But for all its importance, Mr. Menasse mused in 2010, he didn’t really know much about how the European Union functioned, or for that matter, about the functionaries who ran it. So he rented an apartment in the center, on the Rue du Vieux Marché aux Grains — not in the dull European quarter where the Union institutions are. For a writer who loves cities, cigarettes and wine, that would have been a step too far.

He set about exploring the place, meeting officials, reading the histories, digging into the archives. “The European Union is man-made, and everything done by man contains a story,” he said. “What they do all day, what are their biographies, nationalities, coming together with all these different languages and mentalities, and suddenly the institution has a face.”

The result is a traditional novel, broad-shouldered, omniscient, almost Balzac-ian, but with terrorism part of a plot centered satirically around an all-too-plausible Brussels idea. An unhappy Greek Cypriot eurocrat, Fenia Xenopoulou, “promoted” to the underfunded, despised department of culture, is charged with revamping the tarnished image of the European Commission, the bureaucracy that administers the bloc, with a big “Jubilee Project” to mark its 50th anniversary.

She is bitter, and thinks: “When the Commissioner for Trade or for Energy, yes, even when the Commissioner for Catching Fish had to leave and go to the bathroom, the discussion was interrupted and people waited until he or she returned. But if the Culture Commissioner had to leave, people kept right on talking, no one even noticed whether she was sitting at the table or on the toilet.”

Ms. Xenopoulou decides on the perfect project — given that the European Union emerged from the atrocities of the Nazis, she proposes to proclaim Auschwitz as the birthplace of the European Commission.

Needless to say, the member nations that actually run the European Union are horrified, each for its own reasons. Poland argues that Auschwitz was a solely German crime; Germany says that Muslims, now a part of German and European culture, were innocent; Austria says that a Polish horror must not be used to undermine the foundations of the Austrian state. And so on.

But Mr. Menasse wants to capture the other Brussels as well, including the headquarters of NATO, so there is another thread — a police detective whose politically sensitive investigation is frustrated and a Polish hit man who kills the wrong person but escapes amid a chaotic protest by pig farmers (and their pigs), demonstrating against an E.U. regulation blocking the export of pigs’ ears to China. The novel ends, eerily enough, with a terrorist bombing of the Maalbeek subway station, in the European quarter.