Amor Towles: A Gentleman in Moscow

A joyful and joyous book.it starts as if it’s going to be a very small-scale intimate drama about the titular character, an ‘unrepentant aristocrat’ in internal exile in a grand Moscow hotel just after the war who becomes a part of the fixtures and fittings but who nevertheless is astonishingly optimistic and resilient despite his life being turned utterly upside down...and this happens more than once in the surprisingly lengthy telling of his story...lengthy that is in the number of years (30+). His character is one that manages to see the best in everyone without being naive..and at the end with his ‘daughters’ escape, he shows himself to have some remarkable tough qualities.

Is written very elegantly and the lengthy historical sweep of the novel is very well sustained. It intriguingly manages to be both an intimate story of one person in one place AND a panoramic overview of much of 20th Century Russian history...but only as it impinged on this one individual. A clever combination and it was not until I had got about a third into the book that this bigger scope became apparent. At the start I very much had the sense that it was going to be something of an individualistic miniature of a work in a miniature though to a degree microcosmic, world.

Lovely happy poignant read and much recommended. Thanks Ian Whybrow