The Last Hundred Days (2024)

Given the choice to read this for an English class, I avoided McGuinness's book for two reasons: one, because I'm Romanian, and I was afraid I wouldn't be objective enough, two, because I'm Romanian, and I know how Western authors see countries from the former Eastern Bloc - inaccurately, pityingly, and always in the same manner.

I decided to give it a try during the holidays, though, and I was pleasantly surprised. VERY pleasantly surprised. Despite having a certain rhythm which becomes predictable after the first hundred pages, despite sometimes blatantly forcing witticisms into its dialogues, McGuinness's language is delightful, and so are his subtle references to Romanian culture, his sudden shifts in tense, his organic descriptions of a totalitarian regime falling apart. To anyone saying the book is too bleak, or too exaggerated - nope. It is incredibly accurate and incredibly well researched, to the point where I, as someone who spent her entire life in this country, found out new things about the revolution. It's a book that sits very comfortably on the line between fiction and non-fiction, borrowing from both exactly what it needs.

A novel set in Romania during the last months of the dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, who had a good claim to the title of “Most Odious Eastern Bloc Dictator of the Decade” despite competing in a very strong field. I was attracted to the novel after reading that the author had lived in Romania in the late 1980s, which clearly lent the book authenticity. I can certainly understand why witnessing an intense event like the Romanian Revolution would have led him to write the book. Unfortunately, for me it didn’t succeed in conveying that experience.

The story is told from the perspective of a young Englishman who arrives in Bucharest in the summer of 1989, to take up a job teaching English. He isn’t named and is given only a limited backstory involving an unhappy childhood at the hands of an abusive father. Perhaps this lack of detail contributed to my feeling remote from the character and the events he described. Much of the first half of the book is taken up with descriptions of Bucharest in 1989, such as how ordinary people faced continual shortages of basics like food, electricity, and medicines, whilst the Party elite consumed luxuries in reserved shops and restaurants. Corruption is everywhere, either because of poverty and hunger or, in the case of the Party elite, because of greed. A lot of the text is taken up with descriptions of the destruction of old Bucharest. Ceauşescu had a mania for destroying architectural gems and replacing them with shoddily built tower blocks. The horribleness of his rule is set out, but I felt this part of the novel read more like non-fiction. The narrator’s voice seemed to me to resemble that of a documentary film maker. There wasn’t much sense of excitement or emotional engagement.

The book’s other main character is a colleague of the narrator’s, also a Briton, with the unusual name of Leo O’Heix. Leo is a “fixer” who deals in the black market and has lots of contacts within the Party elite. One of the narrator’s students is also the daughter of one of Ceauşescu’s Ministers. These and other contacts mean that Leo and the narrator have access to some of the country’s top people, who are secretly plotting against Ceauşescu. Some of the situations seemed a bit contrived. At one point the author even works in an appearance by Slobodan Milosevic, supposedly on a visit to Romania. I couldn’t help thinking this was overdoing it a bit.

The main plus point was the book’s authenticity, and it did have some moments. Taken as a whole though I found it a bit leaden.

On December 21, 1989, on Palace Square in Bucharest, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu gave what was to be his final speech. Ceausescu's decision to appear publicly at the balcony of the Royal Palace was a result of his profound misunderstanding of the national mood in Romania, which was finally beginning to collectively rebel against his 24 year rule. The belief that simply by appearing before his subjects, speaking the standard wooden language and promising inconsequential changes (such as raising salaries and pensions by several percent) he'd calm and satisfy the revolting masses was itself a result of surrounding himself only by opportunists and sycophants for decades - people who'd never question any of his decisions, and would offer only growing praise and adoration for his person.

Ceausescu's speech was meant to boost the popularity of his regime - it was meant to resemble his famous speech from 1968 which he gave at the same venue, and where he openly condemned the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia and distanced himself from the Soviet Union. That speech was a genuine success, and was received enthusiastically both at home and abroad, in the West - Romania became the first nation from the Eastern Bloc to develop official relations with the European Community, whose leaders quickly jumped on his perceived anti-Sovietism and hoped for Ceausescu to become their man in the East. Romania was the only country from the soviet bloc to join the IMF and have diplomatic relations with Israel; Ceausescu visited Emperor Hirohito in Tokyo and Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace. Richard Nixon visited Bucharest in 1969, marking the first visit of an American president to a socialist country since the beginning of the Cold War.

Only the front rows of the crowd were cheering for Ceausescu now; they were comprised of stooges and party apparatchiks, who were ordered to the portraits of him and his wife and wave the national flags. The real reaction was breeding in the background, where just minutes into his speech the crowd began to chant: "Timisoara! Timisoara!" - name of the Romanian city where just several days before police and the military brutally suppressed an anti-government demonstration. At the time, Ceausescu was not even in Romania - he left for a two-day state visit to Iran, leaving the crushing of the demonstration to his wife, Elena, and their subordinates. In an attempt to silence the growing number of revolting people, Ceausescu raised his right hand and attempted to speak to them directly, and the puzzled expression on his face remains one of the enduring images of the fall of communism in Europe.

The confused Ceausescu was eventually escorted from the balcony by his security; he and Elena were taken away from Bucharest on a helicopter, unable to stop the revolution from beginning. As the army has closed Romania's airspace, the helicopter pilot claimed to be in danger from anti-aircraft missiles and landed on a small country road, forcing the Ceausescus to abandon the helicopter and leaving hem with just one personal guard. The Ceausescus eventually managed to hijack a car and have the driver take them to the city of Targoviste, where they were arrested by soldiers from the local garrison. Revolutionary authorities formed a tribunal and tried both Nicolae and Elena for their crimes against the people of Romania. It was a kangaroo court and a Stalinist trial with many false and overblown charges, and even Ceausescu's defense joined with the prosecution and accused them both of capital crimes. Although Nicolae rejected the revolution as a Soviet coup d'etat and the tribunal as unconstitutional, it was no use - they were declared guilty and executed by firing squad five minutes after the verdict, and more than a hundred bullets ripped through Nicolae's and Elena's bodies - the only violent deposition of government in the Eastern Bloc. Although their trial and sentencing was recorded and broadcasted on Romanian television, the execution was carried out quickly in fear of loyalists rescuing the dictators, and only the last round of shots was filmed, along with the grisly images of their dead bodies. As the Ceausescus were led to their death, Nicolae sang The Internationale; Elena reportedly screamed "you motherf*ckers!"

To understand Ceausescu's Romania one must first understand both the dictator and his wife, who both have developed extensive cult of personality around themselves. At first Ceausescu began to be identified with Romania as a whole after his surge in popularity in 1968, as a result of his growing opposition to the Soviet Union. But the person whom Western leaders saw as a possible reformist and what they took to be a possibility of creating a schism in the Warsaw Pact was in fact the result of Ceausescu's visit to China and North Korea in 1971. In China, he witnessed Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, and in North Korea he met with Kim Il-sung, who introduced him to the idea of Juche - political independence along with self-reliance in the economy and self-defense. Ceausescu took great interest in these ideas - along with the personal way both leaders ruled their countries - and upon his return to Romania began to emulate them.

Soon, along with translations of Kim Il-sung, Romanian bookstores were full of Ceausescu's many books - which the media presented as great contributions to Marxism-Leninism; he took a delight in many titles Romanian writers created for him, such as "Genius of the Carpathians". Similarly to Kim, Ceausescu's rise to power from humble origins was presented in a way reminiscent to Romanian folk tales. By all accounts, Elena was just as self-centered as her husband - despite lacking education she had scientists ghostwrite for her so that she could claim to have made important contributions to the field of chemistry,and thought of herself as Mother of the Nation. It was an ironic name, considering the fact that it was her husband's policy which outlawed abortion as an attempt to increase the falling population, restricting access to contraception and forcing women to take monthly gynecological examinations. Birth rates did increase but so did the number of abandoned children, who were subjected to institutionalized neglect and abuse in overflowing orphanages which they shared with the mentally ill.

Both Ceausescus made sure that films and photographs made of them always showed them in best possible image, retouching all "defects", and engaged in open nepotism, prompting Romanians to joke that they were creating "socialism in one family" - a sad joke in a country which Ceausescu surveilled through the Securitate, an everpresent and invisible secret police force which penetrated all levels of society and could have outmatched both the Stasi and the KGB in brutality. In his vanity, Ceausescu even had a special order made just for him - a "Presidential Sceptre", which prompted Salvador Dali to send him an ironic letter of congratulations. The state media, not daring to see the sarcasm, published it as proof of greatness of the country's leader, and his portraits and posters continued to grace its streets and avenues.

Although Ceausescu's opposition to Soviet influence attracted Western powers to Romania and could secure heavy loans on political grounds, poor and inflexible central planning focused on heavy industry led to stagnation of the mismanaged economy, and increased the country's foreign debt 10 times. While Ceausescu managed to secure a line of credit from the IMF and pay the huge debt in 1989, he did so by adopting a disastrous austerity policy which drastically lowered living standards of average citizens, led to shortages and rationing of basic foodstuffs. Cuts in energy and heating left the streets dark and houses cold, but kindled in Romanians a frustration aimed personally against Ceausescu, which ultimately erupted into the Revolution of 1989.

Which finally brings me to Patrick McGuinness's debut novel, .The Last Hundred Days, which was published and made the Booker longlist in 2011. McGuinness does a good job at depicting a city at the gates of a revolution, with a deep disquiet running underneath and something large and defining just one step ahead - history at the verge of the making. But McGuinness's book is a novel, and novels can contain history but ultimately are dramatizations of it - and this is a case where we can't not see it. McGuinness's narrator is an unnamed young English expat, whose arrival at Bucharest is hardly believable (he secured a teaching position without even appearing at the interview) and the whole novel becomes more fiction than fact from there. The narrator comes into contact with Bucharest's elite and the downtrodden without any effort, and is universally accepted and befriended by all of them, instantly integrating into a completely new culture. Other characters - when they don't serve as explanations for ideological points - befriend him, confide in him, even fall in love with him. Which brings me to my next point - the narrator's main Bucharest insider, Leo, is a character who can appear only in fiction: he has almost limitless abilities and connections, and is able to get away with almost everything (in a totalitarian state nonetheless). The narrator's main love interest, Cilea, is a wealthy socialite who somehow develops a romantic relationship with him when she's not taking trips to Paris in her free time. I can accept the existence of such characters and even the fact that the narrator could meet one of them, but what luck did he had to posses to met and become intimately involved with both in a country infiltrated by a secret police and where people froze down in their unheated homes?

