What is the European Union? If at some point there was a horizon as a clear response towards economic, political and social unification, time has been in charge of destroying (or at least putting in doubt the viability) many of the statements to be developed over time.
Have we changed so much? What was established with popular fervor, a union that would make us stronger, ended up resenting crises, mistrust, failures and attacks interested in destabilization.
And a new question: How to write a novel about this strange union in the style of a marriage of convenience?
The best thing to do is go to the heart of Europe, Brussels. The capital with the ambition of a new tower of Babel where each one, in their own language, tries to impose their own, what about mine?
And it is here, in Brussels, where we approach the essential mechanism of the Europe that one day signed its nuptials. How could it be otherwise, we discover how squeaky this mechanism is, but we are also presented with an interesting sum of stories in five branches.
Acting as a European in Brussels is a strange stateless condition, a pact, a kind of duty free that strays from its own norms but plunges into chaos.
Thus, Robert Menasse benefits from that calm Brussels in the eye of the hurricane, where politicians, advisers, political scientists and businessmen make up a kind of life apart.
With touches of humor that fit perfectly with this paradoxical meeting place called Europe, Menasse uses his characters and his five intertwined plots to address everything from the human to the political, from the great challenges to the great conflicts.
It is curious how Europe seems at times to decompose economically from extremes such as Brexit at the same time that it is convulsed from the contradiction of nationalisms that want to vindicate and deconstruct larger social and political realities while still integrating into a much broader set such as it is europe.
Europe is one of those great contradictions about which thousands of stories could be written. For now, I invite you to get lost in the capital of Europe, a city that houses the magic of this increasingly insane Europe of all.
You can now buy the novel The Capital, by Robert Menasse, here: