A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

I really loved this book. 

Funny, I was talking to two friends of mine about it, and both said that they had started it but not deemed it worthy of finishing. One of them even expressed something that was near the borderline of contempt and / or disgust. I wanted to ask why, but some people get a little pissy when you try to probe their reasoning, and I didn't have the energy to navigate those white waters at that moment. 

Also, I was afraid that knowing more about why she didn't like the book might shave a little of my affection for her away, and I didn't want to risk that.

Not that my friends have to like what I like. Within reason. But this book is just so good, so full of wisdom and wit and charm, that it baffles me as to how someone could start it and not finish it. How someone could fail to be entranced by the story of Count Rostov.

Of course, it does hit on several of my own preoccupations. The smallness of Count Rostov's quarters, for instance, coincides with my fascination for anchorites and prisoners and monks. And two of those are virtually life-long preoccupations. And the focus on the meaning or lack thereof of material things. And the sense of the unreality of the Real World. And fascination with literature, and that which preoccupies literature. Like bread. And salt. Yes. But what most entranced me about this book was Amor Towles style. He is an old school kind of writer. He lets you know he is there, and you are glad of his presence. He is charming and respectful. A bit like Dickens, but (sorry, Charles) classier. There is an elegance which pervades this novel.

Unfortunately, it looks like Mr. Towles has only published one other book--The Rules of Civility--so I'll have caught up to him within a month or so. Because I am most certainly going to read that book next.

In the meanwhile, here are a few of my favorite things from A Gentleman in Moscow, offered up in the hope that they will tempt you into reading this lovely novel. 

I posted some of them on Facebook, hence the backgrounds. Actually, I might have posted all of them on Facebook, but it only allows you to do backgrounds on the shorter ones.

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"...eventually, we come to hold our dearest possessions more closely than we hold our friends. We carry them from place to place, often at considerable expense and inconvenience; we dust and polish their surfaces and reprimand children for playing too roughly in their vicinity - all the while, allowing memories to invest them with greater and greater importance. This armoire, we are prone to recall, is the very one in which we hid as a boy; and it was these silver candelabra that lined our table on Christmas Eve; and it was with this handkerchief that she once dried her tears, et cetera, et cetera. Until we imagine that these carefully preserved possessions might give us genuine solace in the face of a lost companion.

But, of course, a thing is just a thing."

"It is a fact of human life that one must eventually choose a philosophy. ...Whether through careful consideration spawned by books and spirited debate over coffee at two in the morning, or simply from a natural proclivity, we must all eventually adopt a fundamental framework, some reasonably coherent system of causes and effects that will help us make sense not simply of momentous events, but of all the little actions and interactions that constitute our daily lives - be they deliberate or spontaneous, inevitable or unforeseen."

"Alexander Rostov was neither scientist nor sage; but at the age of sixty-four he was wise enough to know that life does not proceed by leaps and bounds. It unfolds. At any given moment, it is the manifestation of a thousand transitions. Our faculties wax and wane, our experiences accumulate, and our opinions evolve - if not glacially, then at least gradually. Such that the events of an average day are as likely to transform who we are as a pinch of pepper is to transform a stew."

"...our lives are steered by uncertainties, many of which are disruptive or even daunting; but...if we persevere and remain generous of heart, we may be granted a moment of supreme lucidity --a moment in which all that has happened to us suddenly comes into focus as a necessary course of events, even as we find ourselves on the threshold of a bold new life that we had been meant to lead all along."

How is that for some beautiful writing?

I am sorry to have come to the end of this book, for sure. One consolation, though: I picked up The Rules of Civility when I returned A Gentleman in Moscow today. Another consolation: there's going to be a tv adaptation. And ♡Kenneth Branagh♡ is playing Count Rostov. Mmm mmm good.