Since the novel feature a known historical background we know how it's going to end - we know how the revolution will play itself out, and the only thing is to dramatize it. And there lies my main problem with this novel - although it wasn't meant to be exploitative it borders on being so. Bucharest and Romania at the time are nothing more to the main character - the suffering, oppression and deficiency that McGuinness illustrates are ultimately little more than an exotic adventure from which he, an expat, can always safely return home and parents he escaped from in the first place. There's never any real sense of danger towards the main character, and his feelings remain hidden in the shadows - which robs the whole experience from intended meaning, and gives it a new one, immortalized by the Sex Pistols - "a cheap holiday in other people's misery".

2.5 stars

The nameless narrator of this faux-memoir seems to fall from the sky into the last days of the Ceausescu regime and the massive gravitational field of the enigmatic Leo O'Heix, oafish, corrupt, generous bon viveur, embodiment of decadent bourgeois capitalism. This story is his, but as he is The Magician (surely this is one of the six/nine/twelve basic plots?) he needs to be observed in preternatural action and not endowed with psychology.

Like the narrator, Leo has no past. More accurately, they both have painful pasts which do not figure in the story at all; the unwanted histories they have jettisoned tip them into the urgency of the present moment unencumbered. Similarly, the regime (the other protagonist) arrives divested of historical context. In the opening paragraphs, McGuiness effortlessly evokes the grey grinding misery of life in Bucharest with an evocative description of 'totalitarian boredom' and acute collocations like 'malign lethargy'. You can tell he's a poet. This tone-setting done, he spends few words on the suffering of the proletariat, instead focussing on the grotesque luxuries enjoyed by the tiers of the privileged: foreigners diplomats, party members and their families.

McGuiness, again effortlessly, scandalises this reproduction of privilege that features so offensively in non-fictional manifestations of communism. I think of Barbara Demmick's book Nothing to Envy. But while Demmick tells the real stories of ordinary people, presenting an incontrovertible indictment of the North Korean regime, McGuiness appropriates his chosen context for a narrative of heroic individualism, in the personality of Leon and his milieu, in which activism and community are envisioned as haphazard acts of interested philanthropy. Oh no! Am I making the foolish mistake of approaching The Last Hundred Days ideologically? Alas, I am.

I see reviews by Romanians saying this book is accurate, and others saying it is inaccurate, and other non-Romanian reviewers saying it doesn't matter because it's fiction. In my opinion, it does matter: I think it's irresponsible to write inaccurate historical fiction about highly political subjects. But it matters less to me that McGuiness might have misrepresented aspects of the historical context than that he has rather transparently used that context to mount a refutation of the ideas behind socialism.

Of course, the highly visible failure of communism is its own critique! One hardly need do any work, but McGuiness happily goes out of his way, not contenting himself with regularly (and haha yes rightly in my view) ridiculing historicism in author voice: "You know the old joke: with communism the future is certain, it's just the past that keeps changing" he creates two characters, Petre and Trofim, who rebel against the regime but defend socialist ideals, and has them articulate their positions in order to dismiss them. Petre's argument is bookended with derisive assertions of its wrongness, and is presented so weakly I want to call it a straw man, while Trofim's, though stilted, is more convincing:

Do you think that you who live in capitalist countries would believe in the right to a job, a decent wage, free health and education if socialism had not shown you the way? The welfare state? The National Health Service? Socialism showed you that what your employers and bosses sometimes gave you out of paternalism or pangs of social conscience was in fact life's necessities, the minimum. You only think of them as rights because of socialism. Until socialism they were merely privileges or random acts of charity or luck. And that is before I talk of social mobility... Capitalism owes its better self to us'

Right I'm done with that, sorry. I think I've used all my political chips, but I'll just have a jab at the presentation of gender and relationships while I'm here. The narrator mainly functions as witness-to-Leo's-antics, but he has a couple of affairs which serve to illustrate felt response to the stranger-than-fiction reality around him. The first relationship impedes his autonomy; he is used by his partner (though the whole affair and especially the yucky sex scenes work as fulfillment of male fantasy - we are meant to identify entirely with his perspective). Thus, it cannot be authentic because it violates the norms of heteropatriarchy. His partner, retaining her autonomy, is consistently presented as amoral and self-centred. The second relationship is presented as authentic because he responds emotionally; this partner surrenders her independence to him so all is right with the world.

The book starts off well, slightly overdone, in a way that seems quite appropriate: the humiliation and boredom of life under the regime is leavened by its sheer weirdness: the hint of baroque excess gives the text its charm, softens us up to be seduced by Leo. By the end, McGuiness seems to have lost momentum, and I was bored. Perhaps it's deliberate! Like everyone still alive, I was relieved when the revolution came. But, starting with the corpses of Timisoara, there are too many nameless victims serving this tale. The people Leo's actions affect negatively are always invisible, while everyone he helps individually commands our sympathy as they do his. But of course, life is like that, there is only a choice between bad Leo (selfish capitalism) and worse Ceausescu (totalitarian socialism), isn't there?

