Mocking the mandarins

Stendhal likened politics in literature to a pistol-shot in a concert: crude, but compelling. When that politics largely consists of machinations within the European Commission in Brussels, readers may fear that the writer who pulls the trigger wields no more than a pop-gun. Yet the Austrian author Robert Menasse has scoured these corridors of power — and powerlessness — to furnish a thoroughly entertaining fiction that serves both as a sort of campus satire and a novel of ideas.