A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

I re-read A Gentleman in Moscow with the Zillenial book club at the Mercantile Library here in Cincinnati. After discussing the book, the group went to the Metropole (with an “e”) hotel bar a couple streets north, well chosen what with the entire book set in the Metropol (no “e”) hotel in Moscow. I couldn’t make it to the Metropole, sadly, but I walked by a week later and started thinking about the book again, which lead me here to record some notes.

The writing is pretty indulgent, but he pulls it off, and I didn’t mind indulging. It’s something of a hack to make your protagonist a pretentious aristocrat so that you the author have full license to be as witty and wordy as you want. It’s been a while since I read Rules of Civility and The Lincoln Highway, and I can’t remember how many SAT words were in those. There were several comments on the book/author/protagonist’s pretentiousness in our book club. Many people were put off by his showmanship with obscure words and too-clever turns of phrase. Fair enough. There were many words I couldn’t define or flat out knew not, but I resisted the urge to pull out the dictionary and instead took my contextual guesses and kept reading. And btw, during the discussion I kept wondering whether the noun form of pretentious is pretentiousness or pretention. It turns out pretension is a word but is not a synonym for pretentiousness, unlike aggression and aggressiveness.