Overview
Once the gleaming "Paris of the East," Bucharest in 1989 is a world of corruption and paranoia, in thrall to the repressive regime of Nicolae Ceausescu. Old landmarks are falling to demolition crews, grocery shelves are empty, and informants are everywhere. Into this state of crisis, a young British man arrives to take a university post he never interviewed for. He is taken under the wing of Leo O’Heix, a colleague and master of the black market, and falls for the sleek Celia, daughter of a party apparatchik. Yet he soon learns that in this society, friendships are compromised, and loyalty is never absolute. And as the regime’s authority falters, he finds himself uncomfortably, then dangerously, close to the eye of the storm.
By turns thrilling and satirical, studded with poetry and understated revelation, The Last Hundred Days captures the commonplace terror of Cold War Eastern Europe. Patrick McGuinness’s first novel is unforgettable.
Shortlisted for the 2011 Costa First Novel Award
Synopsis
Once the gleaming "Paris of the East," Bucharest in 1989 is a world of corruption and paranoia, in thrall to the repressive regime of Nicolae Ceausescu. Old landmarks are falling to demolition crews, grocery shelves are empty, and informants are everywhere. Into this state of crisis, a young British man arrives to take a university post he never interviewed for. He is taken under the wing of Leo O'Heix, a colleague and master of the black market, and falls for the sleek Celia, daughter of a party apparatchik. Yet he soon learns that in this society, friendships are compromised, and loyalty is never absolute. And as the regime's authority falters, he finds himself uncomfortably, then dangerously, close to the eye of the storm.
By turns thrilling and satirical, studded with poetry and understated revelation, The Last Hundred Days captures the commonplace terror of Cold War Eastern Europe. Patrick McGuinness's first novel is unforgettable.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly
Acclaimed poet McGuinness’s autobiographical fiction debut blends doomed romance with the police state intrigues of Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania leading up to the 1989 revolution. The unnamed narrator, a young British dropout, is surprised to land a teaching job at the University of Bucharest. Once there, he falls in with Leo O’Heix, a fellow lecturer who runs a sideline supplying luxury goods to the communist elite, and becomes smitten with the enigmatic Cilea, the pampered daughter of a party official. McGuinness, who lived in Bucharest in the 1980s, shines particularly when detailing daily life in this one-time “Paris of the East,” from Bucharest’s aroma of “petrol fumes” and “the juice of rubbish bins” to musings about the ordinariness of being followed by the authorities—“once the clandestine savour has passed, it becomes another of life’s minor reassurances.” Ceausescu’s Bucharest emerges as if from a sad and mysterious time capsule. There are shortcomings: Cilea, the most interesting character after the city itself, disappears halfway; and Leo’s pontifications, including a reading of “Shelley’s Ozyman-descu,” underscore the ironies too heavily. Still, the novel is stylish and of lasting value to readers interested in the twilight of the Eastern Bloc. Agent: Peter Straus, Rogers, Coleridge and White. (May)From the Publisher
Longlisted for the Man Booker PrizeShortlisted for the Costa First Novel AwardShortlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize "[McGuinness] is observant, reflective, witty and precise. He is capable of combining the essayistic, the lyrical, the humorous and the aphoristic, sometimes within a single paragraph... An incisive and engaging account of a society and a historical period that is essential to remember, especially now." - Francine Prose, New York Times Book Review "[A] memorable story about a pivotal moment in history." - Kevin Canfield, Kansas City StarKirkus Reviews
The final months of Ceaucescu's dictatorship in Romania, as seen by a young British expat. He's a 21-year-old college dropout, yet he's hired without an interview to lecture at Bucharest University, a first taste of how things work over there. The unnamed narrator is not sorry to be leaving. It's 1989; cancer has just claimed his father, a hard-hearted man who mercilessly abused his mother, also dead. Waiting for him in a pleasant Bucharest apartment is another Brit, Leo, a faculty veteran who will be his mentor. Leo is "Bucharest's biggest black-marketeer"; he needs a malleable front man, which explains why his young compatriot was hired. He's an outsize character, not just a crook but a preservationist, cataloguing what's left of the elegant inner-city neighborhoods before they disappear under the dictator's bulldozers. Leo is man of contradictions, but not a convincing one, and a symbol of what's wrong with the novel: its ruinous excess. McGuinness' Romania is the standard picture of life under Ceaucescu: a sad, bleak place of fear (of the ubiquitous security goons) and deprivation (of life's necessities). Instead of grounding Leo and his new sidekick (we never see them in the classroom), McGuinness spirits them into the heart of the dying regime's power struggles. After a chance street encounter, the kid helps a wily old Party stalwart with his memoirs, while dating the coolest girl in town, who just happens to be the daughter of the deputy Interior Minister. There are wheels within wheels; nobody is who they seem. There's a clandestine trip to the Yugoslavia border to help some dissidents escape, but it's a moment without drama for the two lecturers, and it's long after the fact that the now absent masterminds will be revealed as puppets of Party bosses. At the end, it's not only the regime that falls apart, as the narrator dithers over whether to stay and confront his rumored nemesis. A clunky debut lacking suspense.The New York Times Book Review
What keeps us interested in, and sympathetic toward, his outsider hero is the fact that McGuinness writes so very well…[he] is observant, reflective, witty and precise. He is capable of combining the essayistic, the lyrical, the humorous and the aphoristic, sometimes within a single paragraph…Such writing makes The Last Hundred Days an incisive and engaging account of a society and a historical period that is essential to remember, especially now, as the Soviet bloc recedes into the past, along with its painfully clear illustration of how people are liable to behave when they are bullied by their government and encouraged to view their fellow citizens with terror and paranoia.—Francine Prose
The Washington Post
…the sharply observant McGuinness has filled his novel with quick, witty descriptions of people, places and situations. If the narrator's story is sometimes overshadowed by its historical setting, perhaps that's only right, given these earth-shaking events. McGuinness does more, however, than explore how people acted in this now transformed country. He's captured the way corruption and tyranny warp behavior in any society.—Carole Burns