Fact and fiction in Robert Menasse's novel "The Capital City"

Abstract

Austrian writer Robert Menasse received the "German Book Award" in 2017 for his Brussels novel "Тhе Capital City". The novel is mainly about a project of the European Commission's culture department, which was supposed to improve the image of the given organization. There are quite a lot of content knots in the novel "Тhе Capital City" that could have been analyzed in more details, such as the understanding of history, the issue of multiperspectivity, the linguistic reflexions in the novel etc. However, our research paper deals with the issue of the relation between fiction and fact, which is mainly illustrated through the example of one of the main characters, the mentioned Fenia Xenopoulou, as well as the function of reading for different characters and some intertextual allusions related to it.