‘We are Empty and Generic.’ Grote Europese roman as a Document of the Long 1990s

This article reads Koen Peeters’s Grote Europese roman (Great European Novel, 2007) as an analysis of the long 1990s and its aftermath. It presents post-Cold War Europe not as a site of renewal, but as one of boredom, alienation, and sameness. Social exchange is reduced to branding, marketing, and transactional logic. Drawing on Marcel Mauss’s theory of the gift, Marc Augé’s notion of the non-place and Fredric Jameson’s concepts of hyperspace, the waning of affect and cognitive mapping, the article demonstrates how the corporate gifts industry functions as a metaphor for a Europe stripped of meaningful contact. The protagonist’s journey through European capitals initially reproduces this emptiness, as he moves through airports, hotels, and conferences that flatten both identity and history. Gradually, however, his business itinerary develops into a process of cognitive and historical reorientation. The novel ultimately suggests that Europe can only become imaginable as a community when it recovers non-commodified forms of exchange and remembrance.