Quickly, though, we discern the count’s heart - an energetic Russian blend of Elliott Templeton, Don Quixote, Cyrano de Bergerac and the ebullient Ebenezer Scrooge, post-enlightenment - and we care like crazy. In elaborate, fluting prose, Towles shapes before our eyes one Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, an entitled dandy replete with waxed mustache and habits of moneyed leisure - concerts, museums, admiring “young ladies of fashion,” savoring “cakes topped in frostings as varied in color as the tulips of Amsterdam.” “Gentleman’s” opening pages reveal a map of Moscow in 1922, homing in on Theatre Square, site of the (very real) Metropol Hotel, the lovingly detailed setting for Towles’ epic story: that of a kind, shrewd, generous Russian aristocrat who’s sentenced (for writing a subversive poem) by the newly triumphant Bolsheviks to live the rest of his life in a cramped attic of the Metropol. “A Gentleman of Moscow” likewise charts a particular life’s arc, but in the context of a much bigger history. Towles’ debut novel, “The Rules of Civility” (2011), made a notable splash it tracked a young woman’s strivings in 1930s Manhattan.
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