Wouldn’t the migrant crisis make fantastic reality TV? Timur Vermes’s The Hungry and the Fat reviewed

The context for The Hungry and the Fat, Timur Vermes’s new satirical novel, is not as far-fetched as all that. We’re just a short distance in the future, a time when a prosperous Europe is under pressure to formulate its responses to the massive refugee camps that are swelling all over Africa. (Significantly, this setting is explicitly post-Merkel Germany, in the years following the major influx of refugees allowed under her leadership.) Enter a TV producer, who can think of no better way to handle the global crisis than to send his star-of-the-moment to visit one of the large African camps and meet some of its inhabitants. It will be the perfect culmination of the company’s hit reality series, Angel in Adversity, adored by viewers and advertisers alike. What could possibly go wrong The beautiful, elegant and vacuous Nadeche Hackenbusch shows up at the two-million-person camp, where she is welcomed as an angel.