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Review
"...the sardonic crispness and evocative power of its language distinguishes it from the run of contemporary fiction." Sean O'Brien, TLS "..engrossing debut novel..I defy anyone not to revel in 350-odd pages of it at least" Time Out Magazine **** Book of the Month (June 2011) Buzz Magazine
Product Description
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.
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32 of 37 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The Last Hundred Days is a straightforward, first person narrative told by an English academic who has found himself teaching at a Bucharest university in late 1989. He arrives into a totalitarian communist state led by the sinister Nicolae Ceau'sescu supported by the army, militia, police and securitate. But as the reader knows, in 100 days time, the regime will fall and the Ceau'sescus will be shot. This makes for an odd novel - the end is known and the puzzle is how such a turnaround will happen so quickly.
Much of the madness of 1980s Romania is well known. The destruction of villages; the orphanages; the construction of the Palace of the People; and the systematic starvation of the population in order to repay foreign debt. These reference points are all there. But there is more: an insight into the nature of corruption; how the nomenklature lived; the crazy relations between the Conduca'tor and his various African and East European counterparts, perpetually receiving each other on official visits in an effort to create credibility from thin air. As the unrest grows, the bould Nicolae jets off to Iran to press the flesh. And when you're trying to impress with your Iranian connections, you know you're in trouble.
And in the middle of all this, there's the story. Our unnamed narrator flies into Bucharest to take on a job he was given despite not attending the interview. He arrives to find he has filled the shoes (and the job, and the flat) of the missing Belanger. His position, overseen by sleazy Leo O'Heix, seems to involve more than merely teaching students. Our narrator is inducted into a world of intrigue which leads to intimate connections with all levels of the Romanian communist party. A complicated and tangled plot unfolds, which presages the coming revolution in various ways.
The invocation of Bucharest is convincing and arresting. The sleaze is convincing too. The party games and machinations ring true. But something doesn't quite click. The novel is too long and feels repetitive. Once we've had a motorcade we don't really need another one. Once we've got the idea that districts of Bucharest are being demolished, we don't need to go there again. And for all the intrigue of the plot, it generates a feeling of "so what". The novel does the revolution well; it fills in background and brings it to life. Crucially, it shows the revolution as having had a before when all we have seen from the news reports was the after. But the story feels like a bit of a bolt on to justify the historical aspect.
The Last Hundred Days isn't a bad book - and some of the turns of phrase are really quite brilliant; some of the observations are really very funny. It just doesn't quite cohere enough to be a great book.
Much of the madness of 1980s Romania is well known. The destruction of villages; the orphanages; the construction of the Palace of the People; and the systematic starvation of the population in order to repay foreign debt. These reference points are all there. But there is more: an insight into the nature of corruption; how the nomenklature lived; the crazy relations between the Conduca'tor and his various African and East European counterparts, perpetually receiving each other on official visits in an effort to create credibility from thin air. As the unrest grows, the bould Nicolae jets off to Iran to press the flesh. And when you're trying to impress with your Iranian connections, you know you're in trouble.
And in the middle of all this, there's the story. Our unnamed narrator flies into Bucharest to take on a job he was given despite not attending the interview. He arrives to find he has filled the shoes (and the job, and the flat) of the missing Belanger. His position, overseen by sleazy Leo O'Heix, seems to involve more than merely teaching students. Our narrator is inducted into a world of intrigue which leads to intimate connections with all levels of the Romanian communist party. A complicated and tangled plot unfolds, which presages the coming revolution in various ways.
The invocation of Bucharest is convincing and arresting. The sleaze is convincing too. The party games and machinations ring true. But something doesn't quite click. The novel is too long and feels repetitive. Once we've had a motorcade we don't really need another one. Once we've got the idea that districts of Bucharest are being demolished, we don't need to go there again. And for all the intrigue of the plot, it generates a feeling of "so what". The novel does the revolution well; it fills in background and brings it to life. Crucially, it shows the revolution as having had a before when all we have seen from the news reports was the after. But the story feels like a bit of a bolt on to justify the historical aspect.
The Last Hundred Days isn't a bad book - and some of the turns of phrase are really quite brilliant; some of the observations are really very funny. It just doesn't quite cohere enough to be a great book.
15 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
"The Last Hundred Days" in question here are the final days of Ceau'escu's Romania in late 1989. Narrated by an unnamed young British expat who has a job offer from the English department of Bucharest University, despite never having interviewed for the job, we get an insight into the life under communist rule as Eastern bloc countries all around start to open up after the fall of the Berlin Wall. We are told that McGuinness lived in Romania in the years leading up to the revolution, and this is no surprise as there is an authenticity here that could only have come from some level of inside knowledge.
It's a fascinating insight, and one which I enjoyed very much, although there are a few qualms that are worth pointing out. For a start McGuinness takes quite a while for the story to get going. This is his first novel and he is apparently also a poet and this comes as no surprise in the first 50 or so pages as he never misses an opportunity to provide a metaphor or simile in his descriptions that can lead to the book seeming a little "over-written".
However the biggest challenge is that the book has a fairly tenuous relationship to anything that would conventionally be called a plot. The narrator's experience has moments that might be considered to be a plot-line as he finds out what is happening to friends he meets, but the driver of the action in the historic events. This is a problem as we all know what happened and in fact while there were signs of some changes during the last one hundred days, when the end came it was all rather sudden. Neither does our narrator seem to have much to do in his job - he meets some students outside the university and frankly it is difficult to see how he knew who they were. You might also argue that a junior, expat teacher wouldn't have access to the relatively senior members of the regime that this book suggests.