The bleak, paranoid atmosphere of Ceausescu's regime in Romania is evoked as authentically as only someone who was there could make it. This semi-fictional narrative relates the final days of a corrupt, decaying society, where racketeering and trafficking flourish, and playing the system is necessary for survival. Under constant surveillance, everyone has hidden motives and no-one is to be trusted - a fine recipe for gripping, chilling suspense.

Extract:-
Leo told me after the first frosts: 'The Cold War, ever wondered why they called it that? It’s not just all that bollocks about icy relations between East and West. The cold is a weapon here, they use it just like they’d use a gun or water cannon ... you remember what Napoleon said about being defeated by General Midwinter? Well around here Winter’s a colonel in the Securitate ....'

Reviewed for www.whichbook.net

This is the kind of novel I always dread it will turn this way but have to read since it's one of the few written by western authors about Romania; I have no idea how the author did his research but the country and period he described is just wrong - maybe he researched Stalin's Russia of the 30's since the 1989 Romania he describes here reads that way and it was not like that - as i lived through those times as a college student and they are still seared in my memory even after 22 years I found the travesty of this novel funny in the North Korean movie way on occasion - ie so bad to be funny in an absurd way.

Before getting the book I checked the sample - excited, the period that most likely was the most important in my life as from it sprung all the possibilities of the future - novel, longlisted for the Booker - and the writing style - a first person narration - was compelling enough but the factual mistakes started accruing at an alarmingly fast rate - the description of the Romanian car Dacia (wrong), the Bucharest blackouts, the food lines (they were much more prosaic - and again both not so bad and worse than described depending on occasion - than the author described and while here I could understand a little the exaggeration as literary license, it still jarred badly since it presaged the ridiculousness of what followed)

Then the university professors as janitors - so ridiculous, that may have happened in the 50's but in the 80's things were different - I would say subtler though they were sometimes cruder too

Wrong naming all over the place that is again so sloppy (Capsia instead of Capsa or at worst Capsha if you want to transliterate the sh, Capsia just sounds ridiculous, Cilea I am not sure what it stands for but it is no Romanian name - maybe Clea was intended which kind of fits the heroine as one of those ridiculous pretend names affected by people like her, though even that sounds a little wrong - or maybe Cleo from Cleopatra, another sort of unusual fancier name but still around...)

And I could continue on page after page how the author got everything wrong factually and in spirit; the oppression was as mentioned much subtler and on occasion much cruder than the Stalinist menace, the party leaders and the secret policemen gave no fig about anything except their power and seats, communism meant obedience to the First Family and nothing else, Marxism, Leninism and the like were given at best lip-treatment though they generally were marginalized in favor of Ceausescu's Thought which was the only essential ideology combining National Greatness with slogans about Power to the People, the Soviet Union was regarded as an enemy pretty officially and all traces of Stalin had been eradicated long ago...

In late 1989 everyone expected the regime to collapse (there was a movie adaption of a classic 19th century work November the Last ball - movie banned pretty fast for its allusion to the November Party Congress which was indeed the last ball so to speak, that encapsulated the atmosphere) though of course nobody knew how it will happen since like with the avalanche, it still takes the little stone to start it...

The book simply does not get it and it's a pity the author did not choose something he understood better since literary speaking it is reasonably compelling to the end but it is about an imaginary country not the real 1989 Romania as advertised; sadly...

4.5 stars....awesome novel debut...almost flawless

The Last Hundred Days are those of Ceausescu’s Romania. The real historical events leading up to the Romanian Revolution are a scaffold for the fictional narrative. The story is told from the vantage of an expat Brit who was just looking to get a job and it happened to land him there during the last few months of the regime in 1989. The author, Patrick McGuinness, lived in Romania at the time and so would seem to have an insider’s authentic impressions. He is also a poet and writer, and professor of literature at Oxford, and it is his wonderful prose that elevates this novel.
“As a power-saving measure, museum visitors were organised into groups and the lights in each room were turned on as you entered and off as you left,…It was like a tide of darkness following you, engulfing room after room behind you as you went.”
“Trofim greeted everyone as if he had heard of them before, as if they came to him cresting the wave of a happy reputation.”
“This is what surveillance does: we stop being ourselves, and begin living alongside ourselves. Human nature cannot be changed, but it can be brought to a degree of self-consciousness that denatures it.”

The book was longlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2011, and I was struck by the similarities it shared with another Booker nominee that year, Snowdrops by A.D. Miller (which unaccountably made the leap to the short list). Both books could be described by the same paragraph: An English expat ends up in (Romania, Russia), not entirely of his own volition but wants to make the best of it and make a good impression. He falls for an extraordinarily but mysterious beautiful woman, who may, or may not, be what she seems. Could she be a double agent? The characters in his life are pragmatic idealists, or are they?, and he learns quickly that life in (Romania, Russia) is definitely not what it appears to be on the surface. Corruption, hypocrisy and violence are the currency of (Romania, Russia). Despite the hardships and privations, extraordinary by British standards, he begins to feel part of his new home country. But even that might not be enough to withstand the extreme turmoil that is about to happen.

