A Gentleman in Moscow in Espionage Aficionados

Aug 25, 2019 Nooilforpacifists rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: russian-history

Outstanding writing, a tiny jewel box of phrases. The plot—yes, there is one—barely matters. Each scene is plump with descriptions of joy and pain. I’ve made my highlights visible.

This is no ”short” novel, but I never thought it dragged.

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Apr 20, 2022 cool breeze rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Amor Towles seems to admire Tolstoy (War and Peace also featured a Count Rostov and his family) and aspire to that height of literary excellence. Towles sometimes gets close in this novel, but it is very uneven and only rises to that level occasionally. That is still a notable achievement.

The passages with Count Rostov and the young Nina and Sophia are the best, charming and touching, 5 stars. They are the reason for the awards and many favorable reviews of this book. Count Rostov overall is a v Amor Towles seems to admire Tolstoy (War and Peace also featured a Count Rostov and his family) and aspire to that height of literary excellence. Towles sometimes gets close in this novel, but it is very uneven and only rises to that level occasionally. That is still a notable achievement.

The passages with Count Rostov and the young Nina and Sophia are the best, charming and touching, 5 stars. They are the reason for the awards and many favorable reviews of this book. Count Rostov overall is a very well-crafted character, 4 stars. Much of the rest is good, but not great, 3 stars, plus or minus. Unfortunately, Towles’ narration randomly “breaks the fourth wall” and addresses the reader directly. Those passages are nearly always unwelcome distractions that interrupt the flow, and range from fair to poor, 2 to 1 star.

Towles deserves some credit for mentioning that The New York Times disgracefully won a 1932 Pulitzer Prize for covering up the liquidation of the kulaks and the genocide of millions by starvation under Stalin with a steady stream of laughably glowing reports on the supposed "success" of the first Soviet 5-year plan, which was an epically disastrous failure. But Towles promptly forfeits that credit by airily dismissing this as the result of the Times’ reporter, Walter Duranty, being a clueless drunk who habituated his hotel bar. Drunk or not, Duranty and the Times knew, and deliberately covered it up, because they strongly supported the communists and were their devoted propagandists. They have never returned the prize to this day.

This is a longstanding practice with the Times. Most recently, they shamefully won the 2018 Pulitzer for false reporting that was the diametrical opposite of the truth on the Clinton/Deep State-fabricated Russia hoax. As before, because they strongly supported the villains and are their devoted propagandists. It would not have hurt the novel literarily to have truthfully acknowledged that the Times has been a despicable, lying propaganda organ for over 100 years now, but that would have hurt the book’s prospects in the still-influential Times book reviews. Towles obviously lacked the courage to do so.

The novel similarly soft-pedals the horrors of the secret police and the gulags. The censorship and destruction of Mikhail Bulgakov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and countless other writers gets only a few lines in passing and a minor character, Mishka. This book spans the entire Soviet period from 1917 to 1954, but it is a fundamentally unserious and flawed treatment. It is like using the multi-generational suffering of millions as a cheap dramatic backdrop for a character novel, while glossing over the slaughter with a gauzy, soft-focus treatment. It is in as poor taste to do this with socialist mass murderers Lenin and Stalin as it would be to do so with socialist mass murderers Hitler, Mao or Pol Pot.

The plotting and pacing leave a lot to be desired. The Count’s change from a lifelong idle aristocrat to a servile waiter working six days a week is completely abrupt – there is nothing in the novel that bridges or adequately smooths it. The author has a surprise ending in mind, but his set up and reveal are clumsy. The plot doesn’t seem like it is really going anywhere for 375 pages (Books 1-4, which drag in later parts), then it rushes through a lot of intrigues in the final 87 pages (Book 5). Many of these are as artlessly contrived as a pulp detective novel. Some are not credible, particularly in the confrontation with the Bishop. The Casablanca references are heavy-handed and implausible, and feel like a cheap attempt to pilfer something that the novel lacks from a more beloved and resonant work.

Overall, I think the novel rates around 3.5 stars. I rounded my rating up to 4 stars because of the best passages with the Count and young Nina and Sophia. They may not be quite the literary pinnacles of the threshing scene and the skating scene in Anna Karenina, but they are very good in a way that is uncommon in most books written in the last 50 years. Even Tolstoy wrote some notably inferior chapters (including the second epilogue to War and Peace), just a lot fewer of them. Perhaps Towles will be able to sustain his best writing at greater length in a future novel. That would truly be a 5-star novel. ...more

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May 29, 2020 Michael Martz rated it it was ok

Shelves: dnf

Couldn't do it...... made it a quarter of the way through but had to bail. I'm not a huge fan of period fiction to begin with, and the author's over-the-top florid style was too much for me. The Count is a fine character, the other personalities seemed interesting, but not much was happening and I couldn't continue. Too bad, it was on my 'Want to Read' pile for a long time, finally scored a copy, and busted. ...more

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Dec 22, 2018 Thecritic rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Count Rostov lives in Hotel Interpol under house arrest. And he lives a full life.

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Feb 21, 2023 Nicole Ho-Shing rated it it was amazing

Beautiful.

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Oct 29, 2018 Michael Danziger rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Beautiful and thought

I truly enjoyed this amazing novel. A period piece that gives us a grasp of nobility and civility that we need in today's world. ...more

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Feb 21, 2019 Lynnie rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction, tbr-summer-2017-hfc, botm

I am in the minority with this book. I do enjoy the author as a writer and I tried to stick with it, but honestly the plot doesn’t move. Where is the plot? The characters didn’t grab me and was tedious to read. Count Rostov wasn’t the only one imprisoned in the Metropol Hotel, thankfully I escaped.

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