Play Book Tag discussion

A Gentleman in Moscow – Amor Towles
Audiobook performed by Nicholas Guy Smith
5***** and a ❤

From the book jacket: When, in 1922, the thirty-year-old Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, he is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. An indomitable man of erudition and wit, Rostov must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors.

My reactions:
Well this book cements Amor Towles in my list of favorite authors.

I love the Count and the way he leads his life. His accommodations may be limited, and he may be confined to the hotel, but his life is certainly *not* limited. He is a man who lives life with grace and dignity, who treats others with respect, who thinks before he speaks or acts. In short, he IS a gentleman.

This is not to say that he doesn’t suffer from his imposed confinement. He suffers boredom, loneliness and even depression. But he studies his options and moves forward with determination and spirit. He finds ways to circumvent his situation, to foil the forces that wish to take from him. They may take his possessions, they may restrict his movements, but they cannot make his less a gentleman.

Towles populates the Metropol with an assortment of interesting characters – various hotel staff members, small-minded bureaucrats, a beautiful actress, a precocious child, etc. And he paints a picture of elegance, sometimes allowed to fall into shabbiness.

All this serves the purpose of this intricate plot, involving intrigue, misdirection, suspense, luck and a lot of courage and ingenuity.

Nicholas Guy Smith does a marvelous job performing the audiobook. He is a master of different accents, and even does a credible job of the young girls’ voices. I could listen to him for hours (and did).


LINK to my review

Yay!

This is my book club pick for Feb. looking forward to it since I enjoyed Rules of Civility this year.

F2F book club # 2 discussed this on Monday. Wonderful discussion - and two of our members had been in Russia in the late 1980s / early 1990s. Very interesting to hear their perspectives.

No one else in the club had read Rules of Civility ... but I think several of them may do so now.

F2F book club # 1 has it on the schedule for February or March (I forget which).

Good Christmas present to yourself. I caught this one early in the year, and it spurred my to read about a dozen classics of Russian lit. Their governments come and go with a game of thrones, and the Bear may now be waking from about a 50 year hibernation, but the people in many ways remain the same.