By the end of the book, I felt like the Count was an old friend. Early-ish in the book, he says the Count “reviewed the menu in reverse order as was his habit, having learned from experience that giving consideration to appetizers before entrees can only lead to regret.” A description like that tells you so much about a character. The Count should be an insufferable character, but the whole thing works because he’s so charming. He knows his liquor better than anyone, and he’s not shy about sharing his opinions. When he’s forced to become a waiter at the hotel restaurant, he does it with this panache that is incredible. He’s read seemingly every book and can identify any piece of music. Throughout all the political turmoil, he manages to survive because, well, he’s good at everything. He felt to me like he was from a different era from the other characters in the book. The Count-who sees himself as a wine expert-is horrified.Ĭount Rostov is an observer frozen in time, watching these changes come and go. In one memorable chapter, Bolshevik officials decide that the hotel’s wine cellar is “counter to the ideals of the Revolution.” The hotel staff is forced to remove labels from more than 100,000 bottles, and the restaurant must sell all wine for the same price. Many scenes in the book never happened in real life (as far as I know), but they’re easy to imagine given the Metropol’s history. That’s a lot of history for one building.
The hotel is located across the street from the Kremlin and managed to survive the Bolshevik revolution and the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. It’s the kind of place where you can’t help but picture what it was like at different points in time. I’ve even been lucky enough to stay there (and it looked mostly the same as Towles describes in the book). The book follows the Count for the next thirty years as he makes the most of his life despite its limitations.Īlthough the book is fictional, the Metropol is a real hotel. It’s 1922, and the Bolsheviks have just taken power of the newly formed Soviet Union. At the beginning of the book, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is sentenced to spend his life under house arrest in Moscow’s Metropol Hotel. That one scene aside, A Gentleman in Moscow is a fun, clever, and surprisingly upbeat look at Russian history through the eyes of one man. I didn’t want to spoil anything for her, so I just had to wait until she caught up to me.
When she saw me crying, she became worried that a character she loved was going to die. It’s usually a lot of fun, but it can get us in trouble when one of us is further along than the other-which recently happened when we were both reading A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles.Īt one point, I got teary-eyed because one of the characters gets hurt and must go to the hospital. Melinda and I sometimes read the same book at the same time.
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