I think this is the kind of book to which Snowdrops was, in vain, aspiring to be. I even idly wondered if the Booker judges actually meant this book to be the shortlisted one, but got tripped up by a series of clerical bunglings (Dame Stella imperiously waves to the underling clerk and says, “put this book about the Brit duck-out-of-water in a communist country on the short list; it will add a bit of variety.” )
There are a rich assortment of characters, reminiscent of the cast of Casablanca, and some of the descriptions are funny. “Their parties, an endless round of co*cktails and booze-ups,…the circuit as a whole is…’a doppelgangb*ng: where largely identical people f*ck each other interchangeably’” His beautiful girlfriend is dismissed by a cynical friend as “Ah, Cliea — a girl of many layers; layer upon layer of surface…”

This book gives us illuminating glimpses into the deep darknesses of humans, and we see ourselves.
“For all the grotesqueness and brutality, it was normality that defined our relations: the human capacity to accommodate ourselves to our conditions, not the duplicity and corruption that underpinned them. This was also our greatest drawback — the routinisation of want, sorrow, repression, until they became invisible, until they numbed you even to atrocity.” (Of course, we like to think of ourselves as the more noble and heroic characters in the book, not the venal corrupt ones that are more akin to our least favourite acquaintances.) “…The system was breaking down into its constituent parts, paranoia and apathy, and as the centre started to give way the two were left to engage in their great, blurred, inconclusive Manichean struggle. Apathy and paranoia: two drunks fighting slowly around a park bench.”

So this is one of those books that I want to like and feel like I should like, but then I just really hate it. I mean, I STRUGGLED to force myself to pay attention and just finish the damn thing. Really. It was hard slogging through it. And yet, I learned a bit and McGuinness has some great commentary (examples below) and so it deserves a good rating. I mean, it might be a 5 start book and I am just a nincompoop who struggled with staying awake to read it. But on the other hand, isn't it McGuinness's job to make it more damn entertaining? I mean, this isn't a text book!

This was on awards list and so ended up on my to-read without me really having much of an idea what it was about. When I first picked it up, I was quite intrigued for a few reasons. I was 12 in 1989. I remember the "fall of communism" and more explicitly the fall of the Berlin Wall, but I was just a kid. I knew that commies were bad and that Russians were evil and that we were good. And then I grew up and became a sociologist and learned a whole lot more about Marx and started to realize that it was implementation of communism through a police state that was really so awful. And didn't really stop to think back through about what I knew or didn't know about the Eastern bloc at the end of the 1980s. Probably because I didn't really know much of anything.

Except one other small(ish) thing. In March of 1991 my aunt and uncle went to Romania to adopt a baby. When they got there, the baby they were supposed to adopt was no longer available and they waited around and met some people and eventually got a different baby and came home after like a month. They had all sorts of horror stories about their month in Romania. The left home with extra suitcases filled with lightbulbs and cigarettes to use as bartering tools. And my uncle came home with the funny note that Romania had "John Wayne toilet paper" because it was "rough, tough, and took no sh*t". Yep.

So that's all I knew about Romania and so I learned a bunch of specifics. I had heard of Ceausescu, but really I didn't know much other than he was a dictator.

Unfortunately, McGuinness's book is not much of a novel. It reads more like a biography than a novel. There is no real plot other than the unfolding of the revolution. On a personal level, the no name main character does not really compel the reader and doesn't have much of a personality or any real stake in anything (the other characters even remark upon this) and so it is most like a textbook with some back hand comments.

But the comments are good: "life in a police state magnifies the small mercies that it leaves alone until they become disproportionate to their significance; at the same time it banalises the worst travesties into mere routines." and

"the circuit as a whole is, as he puts it 'a doppelganbang: where largely identical people f*ck each other interchangeably'."

"Madness is not living in a fantasy world--she has lived in her fantasy world quite happily for years, perhaps we all have. Madness is the space between the fantasy world and the real one, where you find yourself cut off from both. There's no way back from that."

Overall I felt like I learned quite a bit about the end of Ceausescu's reign in Romania, but it was hard slogging and didn't feel like a novel so much as a chore.

Çavusesku dönemi Romanya’sı edebiyatta çok fazla işlenmeyen bir tarih. Hele ki bir İngiliz’in bu konu hakkında yazması hiç beklemediğim bir şeydi. Ancak yazarın Çavuşesku döneminde hatta rejimin yıkılmasında bir kaç yıl önce Bükreş’te yaşadığını öğrenince taşlar yerine oturdu.

Kitap hayatının karmaşık bir döneminden geçen ve başvurmadığı bir iş ile yolu 1989 baharında Bükreş’e düşen bir İngiliz’in, Çavuşesku iktidarının çöküşü öncesi gözlemlerini ve yaşadıklarını içeriyor. Bu kitap hakkından ne düşüneceğiniz, ne amaçla okuduğunuza bağlı olarak değişiyor. Zira Çavuşesku döneminin yıkım süreciyle ilgili detaylı ve gerçek bir tarih okumak istiyorsanız size uygun değil. Çünkü yazarın kendisinin de ifade ettiği üzere, kitap daha çok kurgu üzerinen ilerliyor ve yarattığı karakterlere benzer insanlarla tanışmış olsa da kitaptaki yansımaları biraz daha abartılmış halde.

