Friday Reads: A Gentleman in Moscow

For this week's Friday Reads, Adam shares A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, a delightful novel about a less-than-delightful situation. 

Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is a Russian aristocrat, a learned man of impeccable manners and wit, whose life of leisure changes drastically when he is brought before a Bolshevik tribunal in 1922. Declared a "Former Person" by the new Communist government, Rostov is sentenced to house arrest in his current Moscow residence, the grand Metropol hotel, where he is moved from his luxury suite to a cramped attic room, and threatened with execution should he ever set foot outside the hotel. He passes his days reading, making his weekly visit to the hotel barber, dining and drinking in the hotel's restaurants and bar, and getting to know the hotel's staff and other guests. He befriends a bright, enthusiastic young girl named Nina, who shows him the hotel's hidden nooks and crannies. He begins an affair with a famous actress, and takes a job as headwaiter in the hotel's fanciest restaurant. I'm only about halfway through the book, and it's only 1930, so I look forward to finding out what happens to the count and his acquaintances over the coming decades. How will the count experience, from the confines of the hotel, the lean years of the Depression, the terror of Stalin's purges, the brutality of World War II, and the onset of the Cold War? Will he ever get to leave the Metropol?


This novel as an absolute joy to read. It's not just that Count Rostov is such a likable character, or that Towles captures Rostov's inner life and the workings of the hotel so beautifully, or fun little details like the chapter titles all beginning with the letter "A." The book is so elegantly written, and with such warm humor and a light touch, that it feels just about perfect. It's one of those novels that's so well-written that it seems effortless, as if the text just came to be in its final form through some sort of magic.