A Gentleman in Moscow

I finally had the time to read A Gentleman in Moscow...a book that I had been anxiously awaiting to get to since last summer.  It did not disappoint.  I thought it was an amazing book and I am predicting that it will end up in my top five books for 2018.  We'll see.  I would love to read other books as good!

This novel is not a fast-paced story, nor is it an action-packed story.  It is a quiet story about an elegant man, living a quiet life.  But there is so much to it!

This is counter-intuitive (at least for me), but for such a long book, this is going to be a very short review.  For one thing, I don't feel like I could begin to do it justice, and for another, I don't want to give anything away!

Count Alexander Rostov was sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life at the Metropol Hotel in Moscow in 1922.  He was accused of writing a poem a few years earlier that was considered to be a "call to action". The Count had lived in the hotel for the past four years in an elegant suite, so that didn't seem to be too bad of a sentence.  Until he arrived at the hotel and learned that he would no longer be living in the suite, but was moved to the attic of the hotel where servants had lived years earlier.  He was taken to his new room, which had been used as a storeroom for the past few years.  Here he was to live out his life in a tiny room, never to leave the hotel again under threat of being shot to death.

One of my favorite lines in the book was the Count stating in his court hearing when he was accused of being a man without any purpose:

"I have lived under the impression that a man's purpose is known only to God."

Great line, great writing.

So this is a story of a man sentenced to live in a hotel for the rest of his life in Moscow during incredibly turbulent times in Russia.  How he manages to have a meaningful life there is the story. An amazing book.  I loved it.