I Read Amor Towles’ ‘A Gentleman In Moscow’.
A man obliges himself his routine. For years, a man can wake at the same time, take the same coffee, the same personal allowances for leisure, the same walk, even allow the same things to annoy him in a way that hampers him, but is acceptable simply because it is part of what he expects every day. Any shift in this routine, any extra hour slept or pocket of traffic or spill of cup becomes a derailment. It annihilates him. This is not the way things should be. This is not how I’ve made them.
A Gentleman In Moscow shows us someone who not only has a staunch routine, but also an immaculate way of living and how his life gets thrown into a vortex of the mundane, the organic, the pedestrian, and how it takes him from being someone who he held in such high esteem to be someone who was more of a gentleman, more of a remarkable person than he initially was within his pristine tower. The joy of this book is watching Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov find love in the small glows of life that exist outside of the golden path he had paved for himself.
Leading the life of a debutante for most of his early days, we pick up with Rostov after he’s already been put on house arrest within the Hotel Metropol, a luxury hotel that thrives upon the aristocracy. Throughout the book we can get a sense of Rostov’s search for high quality, for bespokesmanship, for artisanal creations of food, of drink, and a love of the arts. There’s a sense of an upturned nose, a tailored suit for every occasion. There’s something unrealistic about the way in which he carries himself. Over the course of the story, we start to learn that his life was one of privilege, so his attention to Work, his ability to get his hands upon the tool, was never really a necessity as it were. He could eat well, he could socialize, he could enjoy the arts of the written word and orchestral music.
For most of the first portion of this book, our main character is so starched that it’s tough to see where we are going to go from here. But as time passes (the book spans almost 30 years, I think), we see that Alexander has a far more intimate relationship with his past than he lets on, showing a lot of tenderness which mostly centers around his sister, but also some dear relationships with friends who carry through the rest of the book. And as we watch the character build, we watch as he is liberated from his relationship with his past, unshackled from the bonds which have kept him so self-involved and watch him spread his arms in an open embrace of other people who stay at the hotel, from those who work in the kitchen where he eventually takes a job, from patrons who stay at the hotel and eat his food. But the two relationships that really build an immense bonfire of sentiment within him and within the reader are two young girls who he takes on an extraordinarily paternal relationship with. It is these two girls who make up a great deal of the second half of the book, and it’s the lessons he learns, the opening of his heart which really show immense character development and growth.
Personally, I went through a very similar experience in the last several years wherein I discovered that the love of a child is something that is oddly reciprocal, despite the fact that the resonance of the two forms of love can often be wildly different. A child’s love is humbling, honest, selfish, almost shortsighted. A parent’s love comes from experience, comes in the shape of new and old intimacies, has a stunted language all its own from which you try to shape the grandest world, the most wide-eyed trust in the simplest terms, the smallest actions. Most of what we do as parents and as wards is done behind the scenes. Alexander is not a cold-hearted Scrooge in this book ever, by any means, he’s just a little stodgy. And it’s these experiences he has with the two girls that really start to show how he can be defrosted just a bit. He melts into a new shape, and becomes a whole man. It softens him while simultaneously making him far more fortuitous. His scale is broader. And his actions are the grandest of his extraordinary life.
It’s also interesting to see some of how we watch the Russian state shrink and grow and evolve. I’m pretty ignorant when it comes to the historical development of that nation, but the way that it showed the progression from the eyes of someone who adored his country (but not always its politics) was very cool.
Big time recommendation from me on this one! It can be a little dry at times, but it’s got a lot of charm and I believe the story it tells, especially in its quick climax is heartwarming and exciting. It showcases the tenacity and love that can be found in friendships both new and old, it shows how romance can be something that can stretch across decades, and it really highlights a lot of the ways that we, as people, need to always be moving forward and focusing on the present instead of telling ourselves stories about how things were and how we loved who and how we used to be. We only have today to tell newer and better stories and to make ourselves and those around us improved!
