The hundred days band trial#

The narrator’s friendship with Leo gives him access to a wide range of acquaintances across the strictly enforced class divisions of a theoretically classless society. At an exclusive restaurant where the house specialty is “Pork Jewish Style,” a dish “in which a whole continent’s unthinking anti-Semitism is summarized,” Leo describes “a world of suspicion and intrigue in which he is happy, stimulated, fulfilled,” and the narrator suddenly realizes that “the place suits him, not because it resembles him but because he is so far in excess of it.” In addition, Leo obsessively documents magnificent historic landmarks - churches and monasteries, mostly - that the government is razing to sever its people’s ties with their past and make room for more ugly, state-socialist architecture. Reading this section of Patrick McGuinness’s first novel, I recalled the Nadas essay and 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. At one point, their defense lawyer has to be reined in by the prosecutor because he is shouting abuse at them.”

They are found guilty of a range of crimes, from starving their people to owning too many pairs of shoes.

Perhaps it’s because they seem to take death’s measure and, for a brief moment, to square up to it: the way she buttons up her coat and juts out her chin, decisively the way he strokes her hand, smooths his hair, puffs out his chest. It is always the small proprieties that stick in the mind. They were defiant to the end, and strangely tender in their small proprieties. “It is only the Ceausescus we see, sitting at a small table in a Targoviste bunker.

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:

The hundred days band trial#

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. “Ceausescu just kept looking at his wife, rolling his small, shifty eyes and grinning nervously you could tell he couldn’t grasp what was really happening or figure out how he might gain the upper hand.” 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. 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.