That’s a lot of history for one building. The hotel is located across the street from the Kremlin and managed to survive the Bolshevik revolution and the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. It’s the kind of place where you can’t help but picture what it was like at different points in time. I’ve even been lucky enough to stay there (and it looked mostly the same as Towles describes in the book). The book follows the Count for the next thirty years as he makes the most of his life despite its limitations.Īlthough the book is fictional, the Metropol is a real hotel. It’s 1922, and the Bolsheviks have just taken power of the newly formed Soviet Union. At the beginning of the book, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is sentenced to spend his life under house arrest in Moscow’s Metropol Hotel. That one scene aside, A Gentleman in Moscow is a fun, clever, and surprisingly upbeat look at Russian history through the eyes of one man. I didn’t want to spoil anything for her, so I just had to wait until she caught up to me. When she saw me crying, she became worried that a character she loved was going to die. It’s usually a lot of fun, but it can get us in trouble when one of us is further along than the other-which recently happened when we were both reading A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles.Īt one point, I got teary-eyed because one of the characters gets hurt and must go to the hospital. Melinda and I sometimes read the same book at the same time.
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