Don Juan de la Mancha

In Robert Menasse's "Don Juan de la Mancha," every paragraph ends with a punchy, witty remark. Total immersion in the novel requires a willingness to emerge oneself in the Austrian everyday, and an ability to manage a plethora of female names. There is nothing wrong with the book, but I will probably never finish it. There are some tricks with unreliable narration; the narrator goes to a therapist and tells the story of his student years, a discourse that takes over many pages of the book--and is followed by the revelation that much of the story was made up.

Most of the jokes in the novel are founded on the assumption that the '68er movement in western and central Europe was pretty funny, and that it was just a bunch of rich kids doing the opposite of what their status required. Apparently Robert Menasse has written a neo-Marxist treatise on the culture industry, maybe back in the 70's (I only know it from browsing a book by JJ Long), and in this novel it seems that the expectation is that one has already been there, done that, and long since gotten old enough to dismiss all the radical, critical silliness of past decades. Fine, fine, I have no problem with criticizing criticism, but like so many novels I've read (like New York City novels) I can't help but think the whole text orbits around some kind of insider knowledge and laughs at me quietly.