The Last Hundred Days, or Bad Places in Modern Times

I accidentally began a literary tour of countries undergoing--um, let's call them "growing pains"--in the modern era. For my purpose, I'm considering modern times to mean, roughly, my lifetime. It all started with the excellent The Cellist of Sarajevo which reminded me that I'd been distant witness to the Serbian nightmare in the early 90s while also pointing out how little I knew about the conflict. Then I moved on to Lisa See's book Dreams of Joy which gave me more insight than I'd needed into China's Great Leap Forward. (okay, I'm pushing the boundary definitions of "my lifetime" with that one).

Fiction is a powerful and usually pleasant way to learn about world hot spots, and generally the protagonist is just as much an outsider as the armchair voyager. But occasionally, non-fiction can be just as entertaining a way to learn about the world, as I discovered with Douglas Rogers' excellent memoir, The Last Resort. A Memoir of Mischief and Mayhem on a Family Farm in Africa. Rogers is the son of white farmers in Zimbabwe and while he emigrates to England and then NYC, his parents try to tough it out during Mugabe's land reforms (which mostly involve re-allocating white-owned farmland to black ownership--farmer or not). This memoir manages to be funny while still leaving me figuratively shaking my head alongside Rogers about how an African country that seemed to more or less have its act together could fall into such chaos in such a relatively short period (and yes, I know this is a one-sided view, but it is a memoir, after all).

Next stop on my tour came Romania, in the form of Patrick McGuinness' The Last Hundred Days. This is a novel about the waning days of Ceausescu's iron-fisted reign (side note: I learned to pronounce the dictator's name by watching Seinfeld) and is narrated by a lost soul young British man who finds himself posted to a university there without ever having applied for the position. His job really isn't the focus of the book--in fact, he immediately falls in with characters more interesting then himself and we never even learn our protagonist's name as he ricochet Zelig-like from one historical Romanian event to another. He becomes involved with a well-meaning British black market dealer, the daughter of a high-ranking political figure, some possibly idealistic and possibly self-serving person smugglers, and a sly old-school communist who despises what has become of his country. These friendships are not contradictory at all to the odd experience of living in a communist country so oppressive that escaping to Hungary was seen as a step up.

The Bucharest described here is one in which the past is being torn down literally overnight and replaced with cheap, modern (and very Eastern-bloc) style housing. Bucharest's modern parks were flat, planted with dwarfish shrubs and benches arranged to give the sitter maximum exposure and maximum discomfort. You never stayed long anywhere, harried on all sides by an invisible watchfulness. This is a country in which everyone is watching everyone else, with no privacy, and being caught at something, anything could result in a slow and unpleasant death, so people are naturally wary and rather worn down. At one point, a character looks around the room to determine who is the most likely government plant, but once he realizes that it is he, he's able to relax a bit. When things really hit the fan and uprisings begin, there comes a point when the army, the police, and the Securitate (secret police) are so busy watching each other during a "minutely planned display of spontaneous celebration" that no one has time to realize that the workers are out to get their dear leader, rather than to celebrate him.

This book isn't necessarily fun--there's no way to romp through such an oppressed country full of secret torture chambers and starving general masses--but The Last Hundred Days paints a pretty complete picture of life in the not-so-distant past, before the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is a reminder of the conflict between the idealism of communism and the reality of life under it, a reminder that there are always those who profit when all are supposed to be equal. In the end, there are those drawn to hot spots, and not just in literary form.

Next stop? North Korea. There's a new book out called The Orphan Master's Son and it seems just the place to visit after Ceausescu's fall.