Excerpt from The Capital by Robert Menasse, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Turning smartly to his right, he heard animated cries, a scream and a bizarre panting mixed with squeals. He gasped and looked back. Now he spotted the pig. He couldn't believe his eyes. There, between two of the wrought-iron poles that lined the hotel forecourt, was a pig. It stood, head lowered, like a bull about to launch an attack. There was something both preposterous and menacing about this creature. It was a total mystery: where had the pig come from and why was it there? Ryszard Oświecki got the impression that all life in this square – at least as far as he could see – had stiffened, frozen, the animal's tiny eyes reflected the neon light from the hotel's façade. Oświecki started to run! He ran to the right, glanced back, the pig yanked up its head with a snort, took a few steps backwards, turned around, then ran right across the square to the row of trees outside the Flemish Cultural Centre, De Markten. The passers-by witnessing the scene kept their eyes on the pig rather than the man in the hood, and now Martin Susman saw the creature too. He lived in a building next to Hotel Atlas and was just opening the window to let in some fresh air. Susman couldn't believe his eyes: that looked like a pig! He had just been contemplating his life, thinking about the coincidences that had led him, the son of Austrian farmers, to be living and working in Brussels. In his present mood everything seemed crazy and alien, but a pig on the loose in the square below, that was just too crazy, it must be his mind playing tricks on him, a projection of his memory! He scanned the square but the pig had vanished.

The creature sprinted across rue Sainte-Catherine, keeping left to avoid the tourists coming out of the church, and raced on past to the quai au Briques. The tourists laughed, no doubt thinking that this stressed pig on the verge of collapse was a Brussels trad­ition, a local phenomenon. Some of them would later check their guidebooks for an explanation. Weren't bulls driven through the streets of Pamplona in Spain to mark some holiday? Maybe they did the same in Brussels, but with pigs? If you encounter the incomprehensible in a place where you don't expect to understand everything, then life can be very amusing indeed.

At that moment Gouda Mustafa turned the corner and almost walked straight into the pig. Almost? Hadn't it in fact touched him, brushed his leg? A pig? Leaping aside in panic, Gouda Mustafa lost his balance and fell. Now he was lying in a puddle, which made the whole thing even worse. It wasn't the grime of the gutter that made him feel defiled, but contact – if there had been contact – with the unclean animal.

Then Mustafa saw a hand reaching down to him, he saw the face of an elderly gentleman, a sad, troubled, rain-sodden face; the old man seemed to be crying. It was Professor Alois Erhart. Gouda Mustafa couldn't understand what he was saying, all he grasped was the word "O.K."

O.K.! O.K.! Mustafa said.

Professor Erhart kept talking, said in English that he'd had a fall today too, but he was so confused that he said "fail" instead of "fall". Gouda Mustafa didn't understand him and said O.K. again.

The blue lights had arrived. Emergency services. Police. The entire square rotated, flickered, twitched in the blue light. The emergency vehicles sped howling towards Hotel Atlas. The sky above Brussels played its part: the rain fell. Now it appeared to be raining blue, twinkling drops. A strong gust of wind joined in, tugging at several umbrellas and wrenching them inside out. Gouda Mustafa took Professor Erhart's hand and allowed himself to be helped up. His father had warned him about Europe.

Reprinted from The Capital: A Novel by Robert Menasse, translated by Jamie Bulloch. Copyright © 2017 by Suhrkamp Verlag; Translation copyright © 2019 by Jamie Bulloch. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved."