The Last 100 Days by Patrick McGuinness depicts the final months of Nicolae Ceausescu's regime in Romania in 1989 through the eyes of a young British expat. While some critics argue the plot lacks plausibility, the novel uses its fictional narrative set within real historical events to illuminate the surreal and oppressive atmosphere of life under Romanian communism. McGuinness' prose conveys the isolation, decay, and paranoia of Bucharest during this time period through atmospheric details. The city itself emerges as one of the most compelling characters in the book. Overall, the novel offers a glimpse into the "deep darknesses of humans" through its portrayal of ordinary people navigating brutality and corruption.

1. PATRICK MAGUINNESS

2. Shortlisted for the Costa First
Novel Award 2011
&
Long listed for the
Man Booker Prize 2011
for Fiction

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4. Patrick McGuinness Dr. McGuinness (Professor of French and Comparative
Literature, Sir Win and Lady Bischoff Fellow in French, Tutor in Modern
Languages at St Anne's College, Oxford).
Patrick McGuinness was born in Tunisia in 1968 of Belgian
and Newcastle Irish parents, and brought up in
Iran, Venezuela, France, Belgium and Romania. He now teaches French in
Oxford, where he is Professor of French and Comparative Literature.
patrick.mcguinness@st-annes.ox.ac.uk
He lives in North West Wales. His poetry is published by
Carcanet and he has won an Eric Gregory Award, the American Poetry
Foundations Levinson Prize in 2003 and the Poetry Business Prize in 2006. He
frequently writes and presents for radio, eg “A Short History of Stupidity” and
“The Art of Laziness” for R3 and Night Waves and Women’s Hour on
poetry, French culture and his own work as a poet and translator. His translation
of Mallarme’s For Anatole’s Tomb, 2004 was the Poetry Book Society’s
Translation Choice. His other books include studies of theatre, French culture and
literature. Patrick is a frequent contributor to TLS, and TLRB and reads and
speaks at literary festivals in UK , US, Canada , France , Czech Republic , Austria

6.  The socialist state is in crisis, the shops are empty
and old Bucharest vanishes daily under the
onslaught of Ceaucescu's demolition gangs.
Paranoia is pervasive and secret service men lurk
in the shadows. In The Last 100 Days, Patrick
McGuinness creates an absorbing sense of time
and place as the city struggles to survive this
intense moment in history. He evokes a world of
extremity and ravaged beauty from the viewpoint
of an outsider uncomfortably, and often
dangerously, close to the eye of the storm as the
regime of 1980s Romania crumbles to a bloody
end.

7. This book gives us illuminating glimpses into the deep dark
nesses 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.”

8. 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.

9.  Very very atmospheric -- a wonderful job of
conveying the
isolation, decripitude, mania, hidden
corners, 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.

10. “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.”

11. when
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.
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.

12. 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...

13. I thought the book was exceptional. Cleverly
written with serious doses of sarcasm, irony, clever
turns of phrase, my favorite being dopplegangbang.
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.