2018's Reading I

            My most enjoyable read during the year was Amor Towle’s A Gentleman in Moscow, published in 2016. Count Alexander Rostov is not shot by the Bolsheviks because his 1913 poem, “Where Is It Now?” was considered by them as a call to arms against the Czarists. We later discover that the poem was in fact written by a friend who would have been in danger from the Czarists for having written it, so he and the Count agreed to let it be known that Rostov was is its author. Instead of being shot, Rostov is sentenced in 1922 to a lifetime house arrest in the Hotel Metropol, where he contrives to turn a sentence into a favor. Though he is moved to a ten-by-ten room on an upper floor, the Count, allowed to take whatever furniture will fit, takes his desk, whose legs are stacked inside with pieces of gold. The Count determines to master his circumstances rather than be mastered by them (his father’s constant advice) by committing to the business of practicalities. His little society includes Andrey Duras, the maître d’hotel of the hotel’s best restaurant, the Boyarsky; Emil the cook; Audrios the bartender at the bar the Count called the Shalyapin, for the opera star who once frequented it; Marina, the seamstress of the hotel; Arkady, who mans the front desk; Nina Kulikova, the nine-year-old who shows the Count the secrets of the hotel and then gives him her passkey as a parting gift; and Drosselmeyer, also known as Marshall Kutuzov, the one-eyed cat who takes milk and company from the Count in earlier years and in later ones inhabits the hotel as a ghost.

            Awaiting the Count during his years at the Metropol, besides an implacable enemy nicknamed the Bishop, are romance, adoptive fatherhood, and a perfect bouillabaisse, assembled despite the worst the Bishop and rationing can do to prevent it.