Menasse's complex, confusing and astute social commentaries make "The Capital" an ingenuous prescient work of profound insights. It's a compilation of self-serving characters that are mistrustful, perfidious, non-committal and as such, unable to bridge meaningful connections. The confusion & absurdity in Menasse's writing argue the futility of establishing a functioning European Union. Progress towards a social union, a fiscal union, the formation of common European alliance with the goal of turning competing European nations into a united Europe of sovereign citizens all enjoying the same rights is ephemeral. The unification of the EU is unachievable in lieu of the persistence of nationalist ideology indigenous to one's country of citizenship and is likely to underly all criminalities. Menasse argues nationalism has a proclivity towards evil as it's used as the justification of ethnic purging & genocide. Menasse points towards Nazi Germany's extermination of 6 million Jews during WWII. The novel is set in Brussels, the capital of the European Union which hosts the headquarters of the main EU institutions. The tale begins with a murder mystery that becomes totally effaced in sinister bureaucratic manipulations. A pig runs rampant down the streets of Brussels setting the tone for an absurdist black comedy imbued with many political innuendos hidden within this wickedly convoluted novel. The police cover-ups appear benign betwixt the Catholic Diocese control and bureaucratic back-stabbing for climbing the corporate ladder. There is a plethora of characters: a police detective, a hired hitman, Holocaust survivor, a Catholic priest and multiple executives that exchange double-talk divulging little that would assist another. "The Capital" is clever & abstruse. It's both amusing & disconcerting and particularly relevant at present. Menasse argues that today the world has selected a new scapegoat slated for vehement anathema, not the Jews or the communists but immigrants in general. Specifically the Islamic nations and individuals who would threaten to lord over everyone with austerity, misogynistic rule & religious fanaticism as justification for barbarities inflicted on all infidels. There is a harshness to the debilitating preparedness the individuals take which proves stifling & deleterious to functioning in society. And yet, there is a lyricism for pondering how history is recorded. What do we remember, what do we forget or chose to forget and why we forget. "For the living, death is always the death of others."
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