The Capital: A Novel - Hardcover

“Drolly comic... I enjoyed The Capital so much...A major book about coincidences, of linked and overlapping meanings...This is a deeply humane novel, a novel for adults. It carries the wisdom and weight and weariness of late middle age. Menasse writes not about the way things should be but about the way things are, rare enough these days. 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.”
- Dwight Garner, New York Times

“[A] stinging office satire... A Joseph Heller-like funhouse of bureaucratic cul-de-sacs, interdepartmental squabbling, nonsensical regulations and embarrassing acronyms... Jamie Bulloch provides the excellent translation.”
- Sam Sachs, Wall Street Journal

“A brutally funny and exhaustive tableau of both a continent in transition and the organization straining to hold it together.... Menasse writes with a wry, self-deprecating touch. He turns what might have been a dry lecture into a teeming epic that brings to multi-textured life a continent undergoing an identity crisis.”
- Andrew R. Chow, TIME

“Witty but humane.... The massive cast never becomes unwieldy tanks to Menasse’s delightful prose. This epic, droll account of contemporary Europe will be catnip for fans of mosaic novels and comical political machinations.”
- Publishers Weekly [starred review]

“The first great EU novel.”
- Politico

“Like Musil in The Man Without Qualities, [Menasse] has fun with efforts to organize something grand to celebrate an anniversary, here the 50th of the European Commission's founding (he even parodies that book's opening passage).... [An] ambitious panorama that arrives amid the throes of Brexit and the Chinese Year of the Pig. Intelligent, fun, sad, insightful―an exceptional work.”
- Kirkus Reviews [starred review]

“A thoroughly entertaining fiction that serves both as a sort of campus satire and a novel of ideas.... With its zest, pace and wit, Jamie Bulloch’s translation serves him [Menasse] splendidly.”
- Boyd Tonkin, The Spectator

“Utterly unique.... In constantly blending styles and genres, Menasse 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.”
- Alexander Moran, Booklist

“A first-class read.”
- The Guardian

“Mischievous yet profound.”
- The Economist