A Gentleman in Moscow — the perfect lockdown read
(spoiler-free)
On first glance, A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles may seem like the very last book one would want to read during a national lockdown. The book centres around the life and times of Count Alexander Rostov, a former aristocrat who has been sentenced to “house arrest” at the Metropol Hotel in Moscow by a Bolshevik court. Ironically, I bought this book as part of a quartet of books set in far-flung places (the other three were Three Daughters of Eve by Elif Shafak, The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah and Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) in an attempt to scratch my travel itch. It should have been clear that A Gentleman in Moscow would not do that; as per the limitations of his punishment, the Count scarcely sets foot outside the hotel over the course of the book’s four hundred and sixty-two pages. Hear me out though, because while A Gentleman in Moscow may not allow us to escape to Moscow through its pages, it does serve as a timely reminder that life’s true joys are the simplest and that a life in confinement (or partial confinement) does not mean an unfulfilled one.
This book is beautifully written. I realise that it sounds pretentious to describe it this way but there is simply no other way to convey the quality of Towles’ writing. I found myself re-reading sentences and paragraphs just to appreciate how perfectly they were crafted. I also found myself doing something I never had before, highlighting sections and turning down pages that I may want to revisit later.
No sentence or section of writing was too unimportant or insignificant for Towles. Nothing that could be expressed beautifully was expressed in any other way. Many successful authors pepper their writing with pretty sentences to balance out the mundane, or offset a mere “functional” phrase with a more dazzling one, but nothing was too mundane or functional for Towles to render it stunning. For example, in describing a particularly unwieldy sentence Towles is not satisfied with describing it as such:
“Here, indeed, was a formidable sentence — one that was on intimate terms with a comma, and that held the period in healthy disregard.”
Naturally, given the subject-matter and the confinement of the “Gentleman”, the plot is suitably slow-moving. But this is not a book driven by plot. It is driven by detail, description and dialogue. Admittedly, this can make the book difficult to engage with at first. It does not grab your attention or mount suspense or end chapters with cliffhangers as so many others do, instead the novel is a mellow melting pot of small interactions, fascinating characters and contented routine which simmer away happily with the plot unfolding at leisure in between.
The Count has a bittersweet relationship with time and its passing. For a man destined to be confined for life, the concept of time at once loses all meaning and takes on significant new meaning. We see the Count try to pass time by taking on gargantuan volumes that he had resisted when “at liberty”, while also attempting to maintain, to the extent permitted by the walls of the Metropol, routine and normality within his new situation.
“With so little to do and all the time in the world to do it, the Count’s peace of mind continued to be threatened by a sense of ennui — that dreaded mire of the human emotions.”
Little could Towles have known at the timing of writing how relatable this remark would become. We are now all too familiar with the manner in which confinement can distort time, and how difficult it can be to find productivity at the junction of confinement and isolation.
A Gentleman in Moscow is a superb story, at times humourous, at times dark, but always stunningly written.
If you can’t already tell, I loved this book. It is certainly not a page-turner but if you do keep turning the pages, you will be treated to an unforgettable read — and why not read it now, while we have “all the time in the world to do it”.