Yet for all this, it doesn't read like a work of fiction. It reads more like a cocktail of one part Le Carré, one part one of those accounts by British journalists of the last days of a regime and, what makes this so readable, one part Bill Bryson at his light hearted best at pointing out the ridiculousness of situations. The Bryson element is provided by the narrator's expat friend, Leo, another teacher in the department who has all the best lines. Leo is involved in the black market and has enough detachment to comment on things but enough inside information to know what's going on.
McGuinness portrays very well the danger and corruption of the regime and what it is like when everyone is watching everyone else and no one can be trusted. We see a mixture of dissidents, party apparatchiks, spies and ordinary people struggling to protect their own interests under Ceau'escu's crazy world. Of course, like any good Eastern bloc story, we also get the "man from the ministry", here in the form of a fairly ineffective British diplomat who is also struggling to make sense of what is happening.
It's a difficult book to categorise. It is fiction, but it feels like non-fiction. It has spy elements, but it isn't a conventional spy plot of good versus evil. It is often satirical and funny, but the situation is far from that. After a slow beginning, I was hooked.
It's a fascinating insight, and one which I enjoyed very much, although there are a few qualms that are worth pointing out. For a start McGuinness takes quite a while for the story to get going. This is his first novel and he is apparently also a poet and this comes as no surprise in the first 50 or so pages as he never misses an opportunity to provide a metaphor or simile in his descriptions that can lead to the book seeming a little "over-written".
However the biggest challenge is that the book has a fairly tenuous relationship to anything that would conventionally be called a plot. The narrator's experience has moments that might be considered to be a plot-line as he finds out what is happening to friends he meets, but the driver of the action in the historic events. This is a problem as we all know what happened and in fact while there were signs of some changes during the last one hundred days, when the end came it was all rather sudden. Neither does our narrator seem to have much to do in his job - he meets some students outside the university and frankly it is difficult to see how he knew who they were. You might also argue that a junior, expat teacher wouldn't have access to the relatively senior members of the regime that this book suggests.
Yet for all this, it doesn't read like a work of fiction. It reads more like a cocktail of one part Le Carré, one part one of those accounts by British journalists of the last days of a regime and, what makes this so readable, one part Bill Bryson at his light hearted best at pointing out the ridiculousness of situations. The Bryson element is provided by the narrator's expat friend, Leo, another teacher in the department who has all the best lines. Leo is involved in the black market and has enough detachment to comment on things but enough inside information to know what's going on.
McGuinness portrays very well the danger and corruption of the regime and what it is like when everyone is watching everyone else and no one can be trusted. We see a mixture of dissidents, party apparatchiks, spies and ordinary people struggling to protect their own interests under Ceau'escu's crazy world. Of course, like any good Eastern bloc story, we also get the "man from the ministry", here in the form of a fairly ineffective British diplomat who is also struggling to make sense of what is happening.
It's a difficult book to categorise. It is fiction, but it feels like non-fiction. It has spy elements, but it isn't a conventional spy plot of good versus evil. It is often satirical and funny, but the situation is far from that. After a slow beginning, I was hooked.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Kindle Edition
I've read countless books about the Balkans in recent years and the events of the 80's and 90's. This is simply one of the best depictions of what happened and why and how it happened. Great depictions of the atmosphere, interesting mesh of fiction and non-fiction.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Struggled to finish...
An interesting background to Bucharest at the time of the death of communism, but it seems as if the book is an excuse by someone who knew Romania very well at the time to name... Read more
Published 23 days ago by M. Bathgate
The Last 100 Days
I know pretty much nothing about Romania, and even less about Communism in Romania. I was only 2 when Ceaucescu was overthrown so I certainly cannot claim to remember it, and... Read more
Published 1 month ago by Lucybird
Armchair Revolution
THE LAST HUNDRED DAYS chronicles the activities some English lecturers at a Bucharest university, members of the government and security forces, and some ordinary Bucure'teans... Read more
Published 3 months ago by Kartowidjojo
A flavour of Graham Greene
This is one of the few books of 2012 that will remain on my bookshelf. Set in the final days of Caucescu's Romania it manages to vividly portray the conditions common people were... Read more
Published 3 months ago by S. L. Stewart
Dull,plodding and one dimensional
A dull reference book of an historic time in Romanian history that must have been a rich vein for literacy,whether fact or fiction. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Rich111s
Forcing myself to finish this...
This book is laughably `Philip Marlowe and the Last Days of the Eastern Bloc'. I am a fan of the short sentence, but not when over-used - "I went for a shower. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Ivan
Romanian drama documentary.
I enjoyed this novel pretty well throughout its length.McGuinness manages to blend fiction and fact mediated through a poetic eye very effectively throughout most of the book... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Valentine Gersbach
Very Good
One of the best books I've read. Definitely recommend to anyone who wants to learn more about the underworld of corrupt police states.
Published 4 months ago by H. Bastawy
History provides the interest
The enjoyment obtained from this novel is largely a result of gaining an understanding of the extraordinary life the average Romanian had to face under the corrupt Ceausescus. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Ashencrump
Difficult to believe in
I'm struggling with this at the moment and I'm not sure if it's worth any more of my time. I'm struggling to believe in the narrator figure; he seems a helpless failure of a man... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Beached Whale
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