Benim yakın tarihe dair kurgularda açmaza düştüğüm bir durum bu kitapta da yaşanıyor. Hele ki 1989 gibi oldukça yakın bir tarih ve bu tarihin canlı tanıklarının aktarımlarıyla detaylı bilgi edilebildiğiniz bir devrimin kurgusu söz konusuysa oldukça riskli bir alan. Çavuşesku dönemine dair biraz fikir sahibiyseniz gerçek tarihle ters düşen anlatımları rahatlıkla yakalayabiliyorsunuz. Ancak genel bir çerçeveden bu döneme ait bir kurgu okumak isterseniz sevebileceğiniz bir kitap. Ben bir noktadan sonra Çavuşesku’yu vs kenara bırakıp siyasi polisiye olarak okuduğum için sevdim. Çünkü kitapta ortaya çıkan durum Çavuşesku’nun karakteristik yönetiminden öte Sovyet anlayışı ile Kuzey Kore anlayışının harmanıyla ortaya konmuş bir tiranlık tanımı ve bu tiranlıkta yaşanan yasa dışı oluşumlar. Açıkcası yazarın bu döneme dair çok net bilgileri ve yaşam tecrübesi varken, devrim öncesi son 100 gün yerine, yaşadığı döneme dair daha ayakları yere sağlam basan bir kitap yazsa çok daha memnun olurdum.

Very very atmospheric -- a wonderful job of conveying the isolation, decripitude, mania, hidden corners, and mad luxuries of a nightmarish Bucharest at the height of paranoia in 1989. The telling details are lovingly rendered so that you feel the city around you yet are never bored by the description. The city is the most wonderful and noteworthy character. And the "plot" is fairly clever and well realized. The issues come in (and this book was almost a 2 star instead of 3 because of them) for two main reasons: a) people speak in seminars -- explaining political background or observations rather than allowing ideas to emerge from conversation, interaction, and the atmosphere and b) who the main character -- an utter cipher -- is, and how he manages to win the friendship of all the key (and opposing) figures in Bucharest at the time, is never explained. Our narrator is such an enigma that we have no idea whatsoever why the beautiful and wealthy Cilea (in love with someone else) would take up with him romantically, why her father, a leading Communist, would befriend him, why a grand old man like Trofim would have him as a confidante, why Leo, the magnetic heart of their little circle, would adopt him, etc. etc. etc. We are meant to believe that he's a working class English 21 year old with 1 year of uni, and an otherwise apparently invisible prior life as the obscure child of unloveable parents, and yet that he finds himself at the epicenter of Bucharest's intrigues, adopted and favored by nearly all, including the elites. McGuinness would have done better to fill in the blanks a bit more -- after a while that absence (and absence of sense) at the novel's core grates.

What a fantastic book. McGuinness manages to straddle the fact/fiction border with an engaging, easy to read narrative.

The characters are engrossing and relatable and the narrative effortlessly absorbing as the fall of Ceaucescu’s Communist reign comes to a bloody end. The real stand out in this novel is the language, not surprising given the author is also a Poet. From the very first page you realise you are in gifted hands:

“In the West we’ve always thought of boredom as slack time….Totalitarian boredom is different. It’s a state of expectation already heavy with its own disappointment”.

And the feeling never leaves. It is very clear that this was a labour of love, with every sentence painstakingly constructed. I was quite literally blown away by it.

This is not just a book about the fall of Communist Romania, although if this is why you drawn to it then you will not be disappointed. It vividly paints the everyday struggles of communist life and the all-seeing Securitate.

Yet, it is much more than that. It is a story of a young man searching for meaning in the world; fleeing home from his own domestic totalitarian life. I cannot recommend this more. One of the best books I have ever read.

Interesting character perspective chosen by the author - it provides good insight into the destruction Ceausescu inflicted: razing neighborhoods and century old churches/buildings, his complete disregard for the needs and freedoms of the Romanian citizens, & the volatile placements of those who were in the higher ranks. I believe there could have been a larger insight given into the average person of the state - not as flashy as his apparatchik & expat characters (although these are very well done); maybe more of the percolating discontent of the general citizen that led to its boiling eruption that December day. I think the main character is portrayed as someone older than his 21 years, in ways it just doesn't come across realistic.
A well written book for sure, especially for someone who is trying to understand the atmosphere prior to the revolt.

A very enjoyable read, engaging on every level. It mixes the historical context of life in the last days of Communist Romania with the thrills of a Le Carré novel.

An average story set in the middle of a once in a lifetime revolution makes this novel unique and valuable, hence the awards. Granted McGuinness is a wordsmith and awfully talented but I feel this book does lack a fundamental story line. It feels very much like McGuinness is just going through the motions and perhaps that reflects his age at the time. One feels he would probably rather just get laid than understand the inner workings of the communist party. There is nothing wrong with that but if it was me I would probably do my best to disguise it. McGuinness openly admits he's a voyeur not completely to grips with his comprehension of the unique situation he has stumbled into. However this is very much the story of a young man fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time. I don't quite understand why the historical facts were distorted and some critical ones brushed over but perhaps that does serve to reinforce the book as fictional. Whether they are his own or they are simply reworded McGuinness does comes out with a string of eloquent quotes which have stayed with me. His removed nature does make this book enjoyable and comical yet a little frustrating. I felt the humor was a little eerie, perhaps this is a natural reaction to someone who was actually there opposed to someone explaining it from distance. Overall, like much of the reviews I have read the book is a conundrum. It had the potential to be incredible but for reasons not really understood the author has told it in his own very unique impersonal style confusing many readers.

