A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This book is a real treat. Everything about it is delightful and nothing is unpleasant or uninteresting. And there are a few moments of genuine, auroral beauty. Like the scene on the roof with the bees bringing apple-scented honey. Or the bouillabaisse feast.
A gentleman is someone who makes things easy for other people. In that respect, the narrator is as gentlemanly as the protagonist. I mean that this is a novel which is very deliberate about making itself easy to read. Nothing is ever desperate or panicked. The narrative treats a man’s suicide with the same delicacy and tact as a nation’s.
The way the convulsions of the first decades of Communism penetrate the story are gentle. Labels cut off wine bottles. One little girl left in a hotel. A group of idealistic young officials leaving for the countryside. It doesn’t take much historical knowledge to see the purge, the gulag, the Holodomor floating just beneath the surface.
It’s not more terrifying than One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. But it might be more chilling.
I have a soft spot for exiled Russian aristocrats because of Nabokov. Speak, Memory is one of the great books of all time. But don’t worry! A Gentleman in Moscow couldn’t be further from a Nabokov book. Nabokov might have found it too sentimental, or unclever. But I aspire to be broad enough to love Nabokov for his cleverness and Fowles for his sentimentality.
The creative writing lesson in A Gentleman In Moscow is this: render the concrete. Take the things in the world and put them on the page. This is a novel anchored by food, painting, music, food, clothes, wine, architecture and food. You hook your readers by putting them in the world. And you put them in the world by putting the world on the page.
A good novel can be like time travel. I don’t know of any better way to get into a luxury hotel in 1920s Moscow.
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