![]() The "small proprieties" in which the Ceausescus absurdly indulge during their trial – "the way she buttons up her coat… the way he strokes her hand" – are made poignant by the fading recollection of a dead mother. The last days of totalitarian Bucharest overlay the memory of a tyrannical father, crippled and dying of cancer. McGuinness is similarly interested in incongruous maps, in comparisons where something striking emerges from the imperfect fit between misaligned cartographies. Like a situationist Harry Lime, he spends his days psycho-geogging the crumbling city and his nights on a more dangerous dérive through the "occult… subterranean branch lines" of suppressed commerce. While Trofim writes two manuscripts – one for the censor and one to be smuggled abroad – Leo scribbles his own book about Bucharest, "The City of Lost Walks", a travel guide to a storied city disappearing under triumphalist party architecture. He gains two mentors: the seedy academic Leo (who moonlights as a pillar of the booming black market) and the elderly, debonair Sergiu Trofim, a sidelined luminary of the pre-Ceausescu days who is writing a secret memoir of party corruption. ![]() He falls in love with the daughter of a party apparatchik and falls in with a dissident group of people-smugglers. Offered a job in a Romanian university, the unnamed narrator becomes enmeshed in the complicities of the doomed dictatorship. The Last Hundred Days – his Booker-longlisted first novel – again draws on his time in late 1980s Bucharest. ![]() This is how people, like governments, fall apart. The invented voice gave McGuinness licence to reflect on the end of Romania's communist era but it also enriched the book's meditation on other endings, looking back to earlier poems about the loss of a mother tongue and the death of parents. In fact they were by McGuinness, who edited Campanu into the history of the Ceausescu regime, reversing the absurd process by which its real dissident authors were edited out. "T he news from Bucharest is that the regime is crumbling/ the way the rocks on the shore erode – by seeming not to." The lines are from Patrick McGuinness's 2010 collection, Jilted City, in what claimed to be a translation from the work of Liviu Campanu, a Romanian poet.
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