Yet for all this, it doesn't read like a work of fiction. ![]() 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. 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. 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. 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 is the historic events. However the biggest challenge is that the book has a fairly tenuous relationship to anything that would conventionally be called a plot. 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'. For a start McGuinness takes quite a while for the story to get going. It's a fascinating insight, and one which I enjoyed very much, although there are a few qualms that are worth pointing out. 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. 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. ![]() ![]() 'The Last Hundred Days' in question here are the final days of Ceausescu's Romania in late 1989. There are also plenty of wry and satirical moments to lighten this account of a sinister regime where everyone is watching someone. It feels very realistic and at times you will forget that this is a work of fiction. Summary: Looking at the final days of Ceausescu's Romania, this first person narrative is one part Le Carré, one part Bill Bryson and one part an account of everyday life under Ceausescu's bizarre Stalinist world.
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