A Gentleman in Moscow

A Gentleman in Moscow

By Amor Towles

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.

Allow me to briefly rave: I think this was one of the most engrossing and well-written books I've read all year. I read the whole thing in a day and felt immensely satisfied.  [I will admit, that with a few days' distance, it feels less monumental, more ordinary.  I do think though, that it's a book that would hold up well to re-reading.  There's so much detail and digressions that someone who really wanted to savor every single line would be in hog heaven.]

As always, the books I enjoy get short shrift in these reviews - how many ways can you say: "plot, yes, characters, yes, writing, yes, good, good, good, checks all boxes"?  To paraphrase another great (Russian) author: "Good books are all alike; every bad book is bad in its own way."  So while I can nitpick and critique endlessly on other books, what is there to say here to won't be repetitive?

Well, nothing is perfect: here are some nitpicks to soothe your heart:

I was originally put off by the very poor map at the beginning but not to worry: you don't need a map of Moscow because everything takes place inside one building. Why there is a map of Moscow in this book, I don't know, what we need is a floorplan. Except not really, because most of the action takes place in a few rooms.  But (here we wind back into plaudits again, my apologies) the genius of Towles is that we don't feel cramped by the setting.  As readers, we're taken along with Rostov on his emotional journey, from his lovely suite on the lower floors to the abandoned servants quarters up on six when get gets sentenced, and the tightening of his life, until we reach the nadir in 1926, when he decides to join the staff, and the world opens up again (figuratively - I mean, he's still stuck in the hotel).

I do think though that you can clearly tell the book wasn't written by a Russian - there's a lot of humor in it that isn't pure black. It's a much gentler book than I think would be written by a Russian.  It is certainly possible that Mr. Solzhenitsyn's style has overriden my averages, but it feels impossible that Gentleman in Moscow and Cancer Ward take place at the same time (although Gentleman covers a much longer period of time) and while it's definitely interesting getting a feel for the changing (and the unchanging) political forces in the USSR, Gentleman seems like a dream compared to Cancer Ward's reality. 

In fact, while I appreciate the polite eliding over of the bad times, when Moscow was first under siege and then under conditions of extreme hardship throughout the rest of the war and after, and the horrible political and social ravages of Article 58, as not in keeping with the tone of the book, it is kind of a cop-out. As William Golding said in The Princess Bride: "What with one thing and another, five years passed." Skip the boring parts! Or in this case, the parts of extreme deprivation and hardship, fear, repression, and tyranny.  Is it fair to say that Towles needed to include these when telling a story about one man in one hotel? Maybe, maybe not.  After all, Jane Austen manages to avoid the Napoleonic Wars, and she wrote 6+ books set in that time period.

This book is practically cozy.  Rostov is the ultimate gentleman/hero: polite, mannered, cultured, deftly managing relationships with waiters, OGPU (KGB) officers, actresses, American spies, and children.  There are set-backs yes, (and it almost feels like Towles feels bad that his novel is not more depressing, as he puts a couple of "what happened to them after this" misfortunes of ancillary characters into footnotes) but ultimately, you feel good at the end - the right people succeed, the bad people are punished, and there is a bright and shining hope and optimism.

It feels odd to think of it this way, and it's definitely a spoiler, but it really belongs up there with some of the other great prison-break novels of our time: Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, The Count of Monte Cristo (which I am so excited to read for the challenge later!).  This bears more resemblance to the Shawshank Redemption, in terms of the characters, motivations, lifestyles, and tone.  Rostov is not in for vengeance in the end.  Maybe because he knows how lucky he is to be merely imprisoned.  I never guessed it (I'm bad at mysteries) so one of the most poignant moments was when Rostov admitted to his dead friend's "widow" that the revolutionary poem that saved his life was written by his proletariat friend.  The subterfuge intended originally to save his friend from retribution ended up saving his own life.  Maybe it's saccharine, but maybe it's also important to have these moments in art, so that in life we can live up to the examples they lead.

40: Your Favorite Prompt From A Past Popsugar Reading Challenge
    (2017) 35: A Book Set In A Hotel