Where I want to start is its big similarity with All The Light We Cannot See, which truly didn't hit me until I looked at this blog to begin writing this post. But as soon as I saw the cover image for All The Light, it immediately hit me that they have extremely similar protagonists. Our titular Gentleman here is Count Alexander Rostov, who has been sentenced to a life of house arrest in Moscow's glamorous Metropol Hotel. He is intelligent, witty, and observant, but limited by his physical confines. In All The Light, young Marie-Laure is equally intelligent and observant, but spends years confined to one home or another in war-torn France as a consequence of her blindness.
Each of them witness, in their own way, huge world events unfolding outside their doors while half their lives pass them by. For Count Rostov, it's the decades following the Russian Revolution, as it grows into a world power; for Marie-Laure it's World War II.
They each have two major and several minor relationships which anchor them through the story. For Marie-Laure, they biggies are her father and her uncle. For Count Rostov, they're his long-time lover and his daughter (for details, you'll have to read it).
About A Gentleman In Moscow itself, I really did enjoy it. I listened to the audio, which helped me get through a pretty hefty book in basically record time for a slow reader. I appreciated the Count's erudite observation and analysis of the incidents and people that swirl around him. I appreciated - and this is unusual for me - the sometimes overly flowery language and the unnecessary asides. They just all seemed to work in this book, with this character, in this style for me. Nevermind that outside the doors of the Metropol, Russia was in crisis; the unflappable Count Rostov carries on.
No comments:
Post a Comment