Towles somehow strikes a balance between not much happening at all, and shifting the story forward. And then comes the ending – a masterstroke by Towles. In A Gentleman we have the (charming) minutiae of Count Alexander Rostov’s life in the Metropol – there’s a brouhaha with geese, games on the stairs, reading to be done, a weekly appointment at the barber’s, food to be enjoyed and brandy to be drunk – the lens is very tightly focused, and the book is as much about what we don’t see (tumultuous change in Russia) as it is about Count Rostov’s musings about his daily fruit selection. Sure, The Hills is about twenty-somethings living in LA, and A Gentleman is about a Russian Count, sentenced in 1922 to house arrest in a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. If you’ve read A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles and watched all of The Hills (I might be the only person who fits this category) you will totally understand the similarity. And then the last episode happened – had the producers been playing the audience the whole time?! …but when I watched six seasons of The Hills (yes, that ‘reality’ show with LC and Heidi and Spencer), I was engrossed in the detail – the parties, the holidays, the break-ups and make-ups, Justin Bobby, the workplace dramas. I accept that some bloggers, whose reading tastes lean toward the more literary end of things, will unfollow me for what I’m about to say…
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