Adults in the Room:My Battle with the European and American Deep Establishmentby Yanis VaroufakisFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017The description “lengthy memoir by a former finance minister” isn't exactly calculated to get eyes eagerly scanning pages, but readers won't be able to be so complacent about such a judgement in the future, because Adults in the Room, the lengthy memoir by former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, is boisterously, engrossingly enjoyable from start to finish, despite often needing to unburden itself to its readers on the arcana of international finance and the fine-grain details of Greek governmental meetings. Varoufakis was his country's finance minister from January until July of 2015 in the administration of Alexis Tsipras and also a member of the Hellenic Parliament in the same year. He was intimately involved in Greek “bailout” negotiations on which the economy of an entire nation depended, and – we now learn, and are grateful for it – he took copious notes the the whole time.Adults in the Room is the result, and Varoufakis helpfully frames his own efforts for readers right at the beginning of the book:

The book could be described as a memoir of my dealings with Barack Obama, Jack Lew, Larry Summers, Bernie Sanders, the US ambassador in Athens, Angela Merkel, Wolfgang Schäuble, Emmanuel Macron, Mario Draghi, et al. Or simply as the tale of a small, bankrupt country taking on the Goliaths of Europe and America in order to escape from debtors' prison before suffering a crushing if fairly honorable defeat.

This is in no way intended to be taken seriously, and after only a dozen pages or so, every reader will have realized that there's a third possible description of the book: a Hero's Tale, told by Himself.Anybody who thinks this might be an aridly self-serving way to tell the story of a financial crisis that shook the entire world to its foundations has reckoned without the fact that the Greeks were mankind's original great storytellers, and their best protagonists have always been themselves. It's right there in the book's subtitle: “My Battle with the European and American Deep Establishment,” and that won't be the last time Varoufakis resorts very easily to a kind of hoplite hubris that nine out of ten writers couldn't manage without alienating their audience. Varoufakis, thankfully, is that tenth writer, telling us that when the managing director of the European Stability Mechanism “reminded” him that the entirety of Greece's multi-billion debt could be summarily recalled at any time, he responded with “two ancient words.” “These were the defiant response of the king of Sparta, leader of the three hundred men who attempted to resist the entire Persian army at the legendary battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, when instructed by the enemy to throw down their weapons,” Varoufakis writes, reassuring any reader foolish enough to think Thermopylae might not get a mention. He then gives the two words in Greek, along with a somewhat tepid translation: “Come and get them!”Varoufakis warns his audience early in the proceedings that his book's enormous cast of characters will fall into two camps, the Greeks and the Troj – er, that is, “the banal and the fascinating.” And what should have been the book's biggest weakness is, through weird storytelling magic, transformed into one of its greatest strengths: Varoufakis spends equal amounts of time on the banal and the fascinating. His descriptions of the banal read like scene-settings in a Le Carré novel:

Replacing Chouliarakis had become imperative. A country's Eurogroup Working Group representative and Eurogroup deputy must be the tip of its finance minister's spear. With a finance ministry resembling Swiss cheese. I desperately needed the chair of my ministry's Council of Economics Advisers to be someone in whom I had total faith, both as an economist and as a human being. I had neither. I considered Chouliarakis's analytical skills to be woolly, his academic credentials paltry, and his reliance on the troika's inane econometrics worrisome. As for his character, he was the opposite of a team player: opaque, almost always late for meetings and often remarkably difficult to locate.

And his descriptions of the fascinating folk – among whom certainly count all the big names and national leaders who populate his pages – are equally energetic, especially the not-exactly-rare intervals in which he's discussing himself, as in the moment when he takes a chilly nighttime walk to a meeting in Riga:

How invigorating it was! I walked for about half an hour, taking in the old buildings bathed in the orange rays of the street lights which pierced the freezing haze, breathing in the crisp air, feeling human again. Dinner with my colleagues at a German-themed beer-and-sausage restaurant was just as restorative as I had hoped it would be and reminded me what it was like to have a normal life.

Varoufakis might secretly yearn for a normal life (no reader of this book will believe it for a second, but it's possible), but Adults in the Room is certainly not an account of such a life. Rather, it's just about the last thing you'd expect when you open a lengthy memoir by a former finance minister: a cracking good adventure story.