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A review by missbear
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
emotional
lighthearted
reflective
slow-paced
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
1.5
I really thought I was going to enjoy this book. It's so highly recommended (Barack Obama! Bill Gates!) and it's been compared to some books that I love (The Book Thief! All the Light We Cannot See!). It's described as being philosophical and about finding joy in everyday things, it's character-driven and emotional and heartwarming and clever and charming. It's historical fiction. The main character loves Russian literature and Anna Karenina is his favorite book - I love Russian literature and Anna Karenina is MY favorite book! So my expectations were admittedly rather high.
I'll start with what I liked, because some things here were good: Amor Towles is a good writer, at least in terms of constructing lovely sentences (we'll cover narrative choices and rhetorical tricks later). He is especially talented at painting lovely pictures of lovely places. The Metropol Hotel is truly brought to life in this book. There are also a number of individual scenes that I did find charming and delightful and I felt like I could "see" very clearly in my mind's eye, because they were described in a charming and delightful and vivid manner. At its best, this book reminded me of the Wes Anderson movie "The Grand Budapest Hotel" - not because of the hotel, but because of Towles' ability to construct picture-perfect, clever, charming little scenes in the way Wes Anderson does: Nina primly eating her tower of ice cream, Andre demonstrating his talent at juggling, a tiny dinner party in a secret room, etc.
Despite these charming individual moments, there was something I found quite unsettling about this book and the more I read, the more unsettled I felt. I had gone into A Gentleman in Moscow expecting to read a work of historical fiction, a genre I quite enjoy. But as I read, I started to suspect that this wasn't really historical fiction at all. In fact, the more I read, the more this book began to remind me of A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket, just instead meant for adults.
There are quite a number of similarities. Both stories follow a cast of whimsical characters, who are placed in bizarre situations and get out of them through great displays of cleverness. Both of them are told by clever narrators who give little sly winks to the reader through clever things like footnotes and asides. Both of them attempt to balance a largely lighthearted story against a plot that is genuinely very dark. However, there is one major difference: A Series of Unfortunate Events is a book for children, set in a fictional, nearly fantastical world. Its darkness is nearly unrelenting, but it's also a fictional darkness, and it is the unrealness (the impossibility!) of the terrible things that happen in the story that allow it to be balanced out by clever children and a clever narrator. A Gentleman in Moscow, because it disguises itself as a work of historical fiction, is set in a real, genuinely terrible time of history. The horrors of Stalin's Russia are presented here as nonsensical quirks (the Bolsheviks argue over vocabulary! They take the labels off the wine!), in much the same way as the evils of Count Olaf are in A Series of Unfortunate Events. Count Rostov shakes his head at them, tsks at their lack of taste and their lack of manners, and blithely goes on living his life of drinking wine and eating delicious food in a beautiful hotel. This is not a clever balancing of lightheartedness and a dark aesthetic to me. This is fiddling while Rome burns. This is A Series of Unfortunate Events if it were set during the Holocaust.
For that reason, I was unable to be charmed by Count Rostov - he came across to me as foolish and immature. I was unable to be charmed by the clever narrator - he came across as whimsical for the sake of whimsy and far too aware of his own cleverness (another similarity: A Series of Unfortunate Events makes repeated use of the number 13 throughout the series, in numbers of chapters and numbers of books and other clever ways. Why? Because 13 is the unluckiest number. In A Gentleman in Moscow, every chapter title begins with the letter A. Why? No reason. Just to remind you that this book is meant to be whimsical! No really, I read Amor Towles' interview, this is what he said.)
