian pig farmer pressures his brother, a bureaucrat in the EU hierarchy, to lobby for new subsidies for pig farmers. A senior trade bureaucrat is fending off pressure from pig farmers to eliminate agricultural subsidies to buoy European pig prices.

A man is murdered at the Hotel Atlas and all trace of evidence is “disappeared” by authorities. A concentration camp survivor is on the loose. A professor of economics is tapped to advise on Europe’s future. A bureaucrat is tapped to advise on the best means to celebrate the EU’s Jubilee year, but the idea is snuffed out by vigilant cronies.

Then there are the metaphorical pigs: the bureaucrats eating at the trough of a fat European government. The police units ever present on the streets of Bruxelles. The capitalist pigs at the trough of subsidies. And not the least of it: the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain) the source of Europe’s financial crisis.

Menasse sees little hope for the confederation as long as territorial imperatives cloud the benefits of unity. For one thing, what good is an organization founded on collective guilt, especially when the last of the survivors disappear?

The “Never again!” mantra of the continentalists rings hollow when every sign is on the horizon of a repetition of the dire events of the 1930’s and 1940’s. Nationalism, the old pig on the block, is back.

At every turn the reader (intended to be a European?) is asked to question what it means to be a European. It doesn’t say “European” on their passport. Having sex isn’t a peculiarly European pleasure any more than drinking wine, or beer, or attending a football match. Nor birth. Not death. Not religious affiliation. Nor surveillance.

“Why bother?” Menasse seems to be asking along with a significant number of minority of voices in the UK. What value is a confederation whose sole raison d’être is economic growth when growth is never going to keep up with demand and growth means despoiling the planet?

Well, for one thing if the government in Bruxelles is corrupt so too are the national governments. Moreover, the national governments duplicate other services that automation has clearly shown can be done by a machine. In truth, Europeans are paying too much for government. And their governments are too slow. So are ours on the other side of the Atlantic.

For another thing, the trading players in this universe are China, Japan, and the United States. Going nationalist is suicidal in traditional trade talks.

What is the metaphorical “capital” of the European experiment in continental government? At the moment it’s in the trash can Along with Karl Marx’ “das Kapital” and Thomas Piketty’s “Capital.” There is no room for logic, rationalism, or compassion in this capital.

If anything this planet needs less governance and more cooperation. Yes, I’m speaking of the impending environmental disaster of global warming. The many millions more of environmental refugees on the horizon.

Just to test my thesis I asked my Canadian wife: “If you could have smaller government, lower taxes, and greater access to international trade, would you agree to annex Canada to the United States?”

Her answer: “No way! Over my dead body!” The defence rests, your Honour.

Of that and much more our governments and our voters are petrified. They are all worried about it in France as they are in Ohio or Pennsylvania or the suburbs of Toronto. They too are the “pigs” that frighten us in the night.

The biggest pig in the room? Why, of course, it is us. And if you don’t remember why I urge you to go back and read George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”
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Signalé
MylesKesten | 21 autres critiques | Jan 23, 2024 |
Die von den anderen Abteilungen selten für voll genommene Kulturdirektion der Europäischen Kommission wird beauftragt, ein Projekt zur Imagesteigerung der Kommission zu planen. Man verfällt auf die Idee, mit dem "Big Jubilee Project" den Bogen von der Befreiung des Konzentrationslagers Ausschwitz ins Jetzt zu spannen und die Kommission sohin als Gewähr für den europäischen Grundkonsens "Nie wieder Krieg, nie wieder Ausschwitz" zu präsentieren. Doch das Projekt gerät in die Mühlen der Brüsseler EU-Bürokratie. Parallel dazu wird von Geheimdienstkreisen versucht, einen Mord zu vertuschen.

Robert Menasse hat einen Roman über die europäische Hauptstadt Brüssel und die Europäische Union geschaffen. Er zeigt auf, dass Anspruch und Wirkung beziehungsweise Außenwahrnehmung oftmals auseinanderklaffen. Bürokratie, nationale Interessen, Lobbying und politische Intrigen der EU und Ihres Beamtenapparates werden meisterhaft dargestellt und gibt der Roman Einblick in die europäische Geschichte und die Willensbildung der EU.

