For the crime of being an aristocrat after the 1917 Russian Revolution, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is placed under life-long house arrest. The "house" to which he is confined, however, is vast: Moscow's majestic Metropol Hotel, where he is sentenced to a 100-foot attic room though he's free to move about the hotel.
Rostov is in his early thirties as the novel opens and through the course of its 480 pages we inhabit thirty-plus years of house arrest with him. And what a time we have of it. Within the space of one building Towles has created a very full world, peopling it with an extensive cast that pivots around the appealing Count and includes international hotel guests, an unctuously evil hotel manager, a beautiful actress, a former Red Army colonel, a prodigious young child, a temperamental chef, a revolutionary friend, an orphan, and many others. The cast is delightful, with most characters assisting the Count in providing this enchanting book with its large heart.
The Count himself is the epitome of grace under pressure. Without ever surrendering his gentility or his humor, he accommodates himself to his newly restricted life, which he manages to lead to the fullest, even embracing a new career as headwaiter at the hotel's premiere restaurant (the Bolsheviks allow the hotel to function in its grand old style to impress foreign visitors who stay there).
The novel often reminded me of a fable or tale and as such it's very much in the Russian tradition. There are table legs filled with gold coins, a clock that tolls but two times a day, a key that opens all doors, a shadowy cat, fine wines by the hundreds, brandy snifters by the score, sumptuous meals and exquisite pastries galore. Yet amidst all these trappings of the old aristocratic life, we are also given a clear view of the new Soviet regime with its endless bureaucracies and Siberian gulags, its negation of the individual in favor of the collective, its privations and Orwellian turns of phrase.
The novel concludes very satisfactorily in 1954 and about that I will say nothing more. From start to finish this book is an impressive piece of architecture; many years of planning went into its construction.To my mind, the novel's two greatest pleasures are the sublime delight Rostov takes in literature, from Montaigne to Russia's great literary masters, and the consistent intelligence and civility of the prose (Towles's debut novel, by the way, published in 2011, was titled Rules of Civility). No small part of this new book's success may be due to its timing. With public discourse these days tending to the divisive and vulgar, A Gentleman in Moscow transports us to a far more charming world.
Ann, Adult Services