“The first was that if one did not master one’s circumstances, one was bound to be mastered by them and the second was Montaigne’s maxim that the surest sign of wisdom is constant cheerfulness. “The Count had restricted himself to two succinct pieces of parental advice,” Towles tells us. His omniscient narrator is only a few tones away from the count’s own voice - dusted with wit and given to statements of feigned melodrama, such as, “Surely, the span of time between the placing of an order and the arrival of appetizers is one of the most perilous in all of human interaction.” It’s that crisp, light humor that keeps the count from sounding preachy even as he assumes a kind of quiet authority in an ugly world.

(I began to wear an ascot and affect a brittle chuckle around the house until my wife told me to cut it out.) Although Towles tells the story in the third person, there’s clearly some deep sympathy here between the protagonist and the author, who retired from a lucrative career in finance to write fiction. No matter: The man makes the home, not the other way around, and the count is convinced that “by the smallest of one’s actions one can restore some sense of order to the world.”Īdmittedly, the whole enterprise depends on how deeply you fall in love with the count. This is a character who has “opted for the life of the purposefully unrushed.” He was raised to appreciate the great conveniences of life, such as keeping “a carriage waiting at the door of one party, so that on a moment’s notice it can whisk you away to another.” Now, that extravagant life must somehow be adjusted to the tight confines of a servant’s bedroom.

The count, though, is consigned to a tiny room on the top floor, crammed with a few pieces of his fine furniture and a set of porcelain plates. It was constructed at the turn of the century and soon seized by the communists to house bureaucrats and impress foreign guests. '.a gentleman should turn to a mirror with a sense of distrust. Stripped wine labels He could have written, He fell asleep counting troubles instead of sheep. After all, the Hotel Metropol is a grand Art Nouveau palace - an actual place, still standing. A Gentleman in Moscow: A Novel by Amor Towles How customer reviews and ratings work Top positive review All positive reviews Zeester perfect antagonist. Towles observes that “the Russians were the first people to master the notion of sending a man into exile at home.” But the count’s sentence is hardly the Gulag.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles