I truly enjoyed this book. It's an intelligent, funny, heartwarming, story with well-drawn characters. One of the best books I've read lately that I would rate as 5 stars.
This is an exquisite book: intelligent, delightful; like nothing I've ever read before, a story that will stay with me for years.
This is such a gorgeous book in so many ways. I can imagine my friends who require a plot not enjoying it at all. It's very character-driven. The characters, particularly the main character Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, are richly painted and alive.
Rostov is one of the aristocracy of old Russia and as a relatively young man (after the Bolshevik revolution, 1922) is sentenced to house arrest for life inside the hotel in which he resides, a magnificent old hotel called the Metropol. He adapts to this life, eats meals in the hotel restaurant, and even ends up working in the restaurant. It might sound like a story in which nothing happens, but Rostov has both a rich inner life and a love of life and of people, so life is never dull inside the hotel. There is action, but it is micro-action; you have to recognize it rather than it being completely overt. There is also drama, as there always seems to be in life, no matter that you are stuck inside a hotel. The characters are wonderfully developed and rich in detail and style. Many of them seem at first to be minor characters, but each is essential to the overall tale. Like many people in life, they are hidden gems.
The prose in the book is lovely. I listened to the audio version, which was beautifully done. I found it entirely engaging, as I expected it would be after having already read Towles' Rules of Civility. Towles captures in this story the feel of old Russia, the rise of the revolution, and the resulting cultural changes. I tried to imagine how it would feel to stay at home for a lifetime, to know that life outside in the world is progressing, but to have little or no participation in it.
Update (Jan 2021): I loved that the Count accepted his sentence with grace and went about living his life in a way as rich and possibly with more meaning as he would have if he'd been free. As I think back on it (I read this in 2019), it's a bit like having to stay at home for a year due to COVID-19. Life is what you make of it; quarantine can be as rich as freedom, as many of us found.
âHe had said that our lives are steered by uncertainties, many of which are disruptive or even daunting; but that if we persevere and remain generous of heart, we may be granted a moment of lucidityâa moment in which all that has happened to us suddenly comes into focus as a necessary course of events, even as we find ourselves on the threshold of the life we had been meant to lead all along.â
â Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow
âFate would not have the reputation it has, if it simply did what it seemed it would do.â
â Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow
â...what matters in life is not whether we receive a round of applause; what matters is whether we have the courage to venture forth despite the uncertainty of acclaim.â
â Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow
âFor as it turns out, one can revisit the past quite pleasantly, as long as one does so expecting nearly every aspect of it to have changed.â
â Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow
