Surprisingly, A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles first appeared on my radar in a recommendation at a conference for children’s book writers. When I saw an interview with the author in the November/December issue of Writer’s Digest, a couple of comments intrigued me and confirmed that I needed to look for this book.
Towles said he was committed to being able to describe a character for a full a page, drinking a glass of water, in a way that was fulfilling to the reader. He also said it was important that the character influenced the cadence of the writer’s sentences. When I saw the premise of the book, a thirty-year-old count sentenced in 1922 to a lifetime of house arrest in the Metropol hotel across the street from the Kremlin, I wondered how he could tell an interesting story within that limitation.
While the count can’t leave the hotel, the world can and does come to the hotel – a famed actress, revolutionary thinkers, a little girl who becomes his ward, an outgoing American, and others. Within the hotel, he becomes part of the triumvirate that manage the meals along with the chef and the restaurant captain because of a ability he had developed as a young man at his grandmother’s table. He knew how to seat the personalities attending her dinner parties to cut down on disagreements and arguments, a skill useful to the hotel’s Boyarsky restaurant.
From the book’s beginning in 1922 to its ending in 1954, a girl named Nina, and eventually her daughter Sophia, become central to the life of the count with Sophia growing up in the hotel as his ward and developing an unexpected talent. Repeated occurrences of the twice-tolling clock (only tolling at noon and midnight), gave credence to Towles’s commitment to make a simple thing fulfilling to the reader. The story inside the hotel, the Russian history happening outside the hotel, and the relationships of the characters turn a lifetime in house arrest (or is it hotel arrest?) into a fascinating story. As Misha says of the count, “Who would have imagined, when you were sentenced to life in the Metropol all those years ago, that you had just become the luckiest man in all of Russia.”