New novel by Robert Menasse: He is quite Albanian well

Albania of all places.

A country most people know little about.

However, what little there is is always equally spectacular: spectacular nature, spectacular bunkers that Enver Hoxha had built hundreds of thousands of times on the Mediterranean coast in the paranoid late phase of his reign, spectacular archaic respectability customs in the villages of the northern Albanian Alps, spectacular mafia crimes.

That this country, which has copper and oil deposits, is also making the most credible efforts to become a member of the EU and that the overwhelming majority of the Albanian population is in favor of EU membership, while EU member states with right-wing populist governments are witnessing the political disintegration of the same operate, Robert Menasse has been busy for a long time.

The 2017 book prize winner has dedicated himself to the project of reviving the EU, which is considered bloodless, with red narrative juice.

And thus to make it immortal - contrary to all real political forecasts.

Menasse had already created bureaucracy with a human face at the start of his planned Europe trilogy.

“The Expansion” is now the expansion of this dedicated writing project.

After “The Capital”, “The Enlargement” goes beyond the EU borders

Part one, "The Capital," was set in Brussels and Poland's Auschwitz, which a shrewd EU official in charge of the Commission's fiftieth anniversary wanted to make it the European capital.

In the new novel, the focus shifts.

The Albanian Prime Minister wants to resume accession negotiations blocked by a French veto.

The former basketball pro, who sinks one or two dunks in the courtyard of the state chancellery in Tirana, takes advice from a poet.

Robert Menasse copied a lot from reality.

The French veto, for example, which was withdrawn shortly afterwards.

But also the political personnel: Menasse's prime minister is a reflection of the acting Albanian prime minister Edi Rama – a man with a past as a basketball player and a visual artist like his alter ego in the novel.

His adviser gives him a brilliant idea and at the same time a big problem.

The prime minister is to have a copy made of the helmet of the Albanian national hero Skanderbeg, which is kept in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, to fit his skull.

“Did the EU have a symbol of its unity?” the novel says: “No.

But the Albanians had one thing, this helmet.” And that's why it has to be honored again now, on the symbolic political battlefield of EU eastward expansion.

The leitmotif is an old helmet

Robert Menasse is not only a chronicler of the diplomatic entanglements between Brussels and Albania.

He's also a player.

650 pages about EU accession want to be held together by a leitmotif that pervades the novel's plot.

In this way, the helmet of Skanderbeg is placed on her narratively.

And it develops from a thing symbol, to stolen goods, from there to stolen goods, then to evidence and finally to a slapstick laughing stock.

Not only is the original helmet stolen from the Viennese armory by unknown persons, which raises suspicion of the Albanian Neuskanderbeg.

Also, the copy of the helmet goes astray or gets into the hands of a respectable family that normally does not bother with art theft,