Review: A Gentleman in Moscow

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Five separate people recommended this one to me in the space of about three weeks, so I came to it with a sense of ‘it’ factor. From the title and the enthusiasm of all these people, I assumed it was a modern day Le Carre novel, an East-West thriller with a good dash of contemporary reflection on the nature of totalitarianism.

Well…I suppose there is some Le Carre, but it comes only at the end. Instead, this is mostly a novel of manners. And, reader alert, it’s a very slow beginning. (Did I mention it’s very slow?) This is beautiful throughout, though, and I admired it even when I couldn’t get a good grip on where it was headed.

For most of the first quarter of this, we get an insightful reflection on the changed times of the post-revolutionary Soviet Union. Count Rostov, a nobleman sentenced to spend the rest of his life in a sumptuous hotel (where he will eventually become a waiter), represents a faded manner of life. He’s not entirely opposed to the communist project – he helped write a poem that the new authorities admired enough to spare his life over it – but he has a style and sensibility that the new world neither recognizes nor values.

One of the intriguing instances of that comes into focus when a communist official asks Rostov to help him understand ‘gentlemen” to aid him in his work of communicating with the representatives of Western powers. It’s a quiet and thoughtful conversation, extended over decades, in which each comes to see some of the virtues of the other’s system. Over time, Rostov’s childhood world (and his education within it) seems ever less relevant. When he sets out to tell a story to a child, for instance, she’s disappointed that he has never seen an elephant and yet unimpressed that he once knew many different princes.

Rostov feels like a large soul, like someone destined to be the hero of a novel by Tolstoy or Pasternak. Instead, he’s confined to a single building, making a life among the unambitious people there. He comes to care for these people, but he seems always diminished. I kept comparing him to a bonsai tree. If he’d been in a container large enough for him to spread his roots in full, he’d have been more than merely an ornament.

[SEMI-SPOILER] Things do change in the second half of the novel when he comes to be the parent-of-last-resort for a young girl. Even there, though, the novel remains slow even as there are hints of his connections to the West and his hope, one he always dismisses, that he might find a fuller place for himself and Sophia. This moves so slowly into thriller – and the thriller is so low-key – that it never really hits what I imagined would be full speed.

Bottom line, I might have enjoyed this even more if I’d gone into it with a clearer sense of what to expect. Its prose is stunning at all times, or better said, it’s always elegant and impressive in the manner of Rostov himself. Still, there’s no denying its beauty of its ambition. It may not be Le Carre, but it’s something else very moving and, in the end, very satisfying.


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