An eloquent reminder of a society based on paranoia
By Francine Prose |
June 10, 2012, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
IN his eloquent essay "The Great Christmas Killing," the Hungarian novelist Peter Nadas describes his intense, ultimately chagrined response to a documentary about the execution of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu. Neither his opposition to capital punishment nor his belief in the importance of "just, legal procedures" keeps Nadas from feeling a surge of vengeful delight as he witnesses the final hours of the Romanian dictator.
I don't suppose it's much of a spoiler to reveal that a novel entitled "The Last Hundred Days" and set in Bucharest in 1989 also includes an account of the trial of the Ceausescus. At the book's conclusion, its young British narrator has just escaped from Romania and landed in Belgrade, where he's watching the judicial proceedings on television:
"It is only the Ceausescus we see, sitting at a small table in a Targoviste bunker. They were defiant to the end, and strangely tender in their small proprieties."
Reading this section of Patrick McGuinness's first novel, I admired the skill with which McGuinness inspires in the reader something like the complex responses Nadas observes in himself: an almost giddy triumph tempered by the sobering realization that the brutality of these summary executions will only prolong the country's history of violence and oppression.
As "The Last Hundred Days" begins, its unnamed narrator has come to teach at a university in the Romanian capital. He seems more concerned about his colleagues' lives and the fact that his every move is being closely monitored than what happens in his classes. "This is what surveillance does: we stop being ourselves, and begin living alongside ourselves."
The narrator's friendship with colorful colleague Leo O'Heix gives him access to a wide range of acquaintances across the strictly enforced class divisions and he has a love affair with the spoiled, beautiful daughter of the deputy interior minister,
Late in the novel, the narrator's new girlfriend, a doctor, learns the horrifying truth about the disappearance of her beloved brother. Will her relationship with the narrator end as abruptly as his liaison with the deputy interior minister's daughter, who accuses him of being a voyeur? "You watch, that's all! You float along."
McGuinness keeps us interested in his outsider hero because he writes so very well. A poet and a professor of French and comparative literature at Oxford University, McGuinness - who lived in Bucharest during the time he is describing - is observant, reflective, witty and precise.
"The Last Hundred Days" is an incisive and engaging account of a historical period that is essential to remember, along with its 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.
I don't suppose it's much of a spoiler to reveal that a novel entitled "The Last Hundred Days" and set in Bucharest in 1989 also includes an account of the trial of the Ceausescus. At the book's conclusion, its young British narrator has just escaped from Romania and landed in Belgrade, where he's watching the judicial proceedings on television:
"It is only the Ceausescus we see, sitting at a small table in a Targoviste bunker. They were defiant to the end, and strangely tender in their small proprieties."
Reading this section of Patrick McGuinness's first novel, I admired the skill with which McGuinness inspires in the reader something like the complex responses Nadas observes in himself: an almost giddy triumph tempered by the sobering realization that the brutality of these summary executions will only prolong the country's history of violence and oppression.
As "The Last Hundred Days" begins, its unnamed narrator has come to teach at a university in the Romanian capital. He seems more concerned about his colleagues' lives and the fact that his every move is being closely monitored than what happens in his classes. "This is what surveillance does: we stop being ourselves, and begin living alongside ourselves."
The narrator's friendship with colorful colleague Leo O'Heix gives him access to a wide range of acquaintances across the strictly enforced class divisions and he has a love affair with the spoiled, beautiful daughter of the deputy interior minister,
Late in the novel, the narrator's new girlfriend, a doctor, learns the horrifying truth about the disappearance of her beloved brother. Will her relationship with the narrator end as abruptly as his liaison with the deputy interior minister's daughter, who accuses him of being a voyeur? "You watch, that's all! You float along."
McGuinness keeps us interested in his outsider hero because he writes so very well. A poet and a professor of French and comparative literature at Oxford University, McGuinness - who lived in Bucharest during the time he is describing - is observant, reflective, witty and precise.
"The Last Hundred Days" is an incisive and engaging account of a historical period that is essential to remember, along with its 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.
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