Ok, Zanna (see below) has effectively written my review for me - scroll down, read it, it's very good, but I'll make some brief points.

Firstly, I know nothing about Romania apart from what I gleaned during episodes of Challenge Anika in the early 90s-orphanages? Disabled children? Yeah, that's it. The context, though, is something McGuinness is desperate to get in, though, often in a bit of a hamfisted way ('once she's had the miscarriage, though, he was subject to police questioning because in 1989 in Romania inducing an abortion was a crime....' I'm paraphrasing, but you get the idea. Trust us to get it, Patrick!) and is gripping stuff. Hard to believe it happened in our lifetimes (if it did-there seems to be a bit of a debate raging here as to whether it did or didn't) and has certainly inspired me to read up more on the Ceausescus.

My main issue, though, was with style and credibility of the narrator. Like, firstly, he's parachuted in as a lecturer and he's 21. Really? He 'falls from the sky' as someone else on here has said to Leo's den of iniquity and gets involved in shady deals helping young idealists escape Romania's oppression. Err, what exactly does he have to offer these escapees? He seems to stand around on the sidelines drinking and smoking dope and not doing a right lot, really. And the sex scenes: bleurgh. 'I lifted up her skirt and f*cked her quickly.' And then she came. Yeah, right. Course she did, buddy. Annoying.

The regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu was one of the communist era’s nuttiest and it was perhaps fitting that it ended far more violently than those other dominoes that toppled over two decades ago now. The leader’s very public final days and execution are covered in the last few pages of the volume and if the whole story is a familiar one, the detail of life in this most paranoid of societies is what really shocks – the stationing of huge circular saws underneath the surface of the Danube along the border with Yugoslavia perhaps the most horrific example of a nation that had lurched into extreme totalitarianism and murder.

This book from a veteran of those fateful days is an odd mix and reads pretty much as non-fiction reportage at times. A vast number of characters are real life ones and I found it impossible to treat this as a ‘novel’. How much is true and how much is poetic licence is debatable – and the naive hero of the book isn’t particularly likeable – unlike some of the Romanians attempting to preserve their dignity around him. In all though, it’s a compelling account of the Ceauşescu regime if one that should perhaps be taken with a pinch of salt here and there.

Oh - and note to publisher - don't whack a sign saying 'Booker Prize 2011' on it without saying if it was on the Long or Short List.

As is evident from some of the novel's reviews, both seen here and elsewhere, this book raises some interesting issues relating to the complex relationship between history and fiction. Set within a specific historical moment - the final (100) days of Ceaucescu's rule - the novel tells the (fictional) tale of a young Englishman's time in Bucharest. Offered a job at the city's university, despite having failed to attend an interview, and being presented on his arrival with a complimentary degree, it could be argued that the plausibility of both the plot and its associated depiction of Bucharest is instantly undermined; certainly, throughout the narrative, incidents occur that do little to imbue the novel with verisimilitude. While some reviewers have seen this as a criticism, however, this is precisely where my interest in the text lies. Even though it's clearly written and marketed as a novel, because its setting and context are verifiable, some readers seem to want to critique the text as if it were an historical account, questioning the authenticity of the minutiae of the narrative and subsequently attacking it for its fictionality - a strange charge to be levelled at a work of fiction...

I managed to read just over half of this book before I completely lost interest in the characters. The initial setting was very bleak. Nothing was described without a succession of dreary, drab adjectives. I understood that the author wanted to create a soulless landscape but I felt it was overblown and exaggerated. The characters never really sprang to life for me. I did wonder at one episode where the main character decides at the last minute not to take a flight and is happy to depart knowing his case and belongings will finish up circling the carousels at Heathrow. A bit unrealistic I thought, despite it leading to a short consideration of the nature of loss people and lost stuff.
A minor point but on a few occasions the word "multiply" was used as an adverb (pronounced "multi-plee"?) but on each occasion it pulled me up short. "...the texture of multiply resurfaced tarmac." "...a tattooed, multiply earringed gypsy..."

Always disappointed not to finish a book but this was too much of a struggle.

This is a book that attracted me from its first pages, in large part because I was browsing it while I was still in London and so a little home sick, but also because of the writing style which made me feel literally at home between its pages.
As an Eastern European person myself I felt that I needed to read it so as to see whether the author's nationality had in any way affected the way in which the last 100 days of communism and my country were to be presented. I am happy to say that it did not or, if it did, it did so on very few accounts. While I believe it is well-written and presenting an interesting side of the story, viewed through the eyes of an adopted citizen of Bucharest and many such others, I cannot escape the feeling that it would have been a much better read in English rather than Romanian. But all in all, a pleasant and eye-opening book.

this chilling book with its iiconruous humor will fills us in on everything we really didnt want to know about life in a collapsing totalatarian state.

'The Last Hundred Days' is a smart chronicle of the months immediately prior to the downfall of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Patrick McGuinness imbues the story of grim, grey Bucharest with florid turns of phrase you would expect of a poet. The razor-sharp similies begin in the second sentence: the relentless monotony of crumbling Communist life 'tugged away at the bottom of your day like shingle scraping at a boat's hull.'
The framework for the tale of Ceausescu's demise comes in the form of the first-person narrative of a young English academic, who arrives in Bucharest to assume the role of his mysterious departed predecessor. This unnamed narrator is soon inveigled in a dark world of corruption and paranoia involving various members of the party hierarchy.
In this crushingly bleak world, the heightened senses invoked by such fleeting acquiantances are brilliantly handled by McGuinness:

'her face was dark, her eyes at once stormy and aloof. Her skin was tanned, her mouth lipsticked bright red and her hair black and shiny as a Politburo limousine. Arresting was the word, though we tried to use it sparingly in a police state.'

