Skip to main content

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Readable, diverting book about reconciling oneself to changed circumstances, and to keeping your chin up in the face of adversity. Unfortunately it is also Russian literature-lite, a kind of Oprah's Book Club version of the real thing: the author apes the style of a real Russian novel, and his characters' comportment and dialogue ape what you'd find in real Russian literature. 

Maybe this might lead a few curious readers to actual Russian literature (see the Russian Lit Starter Pack at the end of this post). If so, then it's good that this novel exists. 

The story revolves around Alexander Rostov, a Russian aristocrat deemed a "Former Person" by the Bolshevik regime and sentenced, implausibly, to lifetime house arrest in Moscow's famous Metropol Hotel. In the decades to follow Rostov lives out his life in this hotel as a sort of reverse Forrest Gump: all the world's interesting people come to him.

[Affiliate link to the book here: https://amzn.to/3UDlnHs Note that you can support my work here by buying all your Amazon products via affiliate links from this site, or my sister site Casual Kitchen. THANK YOU!] 

Rostov is a good example of a Mary Sue character: perfect in nearly every way, always ready with the consummate bon mot, an unerring observer of human nature, and an expert in whatever arbitrary skill the storyline requires: classical music, literature, orology, gourmanderie, oenology, marksmanship--even pilferage (in one particularly far-fetched plot event late in the book).

For a reader to swallow this novel's fundamental premise (that Rostov, rather than being summarily executed, would be put under house arrest in one of the world's finest hotels where he could somehow, for free, still eat in the hotel's restaurants, drink at the bar, wander the halls, seduce actresses, and, eventually, help teach European and American culture to powerful Bolshevik apparatchiks) requires either complete ignorance of Soviet-era history or a gravity-defying suspension of disbelief. Get past that and the story will carry you along harmlessly.

Russian Literature Starter Pack:
Anton Chekhov short stories 
Ivan Turgenev: Fathers and Sons; Torrents of Spring
Nikolai Gogol: Dead Souls; see also his short story "The Overcoat"
Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Brothers Karamazov
Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina

More Posts

Broken Money by Lyn Alden

Our money is broken, and the sooner we wrap our minds around the implications, the better. In Broken Money, Lyn Alden, a lucid writer and gifted teacher, offers a highly readable grand tour of monetary history: she explains the emergence of money, what makes a good or bad money, how money gradually became more and more "abstracted" away from gold, and how the modern fiat financial system evolved. Most importantly, she explains, clearly, how inflation, purposely designed into the modern system, is used as a wealth extraction tool: "...the financial system in its current form is designed in such a way that 1) the money supply continually inflates, 2) purchasing power is gradually siphoned away from savers and toward arbitrageurs who sit near the source of money creation, 3) the system rewards large and well connected entities at the cost of small and poorly connected entities, 4) liabilities gradually shift from the private sector to the public sector to keep the system f...

The Best Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham

This was my first experience reading this author. Competent short stories, some very good.  The author has a knack for creating a mood and for creating an arc of tension and release. See for example the short story "Rain" where the reader really feels the smothering monsoon on the islands of Samoa, or see the story "P.&O." with its atmosphere of genuine foreboding as one of the main characters lies ill in a ship's sick bay, but then an expiation and release of that tension as the story's central character puts her own mind right about a past wrong done to her. Finally, an auxiliary benefit to readers: we get a well-fleshed out picture of the British Empire in the early 20th century. If we had to name this era, maybe we could call it "post-peak UK." It was a time of clear class distinctions, obvious-but-unwritten proprieties and competent English functionality worldwide: on transcontinental train trips, on multi-week steamer passages--wherever ...

The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy

This is a blatantly repetitive and poorly-organized book, and yet it's still highly useful: filled with good tactics and reminders to observe and control your thinking--and more importantly, to be attentive to the implications of your thinking. Thoughts are things! How you think and the beliefs you hold play an enormous role in your reality. And so, despite its flaws, I think The Power of Your Subconscious Mind is still worthwhile. Think of it as a book-length practice of autosuggestion, or even a sort of extended mantra. The book's repetitiveness then becomes a benefit: it helps you practice and build good mental habits, it gives you plenty of examples of affirmations and mental scripts to apply to various life situations, and so on. A minor warning: if you consider NLP , autosuggestion or visualization and affirmation techniques to be useless woo-woo silliness, do not read this book. It's not for you. [A quick  affiliate link to readers to the book here . You ca...