A Gentleman In Moscow
Sitting next to the fire crackling in the heat of summer’s late evening, still bright at nearly 10pm this far north, I look up from my book at the vast expanse of the Sawtooth Wilderness in central Idaho. These majestic surroundings and my freedom to enjoy them are not lost on me as I pull myself out of the story Amor Towles weaves in A Gentleman in Moscow (2016). Towles is a household name and over the course of the past eleven years (since the publication on Rules of Civility in 2011) he has acquired a well-deserved following. This, however, is my first Towles’ novel. I scan the mountains around me as moment by moment they glow deeper purple red a the sun sinks further toward the far western horizon before I return to the Count and the world of Moscow’s grand Metropol hotel; the contrast between his life and my own in this moment could not be more pronounced.
A Gentleman in Moscow begins as a Bolshevik tribunal finds Count Alexander Rostov unrepentant for his aristocratic background and sentences him to house arrest in Moscow’s luxurious Metropol Hotel in 1922. The novel that follows tracks the Count’s life as he settles into the limitations of his new realm and Russia’s wildly shifting culture. As the title suggests he is above all else a gentleman, and one with whom it is a pleasure to accompany through his day-to-day life.
Ultimately, A Gentleman in Moscow is about an aristocratic young man who is forced to evolve as the world he was born into becomes nothing more than memory. Due to his confinement at the Metropol, the Count’s evolution is entirely one of the self since his options are limited. The story that Towles tells as the years pass and the Count settles into the life he creates within the walls of the grand hotel is both charming and inspiring; in it we readers will, no doubt, find lessons for our own (less confined) lives.
What’s more, perhaps readers will recognize the incredible gift of freedom. Sitting beside that campfire as the hot sun’s light slowly faded from the sky, I was certainly struck by the limitless possibilities my life of freedom affords me. But perhaps even more so, I found myself inspired by the astonishing free will the Count unearths even amidst the confines of his life at the Metropol. This is a novel to be savored. It is one that will stay with you, reader, long after the smile brought forth by the final pages has disappeared from your face.
Bibliography:
Towles, Amor. A Gentleman in Moscow. Viking: 2016.
A Few Great Passages:
“From the earliest age, we must learn to say good-bye to friends and family. We see our parents and siblings off at the stations; we visit cousins, attend schools, join the regiment; we marry, or travel abroad. It is part of the human experience that we are constantly gripping a good fellow by the shoulders and wishing him well, taking comfort from the notion that we will hear word of him soon enough” (14).
“[A]s a people, we Russians have proven unusually adept at destroying that which we have created” (290).
“‘Who would have imagined,’ he said, “when you were sentenced to life in the Metropol all those years ago, that you just became the luckiest man in all of Russia’” (292).
“The pace of evolution was not something to be frighted by. For while nature doesn’t have a stake in whether the wings of a peppered moth are black or white, it genuinely hopes that the peppered moth will persist. And that is why nature designed the forces of evolution to play out over generations rather than eons – to ensure that moths and men have a chance to adapt” (336).
“‘Looking back, it seems to me that there are people who play an essential role at every turn. And I don’t just mean the Napoleons who influence the course of history; I mean men and women who routinely appear at critical junctures in the progress of art, or commerce, or the evolution of ideas – as if Life itself has summoned them once again to help fulfill its purpose” (420-21).
