A Gentleman In Moscow

A Gentleman in Moscow has been popping up on my recommendations for quite a while now. I kept swerving it, mostly due to the cover (see my previous post) and the number of pages. It’s a big book and I have been sailing through some shorter stories over the summer. Having taken the plunge, I am both glad I’ve read the book and glad I left it until now (not really a summer read).

The story centres around Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, a Russian aristocrat who finds himself on the wrong side of a revolution. He is swiftly tried and sentenced to indefinite house arrest at the super posh Hotel Metropol, where he had been loving for the previous few years.

The book spans many decades and is quite ingenious in the ways it manages to find interesting and compelling stories for a character who is so limited in terms of his location. But the stories are beautifully crafted and the characters superbly described and brought to life. The way Towles sometimes tells stories in the wrong order, or offers up a nugget of detail before circling back to make it fit in to the narrative was a treat.

It is a book of such a vast timeframe that perhaps unsurprisingly it does get a little bit bogged down in the middle part. I found some of the stories a little too distracting at a couple of points and wanted the main story to progress a little faster. However, this is a minor personal preference and it should not deter you from giving this book a read.

Thoroughly enjoyed it and I am looking forward to watching the screen adaptation.