A Gentleman in Moscow A Book Review

Shay Steckler

I read JaneEyre on the train from Tours to Paris, and Paris to Nice, and back again. I had visited the Tours FNAC before I left on holiday and picked the classic Brontë tale out of the limited selection of English-language books. Perhaps it was months of missing my native language, but perhaps it was indeed the eloquence of the English and the story itself that made me fall in love with JaneEyre. Placed high on the pedestal, it was my rapid-fire answer for the old adage, “What’s your favorite book?” Then along came Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, and he began to topple the likes of Mr. Rochester.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor

Towles tells the story of a Russian aristocrat who is sentenced to lifelong house arrest in the Metropol Hotel in Moscow. While the Count is fictitious, the luxury hotel on Theatre Square is not, nor are the historical events that unfold during his 30-year tenure as an imprisoned fixture of his residence. As he is banished to an attic room, he thinks of jumping and ending it all, for who could imagine a life trapped inside the walls of a hotel, grand as it may be. He overcomes this fear by living the message at the heart of the novel: “A man must master his circumstances or otherwise be mastered by them.”

With his limited possessions—his late sister’s scissors, a copy of Anna Karenina, and a grandfather clock— the Count is determined to be the cause and not the effect of his own life. He compares himself to other heroes whose lives were sentenced to confinement: Dantès, Cervantes, and Napoleon. He opts not for revenge but instead to embrace the path of Crusoe and “maintain his resolve by committing to the business of practicalities.” Towles masterfully crafts the Count’s ability to be the master of his own circumstances, to spend equal time contemplating the wine served with dinner as the opening passage of Anna Karenina as the syntax of his correspondence. We see the Count lay witness to the Russian Revolution, befriend the hotel staff, play hide-and-seek with a young guest, expertly wait tables, be seduced by an actress, correspond with emissaries, and share nightcaps with spies. He lives a life full of meaning.

To watch someone make so much of the life he is sentenced to gives the reader a glimmer of hope for his own circumstances. One’s only wish is that his life would be written as eloquently as Towles writes of the Count’s. Passages such as “They spoke of the once and the was, of the wishful and the wonderful,” roll off the page as effortlessly as more comic passages like the Count's musings on jazz (a fistful of notes crammed higgledypiggledy into thirty measures) or amusing explanations of Russian literary characters: “Our greatest authors, due to some deep-rooted sense of tradition or a complete lack of imagination, constrained themselves to the use of thirty given names.”

I suggest reading my new favorite book like the Count himself, listening to Tchaikovsky leaned back in a chair in a cozy attic room, or at the very least on a train from Paris to Nice and back again.