The Last Hundred Days

March 19, 2012
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.