McGuinness has written a thinly veiled account of the last days of communist rule in Bucharest, Romania, under the rule of strong-man Nicolae Ceausescu. McGuinness lived and taught in Bucharest during the final years of Ceausescu's reign and knows his subject well; his experience was first hand and the story he tells rings true from the characters to the plot.
The main character, a young Englishman, is never identified by name. Almost as soon as he arrives in Bucharest in the late 80s, he is enmeshed in the strange underground society of the city called the "Paris of the East," though a decidedly shabby shadow of its namesake. The young man is quickly taken under the wing of a likable but shady black-market dealer named Leo O'Heix who also has a University position. Leo knows the old city and its haunts as if he was born there. He introduces the narrator to this City of Lost Walks, so named by Leo because of the number of beautiful old areas of the city that have been razed, along with historical buildings and churches. Like a war zone, it is a city of crumbling buildings with a few remaining dusty and dark museums.
"This is how you measure what you have against what there was," Leo said, "you walk it, what remains of it, you hear the clamour of all that's gone. It's your listening that brings it back."
Through Leo the young man meets and becomes involved with a dissident group which is smuggling people out of Romania.
Along with Leo, our hero is mentored by Sergiu Trofirm a former communist intellectual who is writing a memoir of the city. The young man helps smuggle this book out of the country and into Paris for publication. He also manages to become involved with two young women, Cilea, a daughter of a party apparatchik and Ottilia, an idealistic young doctor working in appalling conditions in a poorly staffed and dingy hospital.
All movement within the city was under surveillance and monitored by the Securitate, who somehow seemed in collusion with the corruption and black-marketers.
"For all the grotesqueness and brutality, it was normality that defined our relations: the human capacity to accommodate ourselves to our conditions, not the duplicity and corruption that underpinned them. This was also our greatest drawback--the routinization of want, sorrow, repression, until they became invisible, until they numbed you even to atrocity."
McGuiness, now a professor of French and comparative literature at Oxford, has written an interesting and engaging book about the end of the repressive communist regime in Romania. Real characters from that era intermingle with the fictional characters. I enjoyed reading about a country I knew little about except for the odd mention in the news. I recommend this read for any who enjoy a dose of reality along with their fiction wrapped up in a well-written novel.
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