A Gentleman in Moscow: A Novel
By: Amor Towles / Narrated By: Nicholas Guy Smith
Length: 17 hrs and 52 mins
If you’re willing to spend decades in the life of a man, do expect a jolly listen! If you’re not, however…?
… do expect to be bored outta your skull…
Fortunately, I am of the former, and I do appreciate it when an author (And a narrator!) are up for streeeetching out a single life; I’m totally up for the day-to-day of a person’s life. Perhaps because I’m interested in the minute happenings of my own life, looking at the itty bitty bits as they begin to flow and meld into a single and much greater picture? A good friend recommended A Gentleman in Moscow to our writing group with the caveat that p’raps it truly comes to life as a Listen during this time of Sheltering-in-Place as much as possible. Yessss, we have the time to look, to sit, to listen, to be transported by a grown man discovering the joys of discovering the world, the people around him.
I say this cuz SEVeral reviewers didn’t get past an early part of the book where our hero finds enchantment in a young girl who becomes a friend: Seeing the story as drudgery whereby the biggest thing that happens is a sort of game of Hide ‘n’ Seek (And if they juuuuust stayed around, they would’ve been enraged when HOURS later there truly IS such a game played… tsk tsk).
The story opens with Alexander Rostov being sentenced to house arrest in his home at the grand hotel, The Metropol—this instead of being executed or sent to Siberia. It’s 1922, and tho’ granted life, this “unrepentant aristocrat”, discovers that his days will be spent, not in his suite of rooms, but in a tiny room, 100-square feet. And then time goes on… decades… and the book is about the year-to-year, each day following another, no hope of a different life as one foot stepped out will mean execution on the spot.
I LOVED the people in his life, as they’re met, as they’re embraced, or as they’re foiled (And we have a grand antagonist of The Party who compiles a huuuuuge file of Rostov’s various offenses and misdeeds, the slights he’s given, the liberties he’s taken). I loved how the young become older, how the old become feebler, how some fade in and out of his life, just as those we’ve loved in our own life sparkle then dim. Life is full then empty, empty enough to consider ending the futility of it all, but then gosh darn it all if it doesn’t morph into something fuller, something filled with gifts and/or monkey wrenches thrown in; love can take you by surprise.
Add to this the fact that it’s Nicholas Guy Smith doing the narration honors here, and I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve ever listened to him narrate. He turns in a fine performance, and lemme tell ya that this audiobook has a PLEthora of characters coming and going, entering Sasha’s life, exiting, growing large then maybe melting into the darkness, the nothingness that comes with the passing of time. Different temperaments are handled, different genders, and the characters themselves grow over time. An actress may be haughty, might become enraged and spiteful, but as the years build on themselves, as opportunities grow and dwindle in a Communist society, maybe that actress learns and becomes a softer version of herself, a wiser one, a more grateful one… all this Guy Smith does with ease, so that I never felt anything less than immersed in the story, engaged in what is kinda sorta a long haul of a life.
My only reservations are that this is not a hard-hitting look at life under Stalin—which I hear tell was what one could call hoRRIfic! Nope, life in The Metropol is touched only by ingredients being hard to come by in its best restaurant, only by the clientele changing over time. Journalists are lulled into sharing the good stories, into believing what they’re told, so there’s never any real unrest. It’s only when we discover, with a brief and solemn Addendum, what happens to Rostov’s young friend Nina, her fate, that we catch the essence of living, and dying, by beliefs, of seeing what happens when one is caught on the wrong side, of asking the wrong questions.
All that aside, this was a lovely and leisurely way to spend almost 18 hours, and author Towles managed to make things sweet without being tooooo sentimental. He managed to craft enough characters living and breathing form into Rostov’s life that I was engaged. And Rostov managed to do enough questionable things that I was SURE would send him to Siberia or would land him in a heap, a bullet to his head, that I experienced the occasional held breath, or gripped the edge of my seat for a bit.
This is a life, that’s all. Almost 18 hours of a life that stagnates or grows, ebbing and flowing. It’s nothing.
Until it is…
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