I recognize that I've been rather harsh on A Gentleman in Moscow, here, especially for a book that I've said contains things I liked. And I do understand why people like this book, because a mixture of dark circumstances and charming characters and an appreciation for the joy of life can be absolutely delightful. Unfortunately, I think an appreciation of charm is like a sense of humor: it's very individual and nothing will be to everyone's taste. And it will certainly help to go into this novel knowing what to expect. It turns out I should have read that interview first, as in it Amor Towles makes very clear that he's perfectly aware that he's not writing a historical fiction, but is in fact telling a story about an imaginary Moscow and the imaginary characters who might live in it:
I'll start with what I liked, because some things here were good: Amor Towles is a good writer, at least in terms of constructing lovely sentences (we'll cover narrative choices and rhetorical tricks later). He is especially talented at painting lovely pictures of lovely places. The Metropol Hotel is truly brought to life in this book. There are also a number of individual scenes that I did find charming and delightful and I felt like I could "see" very clearly in my mind's eye, because they were described in a charming and delightful and vivid manner. At its best, this book reminded me of the Wes Anderson movie "The Grand Budapest Hotel" - not because of the hotel, but because of Towles' ability to construct picture-perfect, clever, charming little scenes in the way Wes Anderson does: Nina primly eating her tower of ice cream, Andre demonstrating his talent at juggling, a tiny dinner party in a secret room, etc.
Despite these charming individual moments, there was something I found quite unsettling about this book and the more I read, the more unsettled I felt. I had gone into A Gentleman in Moscow expecting to read a work of historical fiction, a genre I quite enjoy. But as I read, I started to suspect that this wasn't really historical fiction at all. In fact, the more I read, the more this book began to remind me of A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket, just instead meant for adults.
There are quite a number of similarities. Both stories follow a cast of whimsical characters, who are placed in bizarre situations and get out of them through great displays of cleverness. Both of them are told by clever narrators who give little sly winks to the reader through clever things like footnotes and asides. Both of them attempt to balance a largely lighthearted story against a plot that is genuinely very dark. However, there is one major difference: A Series of Unfortunate Events is a book for children, set in a fictional, nearly fantastical world. Its darkness is nearly unrelenting, but it's also a fictional darkness, and it is the unrealness (the impossibility!) of the terrible things that happen in the story that allow it to be balanced out by clever children and a clever narrator. A Gentleman in Moscow, because it disguises itself as a work of historical fiction, is set in a real, genuinely terrible time of history. The horrors of Stalin's Russia are presented here as nonsensical quirks (the Bolsheviks argue over vocabulary! They take the labels off the wine!), in much the same way as the evils of Count Olaf are in A Series of Unfortunate Events. Count Rostov shakes his head at them, tsks at their lack of taste and their lack of manners, and blithely goes on living his life of drinking wine and eating delicious food in a beautiful hotel. This is not a clever balancing of lightheartedness and a dark aesthetic to me. This is fiddling while Rome burns. This is A Series of Unfortunate Events if it were set during the Holocaust.
For that reason, I was unable to be charmed by Count Rostov - he came across to me as foolish and immature. I was unable to be charmed by the clever narrator - he came across as whimsical for the sake of whimsy and far too aware of his own cleverness (another similarity: A Series of Unfortunate Events makes repeated use of the number 13 throughout the series, in numbers of chapters and numbers of books and other clever ways. Why? Because 13 is the unluckiest number. In A Gentleman in Moscow, every chapter title begins with the letter A. Why? No reason. Just to remind you that this book is meant to be whimsical! No really, I read Amor Towles' interview, this is what he said.)
I recognize that I've been rather harsh on A Gentleman in Moscow, here, especially for a book that I've said contains things I liked. And I do understand why people like this book, because a mixture of dark circumstances and charming characters and an appreciation for the joy of life can be absolutely delightful. Unfortunately, I think an appreciation of charm is like a sense of humor: it's very individual and nothing will be to everyone's taste. And it will certainly help to go into this novel knowing what to expect. It turns out I should have read that interview first, as in it Amor Towles makes very clear that he's perfectly aware that he's not writing a historical fiction, but is in fact telling a story about an imaginary Moscow and the imaginary characters who might live in it:
"Rather than pursuing research driven projects, I like to write from areas of existing fascination. Even as young man, I was a fan of the 1920s and 1930s, eagerly reading the novels, watching the movies, and listening to the music of the era. I used this deep-seated familiarity as the foundation for inventing my version of 1938 New York in Rules of Civility. Similarly, I chose to write A Gentleman in Moscow because of my longstanding fascination with Russian literature, culture, and history. Most of the texture of the novel springs from the marriage of my imagination with that interest. For both novels, once I had finished the first draft, I did some applied research in order to fine tune details."
Content Warnings
Moderate: Suicidal thoughts