A Gentleman in Moscow
Amor Towles · 2016
A Russian count under house arrest in a luxury hotel for 30 years. An elegant, witty, warmly humanist novel that became one of the great word-of-mouth successes of the era. Not fashionably experimental, but executing traditional pleasures with rare craft. Enormously re-read.
The case against
Charm is the whole diet, and it cloys. While the Count perfects the bouillabaisse and trades aphorisms, collectivization and the purges happen conveniently offscreen; the Metropol is a snow globe with the Terror outside the glass. Towles writes lovely sentences in praise of graciousness for nearly five hundred pages; the century's worst decades serve as wallpaper.
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