AMOR TOWLES – A Gentleman in Moscow.  Viking, hardcover, 2016. Penguin Books, softcover, 2019.

   I just spent two pleasant weeks in the company of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, and feel duty-bound to recommend in the most glowing possible terms that the readers out there avail themselves of his companionship. He can be found at the Metropol Hotel, in (where else?) Moscow, anytime between 1922 and 1956.

   The count is thus so readily and consistently available owing to the fact that in the first chapter he is tried by the Emergency Committee of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (This is in 1922, when the Revolution was still fresh) and sentenced to Life under House Arrest. Since he’s been living at Moscow’s luxurious Hotel Metropol, that would seem none too bad, but he’s unceremoniously moved from his regal suite to a tiny room in the belfry, barely large enough to stand upright and move around in, which will be home base in his hotel-world for the next thirty years. Nothing daunted, Rostov sets about turning his gilded cage into a vantage point from which to see and savor Life.

   The novel that ensues from this premise is four-hundred-and-some-pages of pure pleasure, mostly because Towles writes like a man who enjoys writing, and conveys that joy with vivid descriptions of food, drink, rare warm days, starry Moscow nights, beautiful women, good movies (He even picks out a moment in Casablanca I never noticed!) good deeds done by important people, and great things done by good people.

   Don’t get the notion, though, that this is Rebecca of Metropol Hotel.   Towles takes us through the idealism and chaos of the Bolsheviks, to Stalin’s genocidal reign, Hitler’s invasion, and the ascent of Khrushchev. And he conveys the lethal idiocy of bureaucracy to chilling effect, as some of those nearest to Rostov find their life’s work — and their lives — tossed aside by the arrogance of the genuinely stupid.

   A Gentleman in Moscow is a complex and richly varied work, even one that requires some effort from the reader. But it rewards the effort with characters who come alive on the page, and with a tale you won’t forget.