Books I Suggest: Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow (2016)

            Count Alexander Rostov, whose family estate, Idlehour, is in Nizhny Novgorod, is not shot by the Bolsheviks because his 1913 poem, “Where Is It Now?” was considered by them as a call to arms. We later discover that the poem was in fact written by Rostov’s friend Mikhail Mishkin, who would have been in danger from the Tzarists for having written it, so they agreed to let it be known that Rostov was 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, Rostov, allowed to take whatever furniture will fit, takes his desk, whose legs are stacked inside with pieces of gold. Rostov determines to master his circumstances (rather than be mastered by them) 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 Rostov calls 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 Rostov 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 Rostov in earlier years and in later ones inhabits the hotel as a ghost.

            Other characters will enter Rostov’s life and change it, including a film actress named Anna who becomes a love interest, a five-year old child named Sofia whose temporary care of by Rostov turns out to be longer than he’d bargained for, and an oafish waiter in one of the Metropole’s restaurants he names the Bishop, who becomes a sometimes comic, sometimes not-so-funny feature of the Rostov’s life..

            Towles has a straightforward style characterized by the way one character will repeat what another has just said, epithets used to identify characters (Nina’s penchant for yellow when a child, Anna always described as “willowy,” and the bizarre head shape of the Bishop, Rostov’s main adversary in the book) and occasional odd failures of editing such as calling Colonel Osip Glebnikoff “the Captain” or Towles’s apparent belief that “malingering” means “loitering.” For me, it was a delightful read from beginning to end.