Book review: Finding life within the trappings of a hotel

Between the election of Donald Trump as President Barack Obama’s replacement in the US, and our own government taking away all our money while telling us that our money remains our own, you can’t deny that November 2016 was the most depressing month since, well, May 2014.

Like millions of others in the country, I spent days standing in line outside my bank, eventually receiving a pittance so minuscule that I needed a microscope to see it clearly. And the only printable thing that went through my mind while my middle-aged ankles swelled and all my vertebrae fused together from that non-stop standing, was utter amazement that a right-wing government could pull off what even Stalin’s Communist state could not: 1.24999999 billion out of 1.25 billion people truly equal in terms of cash in hand.

Since I suddenly found myself in a Communist state, naturally I had to read about what it’s like. And while I did contemplate several deeply depressing Russian authors of the 1950s and ’60s, I stumbled upon a new book on the subject that was so utterly delightful that I actually smiled my way through several queues that would ordinarily have had me swearing and cursing. Often, I even laughed.

Since I am a self-confessed book evangelist, the kind of person who thrusts books she loves into the hands of innocent bystanders with strict instructions to read them immediately, I am now about to tell you all about A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, a book I insist you read.

This is the story of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, a gentleman to end all gentlemen, who returned to Russia from Paris just after the Lenin-led revolution, because he loved his country no matter what. Condemned in 1922 to be a Former Person by a Bolshevik court, the count is placed under permanent house arrest at Moscow’s Metropole Hotel, where he’s been staying since his return, but he must move out of his sumptuous suite — the one furnished with pieces from his estate — into a tiny attic, with just a few of his possessions. There he must stay till he dies — one step out of the hotel, and he’ll be shot at sight.

Stuck in the hotel, the count doesn’t know what to do with himself for some months. He’s never been so aware of time before in his life: there’s such a lot of it around, and nothing to fill it with. From among his many possessions, he’s kept one book — the essays of Montaigne, which he’d always been planning to read but never got around to. But as much as he tries to read it, swearing that he will not look at the clock till at least half an hour has passed, alas, within minutes, he’s being terrorised by time again.

Slowly, however, he begins making friends at the hotel, starting with a very pushy little girl named Nina who’s staying there while her senior party worker father is busy elsewhere. Nina has a child’s eye view of the hotel, and shows the count all the bits of it he’d never even imagined existed when he’d stayed there as a guest. Wandering the inner and outer corridors of the hotel, the count meets huge numbers of employees, guests at the hotel, and even has the occasional visitor. And as the years pass, he contemplates suicide, but is saved by bees, falls in love with an actress who is amazed when she realises she loves him back, becomes a head waiter, trains a Red Army colonel in the art of being a gentleman (for espionage purposes), subtly fights back against the new rules constantly being imposed on the hotel by a waiter-turned-manager with no clue about hospitality and friends in high places, becomes the guardian of a little girl named Sophia (Nina’s daughter), discovers he’s become set in his ways (so very ungentlemanly), unsets his ways and carries on… over 30 years and more, he lives. Lives well and happily, all within the confines of Moscow’s only luxury hotel.

But until Sophia arrives, the count has no purpose in his life. And when the little girl grows up to be an amazing musician, the count understands that the purpose of his life must now change, to give the girl freedom. And so the story winds to its end… and perhaps another beginning?

I cannot explain how enchanting this book is. It made me smile for days. It also made me laugh, catch my breath, gasp, get a lump in my throat, choke a bit, and smile again — it truly made me happy.

It’s also a beautifully written book, with a perfect sense of place, trapping you in the hotel just as the Bolsheviks trapped the count, only just like the count, you don’t feel trapped. Instead you feel unbelievably alive.

But as much as I love A Gentleman in Moscow, I have to admit there are some flaws. The tone and pace are occasionally uneven, so that at times you understand completely what the count felt about his essays of Montaigne. And the book might have been absolutely stunning if it had been just a little shorter.

Fortunately, given the joy of the book as a whole, you’ll find, as I did, that the only reason you wish you hadn’t read the book was so you could read it again for the first time.

Kushalrani Gulab is a freelance editor and writer who dreams of being a sanyasi by the sea.