2024 BOOK REVIEW #14: KIDNAPPING BY GASPARD KOENIG

This parallel and then intersecting metaphorical plunge into European expansion and family au pairs is fascinating in its detail, warnings of a continental gentrifying push in the name of more commerce, the sacrifices we all need make to stay employed in the line of work we choose and the underbelly of international banking and London-based Romanian communities.

It’s a lot, and there’s plenty more, but each character in this literary Economist type, slowly boiling thriller has a well defined archetypical and sociologically representative role.

I remember as in the mid 1990s as a student at Sciences Po in Paris, where the author has taught, the excessive lauding of the expanding European Union, while my first job was to research some of its day to day challenges and controversies, with a daily five minute EU themed report in English for a new European desk at Radio France Internationale.

This gripping book is nuanced though, and shows the vanity and limitations of bankers who see themselves as key to making the world progress, while deep rooted non monetary values do remain resilient in more remote parts, issues often played out, and sometimes misread by journalists to this day.