Michael Barnes
A gentleman in Moscow was a bookclub book for me so a pleasant choice since it was one I would be unlikely to choose first because it's male author (as a friend I much admire once said "..life is too short to read male authors") and because due to its setting and period I feared it would follow the trend of portraying the Soviet Union in the usual and erroneous western rubric especially since the narrator is Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal. This nuance in soviet character especially revealed when the young woman the Count cares for in injured and he takes her outside the bounds of the hotel to hospital. I was therefore pleasantly surprised by the more genial tone as in keeping with the Count's attitude of optimism that sees him survive and thrive in his constrained world which is Shakespear spoke "O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space".
A gentleman in Moscow was a bookclub book for me so a pleasant choice since it was one I would be unlikely to choose first because it's male author (as a friend I much admire once said "..life is too short to read male authors") and because due to its setting and period I feared it would follow the trend of portraying the Soviet Union in the usual and erroneous western rubric especially since the narrator is Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal. This nuance in soviet character especially revealed when the young woman the Count cares for in injured and he takes her outside the bounds of the hotel to hospital. I was therefore pleasantly surprised by the more genial tone as in keeping with the Count's attitude of optimism that sees him survive and thrive in his constrained world which is Shakespear spoke "O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space".