A Gentleman in Moscow (2016)

Suzanne is a voracious reader who keeps up with recent fiction. Our conversations often revolve around what's on our nightstands. A book she recommends is the novel A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, which she lent me last week. Because Suzanne once worked in a bookstore, I lent her my review copy of Marius Kociejowski's A Factotum in the Book Trade (2022).

I am only on Page 25 of this 462 page book, but have already read beyond its premise: that of a charming aristocrat, poet and 1905 protester named Count Rostov who, four years after returning to a more settled and demonstratively post-Tsarist Moscow, is sentenced to life imprisonment at the Hotel Metropol. Not the palatial Second Floor apartments he was living in prior to his June 1922 hearing by the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, but a 100 square foot former servant's quarters on the Fifth Floor. 

From his many furnishings, Rostov chooses a bed, a night stand, two high-back chairs, a desk and all his (father's) books to take upstairs with him. The first chapter ends with Rostov checking to see if the gold coins hidden in the legs of his desk are still there, and they are, so we know he will not have to do as other Russian aristocrats did and bend over for party officials.

And while we're enjoying Rostov's dignity, we're also enjoying his love of books and the time he now has to read them -- the first of which is a collection of essays by Montaigne (1533-1592). Fittingly, I thought, for it was Montaigne who wrote that with every constraint there is a liberty, which was hardly true of those wealthy enough to know how to read back then -- and an apparent luxury for those who could not.

I admit thus far to not feeling very attracted to this witty and unflappable gentlemen, not like I was to Boris Pasternak's humble and pathologically observant poet/doctor Yuri Zhivago, an aristocrat himself who, like Rostov, was sympathetic to the 1905 protesters. The question for me now is, how will Towles convince me his Rostov is someone I should be interested in? Or for those already convinced, how will he make him unlikable, but worthy of understanding? As with all things, something has to give. Because as things stand, this book is to literature what Sokurov's Russian Ark (2002) is to film: a restructuring of a past that is not so much critical but indifferent to the modern world.