McGuinness conjures a convincing portrait of the state of blanket paranoia: among his ragged cast of fictional, semi-fictional and real-life characters, you never quite know who to trust, and with good reason: most are hopelessly corrupt, many double-crossing agents of the feared Securitate. It is a city shorn almost entirely of logic or reason, where vast presidential motorcades sweep their passengers to luxuriant lunches through half demolished streets snaking with food queues:

'you could queue for four hours only for everythign to run out just as you reached the counter. Some forgot what they were waiting for, or couldn't recognise it when they got it.'

Perhaps the most indelible images of the Romanian revolution came from news footage of dramatically disabled children packed in dark, dirty orphanages; McGuinness explains that many were the result of failed, self-administered attempts at abortion in a society were the practise was not only outlawed, but where a 'celibacy tax' was imposed on women who did or could not have children.
It is McGuinness's admirable desire to stay true to the chronology of real-life events which provides one of the book's few flaws. While regimes in most of the rest of eastern Europe were collapsing, Romania stayed true to Communism to the very end: only in the final handful of the last hundred days did Ceausescu's ultimately shocking downfall become inevitable.
This leads to stodgy periods, particularly in the third quarter of the book, when the pace of the narrator's personal narrative also falters, and begins to beg questions over how such an inconsequential foreigner could continually find himself at the centre of so many key components to the uprising.
But overall, this is a fine, worthy book. If the plot itself strains, the quality of McGuinness's prose never falters: crisp and evocative and studded with the kind of humour you can't help feeling the Bucharest residents must have clung to in order to get through those boat-scrapingly boring final days:

'daily life was felt less as Stalinist terror than as shady ineptocracy - brutish and clumsy, sometimes comical, usually absurd. Our sense of the system's viciousness was offset by our belief that it was not sufficiently organised to implement that viciousness.'

A thoroughly good read, I found McGuinness's prose lyrical and flowing - a good counterpoint to the clunky translation of my last read, and an encouragement to seek out his poetry - but he never sacrifices the story for the sake of a well-chosen phrase. The authentic miasma of communist eastern Europe seeped from the pages, and brought back vivid memories for me of Poland and the USSR in the 1980s, Fact and fiction were woven together so dexterously that I almost 'remembered' some of his inventions. The (anonymous) narrator perfectly illustrates the shifting sands of 'principle' in infinitely-adaptable humans living through change: he moves from qualms over the fictitious reference for the daughter of an apparatchik, through collaboration with a marginalised Ceausescu crony, to working with duplicitous freedom-fighters in a haze of wanting to belong. A narrator who also maps his own history as an overlay to Bucharest present, just as his fellow ex-pat maps the fast-fading old Romania as an overlay to the tidal wave of communist concrete.

Having been brought up in the Soviet Union, I know how happy the people were there - in the entire Soviet bloc - despite the difficulties imposed on them by the state. Foreigners fail to perceive this because on the surface everything was grey and hopeless. And although Patrick McGuinness lived in Romania for a couple of years (not at the time the Ceaucescu regime fell), he has painted the picture of an essentially grey and dull country, which makes his novel a grey and dull read, at least for me. No doubt the reader's excitement is also dampened by the fact that he knows how it all ends: the old dictator falls and he and his wife are shot.
Having said that, the novel is full of interesting observations for the reader who knows little about Romania. The story is told by a 21-year-old narrator whose observations are those of a much mature man, but let this fact not put you off.

I found the story tough to follow with the plot hardly changing thus making it a difficult read. The Romanian experiment in socialism failed like all other experiments because the need for consumerism is far too great in man. Every man has to experience consumerism before choosing to reject it. Everyman has to have a personal stake in the system in order to feel part of the order. The plight of honest and hardworking citizens of Romania who tirelessly work for their people only to be exploited proves that no system however pure is perfect. I guess that is why an imperfect system of democracy is good fit for unpredictable people.

Interesting to read the other reviews. I thought the book was exceptional. Cleverly written with serious doses of sarcasm, irony, clever turns of phrase, my favorite being dopplegangb*ng. Overall, McGuinness captures the surreal and bleak atmosphere of Romanian communism. Even the closing sentence has a realistic sort of resignation to it. As for the main character, in many ways he is a blank, the kind of blank that could find a life in the least livable place. The passages describing the destruction of the historical city render an apocalypse of insanity.

“People were free; intensively, dangerously, and perhaps not for long, but they were free.”
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I just finished it. A masterpiece.
I want to write a very long review but I still need time to take it in. It’s heavy and it reminds me so much of all that happened in Egypt 8 years ago. I definitely recommend it for reading.

Quirky and offbeat tale about a Englishman who gets a job he didn't apply for, as a lecturer at a University in Bucharest just before the fall of Ceaucescu. It's a outsiders view of a city in turmoil and a dictator state teetering on the brink.

Review to come; homework first.