Fraglich bleibt aber, weshalb Menasse sich nicht darauf beschränkt, sondern zudem noch ein Mordkomplott und zahlreiche Absurditäten in den ohnedies prall gefüllten Plot zu packen versucht. Das Buch ist ein Pageturner, dass sich letztlich aber in Verästelungen verirrt. Dies mag als Symbol für die Brüsseler Bürokratie durchaus passend erscheinen, im Hinblick auf die angerissene Kriminalhandlung und weitere Erzählfragmente enttäuscht aber das abrupte (zumindest im Hinblick auf Nebenstränge der Handlung schlusslose) Finale.
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Signalé
schmechi | 21 autres critiques | Jul 10, 2023 |
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 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.
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½
 
Signalé
thorold | 1 autre critique | Jun 25, 2023 |
Robert Menasse’s Die Hauptstadt, winner of the 2017 German Book Prize, has recently being published by MacLehose Press in an English translation by Jamie Bulloch. In this incarnation, the novel’s title is rendered as The Capital. This name, of course, a faithful and literal translation from the German, but I wonder whether it was also meant as a tongue-in-cheek reference to Karl Marx’s epic tome. Indeed, political and economic theories also loom large in Menasse’s Capital, except that they are presented within the context of a zany novel about the workings of the European Commission.

Die Hauptstadt has been described as the first great novel about the European Union. It could well be the case. I don’t profess to be some expert in Continental literature, of course, but the only other novel I know which uses the European Commission as a backdrop is “What happens in Brussels stays in Brussels” by the Maltese author Ġuże’ Stagno. And that’s more a satire on Maltese politics and the Maltese representatives in the EU, than a novel on the European institutions themselves.

Menasse’s work takes a wider view. Its central plot element is a “Big Jubilee Project” which is being organised by the Commission as a celebration of the anniversary of its founding. Ambitious EU official Fenia Xenapoulou hopes that this will be an occasion to improve the image of the Commission, whilst providing her with her big break. Fenia’s Austrian assistant Martin Susman comes up with the noble idea of roping in Holocaust survivors, as a reminder that the European Union was built to ensure that Auschwitz would “never happen again”. Unsurprisingly, as the organizers will discover to their chagrin, national interests and behind-the-scenes lobbying make the success of such an ambitious celebration unlikely.

Much as I enjoyed this novel, I must say that it took me some time to finally get immersed in it. This is certainly not the fault of the translation – I’ve previously enjoyed Bulloch’s translations of The Mussel-Feast and Look Who’s Back, and as in those novels, The Capital is rendered in prose that is idiomatic and flowing. I believe the problem is more with its sheer number of characters (a recent theatrical adaptation involved 7 actors playing about 20 roles) – in the initial chapters especially, I thought that an introductory dramatis personae would have been helpful as a guide to the somewhat bewildering international cast.

Another issue is with the proliferation of seemingly unrelated subplots involving, amongst other narrative complications: a pig on the loose in Brussels; a retired Professor preparing to deliver a final, memorable speech; a Holocaust survivor coming to terms with his impending death; a number of potential, never-fully-realised love stories and, more weirdly, a crime investigation which seems to have been borrowed from a Dan Brown thriller. More frustratingly, some of these loose ends are never tied up.

In other words, The Capital is a sprawling novel which could have done with some tightening. However, its polyphonic narrative is, in itself, a good metaphor for the European Union, this patchwork of nations and cultures which, somehow, managed to build a future of hope from the cinders of a continent ravaged by war. Indeed, this novel, despite its several comic and surreal elements, provides Menasse with the springboard to present his views on the European Union. Despite the evident shortcomings, the bureaucracy and the backstabbing which seem to characterize the working of its institutions, especially the Commission, the central idea(l) of the EC remains a laudable one – the creation of a supra-national body to keep extreme nationalism in check, in order to ensure that the horrors of the 20th Century do no happen again. In the age of Brexit and strident populism, its themes urgently relevant.

Full review at: http://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-capital-by-robert-menasse.html
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Signalé
JosephCamilleri | 21 autres critiques | Feb 21, 2023 |

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