6/24/2023 0 Comments Last hundred daysWe have the real thing and then we have this series of fantasies which we impose upon it. ![]() This is what we do with cities and with villages. So yes I had a character who was trying to rebuild the town or at least preserve it in language, trying to write a guidebook, trying to reassemble an ideal city from all the guidebooks that he had. I wanted to try to recreate in words the city that was being destroyed. There were absolutely beautiful buildings and Ceausescu was demolishing all this stuff so that literally one day to the next you would walk past a familiar building and find that it had gone. One of the things about architecture is that it looked like a fusion between Paris and somewhere like Istanbul. When I was there, Ceausescu was demolishing huge sways of old Bucharest, as you know perhaps because the French have got a special relationship with the Romanians. Is it what makes those last hundred days particularly interesting, the fact that it is a society that is erasing its past while having not much of a future at all? ![]() One of your protagonists is writing a sort of travel book describing how the past of the city is being erased by the modern communist architecture. I didn’t take any notes but I knew I would write about it.Ĭ.A.: There’s a sort of mise en abime of writing about Bucharest. Often it’s a very bad thing but when you write fiction it’s very good. I have a good memory, an almost photographic memory for sights and the equivalent of photographic memory for tastes and smells. All the bits about being bored I took from le vif as you would say.Ĭ.A.: Did you feel it would make a good subject for a book at the time? Did you take notes while you were there? All the exciting experiences to do with high politics or sexual intrigue I had to use my imagination for. It’s not what the French call autofiction but it is a book that uses quite a lot of my own experiences and sadly not the exciting ones. ![]() That’s why I ended up in Bucharest at that time. I had a strange job teaching English to diplomats, mostly French people in fact because there was a Lycée français in Bucharest and I taught some of the teachers English. It is partly autobiographical right? You spent some time there in the 1980’s, in Bucharest. Transcript of the interview (Collège Hotel, Lyon, )Ĭlifford Armion: Your first novel, The Last Hundred Days, deals with the end of the Ceausescu regime in Romania.
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