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Review a gentleman in moscow5/13/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The Count hits a low point, and I love the scene that switches his thinking. It was such a poignant moment, made all the more so by the fact that Towles didn’t explain, “He missed the outdoors and the smell of winter and wood smoke.” He left the scene as is for the reader to infer why the Count lingered, holding the coat sleeve. The coat room girl finds him a few minutes later, holding the sleeve of the coat. He also notices the smell of wood smoke on the coat someone has just left behind. Searching for its origin, the Count finds himself in the coat room, where someone has just come in in from outside. In one of the best pieces of “showing, not telling” I’ve seen, the Count has been inside for about a year when he feels a blast of cold air in a hallway. But confinement is confinement, and it strains the count at times. There are worse places to be confined than a Grand Hotel. He was moved from his suite to an attic storage room and told that if he stepped out of the hotel, he would be shot.īelieving that “if a man does not master his circumstances then he is bound to be mastered by them,” the Count determines to make the best of his. Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov lived there in 1922, when he was convicted as an unrepentant aristocrat, declared a Former Person, and sentenced to house arrest. Amor Towles novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, takes place almost entirely within the walls of the grand Metropol Hotel in Moscow. ![]()
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