"A Gentleman in Moscow" by Amor Towles
For the most part I really liked this novel about a "Former Person" ...an aristocrat being under house arrest in The Metropole, a famous hotel in Moscow. It did drag a bit at times but loved the ending. There is almost too much going on at times but generally pretty engaging.
The Count is a very sympathetic character and all the delightful recounting of past experiences in aristocratic life are intriguing and interesting but the reader does know how the proletariat lived before the revolution and of the very repressive antics of the Bolsheviks. The author creates the old privileged life along with the new. Still a world of privilege but for different people.
From goodreads:
In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and 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.
Brimming with humor, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates the count's endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose
