Count Alexander Rostov is master huntsman and knight of St. Andrew’s Order. As an aristocrat, he already resides in a suite at the exclusive Hotel Metropol in Moscow. However, in the spring of 1922, he is brought before a Committee under the People’s Intendant for Internal Affairs’ where he is accused of having written a poem and of not wanting to give up his titles of nobility.
This trial takes place in the years immediately after the Russian Revolution. Rostov gets away with a sentence of lifelong house arrest in the hotel. However, if he steps outside the front door of the hotel, he will be shot down on the spot.
Count Alexander Rostov is an educated and knowledgeable man with an irrepressible and optimistic mind, but he has never had to work for a living before. Now he is forced to live in a small room on the top floor of the hotel. Every day he has to walk the many floors up and down to and fro work in the hotel. He does so for the next four decades, while some of the most tumultuous times in Russian history unfold outside the hotel’s doors.
This might sound like a sad fate. For Count Rostov, however, it is a gift, and he will over the years undergo a life transformation and become another person. For the many fantastic people who make up the characters in the novel, he becomes a role model and for them also an opportunity to experience a life they otherwise could never have imagined.
A Gentleman in Moscow is written in a language that is full of atmosphere, details and most often with a twinkle in the eye.
Amor Towles manages to depict action and a gallery of characters so that the reader is absolutely absorbed. At the same time, the novel is also a moving story about friendship, love and the ups and downs of life in the Soviet Union’s formative years.
A Gentleman in Moscow is an extremely well written and engrossing novel that is very hard to put down once you start. Hurry up and read it.
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