Description
A transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel. When, in 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the Count is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel's doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.
And it's funny because it's true.
Well, some parts of the novel are true, like the complex and fond relationships between characters. I smiled when the Count lifted his daughter's piano instructor off the bench by his coat lapels because he misunderstood the nature of their liaison. It's also true that this reader prefers to envision members of the aristocracy as erudite gentlemen of purpose living into the promise of noblesse oblige toward the "rest of us." The Count's gracious manner toward other hotel guests, especially children, is heartwarming and makes me believe for a second that aristocracy is the preferred situation in life.