It's a tricky time to be an aristocrat in Russia, the early 1920s. Admittedly if you've got as far as the 1920s then you've at least survived being brutally purged in the immediate aftermath of the 1917 revolution, but still, if you've chosen to stay in Russia rather than taking the easy way out and swanning off to Paris to live out your days then you may find things less easy than they used to be, what with the peasants having ideas above their station like, you know, running the country and all that.
So here's Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, former heir to a country estate near Nizhny Novgorod, an estate now obviously requisitioned by the new government. The Count himself is still around, though, and swanning around Moscow being a fabulously urbane socialite in a way that grinds the gears of the new governing regime somewhat. So much so, in fact, that they concoct a show-trial at which the Count is accused of being a parasite, an anachronism, an idle, dawdling flâneur who represents the last vestige of a corrupt regime that must be swept aside for the greater good. But he's quite charming and everyone quite likes him, despite themselves, so instead of ordering him out the back to be summarily shot they instead subject him to house arrest in the Hotel Metropol. Not so terrible, you might say, especially since he has made a third-floor suite at the Metropol his residence for a few years now anyway. But the sentence comes with a few extra strings attached - firstly no nice comfy suite but a boxy attic room, and secondly a reminder that if he should breach the terms of his house arrest it'll be No More Mr. Nice Communist and he will be the recipient of a hot lead sandwich.
For all that he has never been obliged to do anything as coarse and proletarian as actually work for a living, the Count likes to keep busy, and he soon finds things to do: firstly knocking though the boarded-up connecting doors between his room and the empty one next to it to afford himself a bit more space, and secondly taking on the job of head waiter at the hotel, a job which requires that he attend regular planning meetings with the hotel's maître d' and the head chef, who soon become his close friends.
Other people also come into the Count's orbit and become friends, or in the case of film star Anna Urbanova, a regular at the hotel, a bit more than friends, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. There's also Nina, a young girl with a keen sense of curiosity and a hotel pass key which allows her access to various parts of the hotel off-limits to normal guests. There are also a couple of representatives of the Communist regime, which continues to keep half an eye on what the Count is up to, and, mainly after the Second World War, some Americans, who appear to be brash types throwing money around drunkenly but who the Count soon clocks as spies.
Years pass, and Nina grows into a young woman and gets involved, along with her husband, in some activities inimical to the current regime, and there comes a day when Nina has to head off to try and get her husband released from some remote gulag. Before doing so she entrusts her daughter, Sofia, to the Count, who is thus - approaching fifty and with no children of his own - thrust into effective fatherhood.
Sofia grows up into an intelligent and feisty young woman, but there are inevitably a few bumps in the road, notably when she falls down the stairs and fractures her skull. This entails a dash to hospital in a cab and, as a matter of necessity, the Count's first venture outside of the hotel in twenty-plus years. Fortunately - again - people he knows inside the Communist regime view his plight with some sympathy and arrange to have him spirited back into the hotel once Sofia is safely in the hospital before some jobsworth spots him and pops a cap in his ass.
Sofia shows an aptitude for music, the piano in particular, and soon starts picking up gigs with youth orchestras which entail travel, including outside Russia. This gives the Count an idea for a scheme which will allow Sofia to escape the regime (with a bit of help from the Count's American contacts) and for the Count and Anna to live out the rest of their lives together without having to do so within the confines of the hotel he's spent the last thirty years in.
A Gentleman In Moscow was donated to me by my mother after she'd read it with her book group. It's hard for me to describe it as a "book group book" without sounding snottily, snobbily dismissive, but, well, I'm going to anyway. That's not to say it wasn't an engaging and enjoyable read, but there's a genre of books with a historical setting, wide time-span (usually many years), slightly whimsical in tone, very little sense of the characters being in any physical peril or of anything too experimental or metafictional happening like not ending up with a nice neat tying-up of loose ends that I tend to lump together as "book group books". That probably doesn't make any sense, but whatever. The lack of peril is jarring in this case because Stalinist Russia was pretty good at ruthlessly eliminating anyone who was even a mild inconvenience to the smooth running of the state.
It's also quite meandering and episodic plot-wise, especially since the Count's situation at the end of each episode except the last is the same, i.e. still in the hotel, and the Count himself is a man of great personal charm, erudition and saintly patience who starts to seem a bit of a Maryovski Sueovich by the end.
Needless to say as befits a book group book it's been adapted as a Netflix series, starring Ewan McGregor who seems to be leaning into the slightly magical charming twinkliness of the character in a way I daresay I would find a bit annoying if I ever watched more than five minutes of it. But I won't, so that's fine. The character also seems to retain his luxuriant moustache throughout the timeline, whereas a major plot point in the book is his loss of it pretty early on.
Anyway, the book is perfectly fine and highly readable, with just a hint of "if you like that sort of thing" attached. I will also add, as a final thought, that if you were to be in a position of being stuck in the same hotel for thirty years or more, "AMOR TOWLES" is the sort of thing you might find yourself bellowing down the phone to room service fairly regularly.
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