Back when he worked in finance, Amor Towles traveled a good deal, staying in some of the best hotels in the world’s great cities. Once, in Geneva, upon realizing that he saw the same faces there year after year, he thought to himself, “This is a nice hotel, but can you imagine having to live here your whole life?’’
“That evening I began sketching out an outline,’’ said Towles. “My instinct was that the character should have to live there by force, not by preference. Russia was the perfect setting,’’ he added, since house arrest was a fairly common punishment in the first few decades of the Soviet era.
In Towles’s novel, “A Gentleman in Russia,’’ the titular gentleman is Count Alexander Rostov, “an unrepentant aristocrat’’ who has just begun his forced, 30-plus year stay at Moscow’s elegant Hotel Metropol. Constructed at the turn of the 20th century along the same lines and for the same wealthy travelers as the Ritz in Paris or the Waldorf in New York, the Metropol “became sort of the Oz in the imaginations of Russians,’’ Towles said. “Everybody knew it was an oasis in which these fantastic things could happen. Anybody of significance who came to Moscow either drank, ate, or slept at the Metropol. Champagne poured freely.’’
For Towles, setting his entire novel within the confines of this one building was an artistic challenge. He hoped to use the hotel both “as a lens to study the life of an individual and to capture the changing aspects of Russian society by virtue of who’s coming through the door.’’ At the same time, he added, “it clearly presents a certain challenge: I’m asking you, the reader, to go in the building and not come out over that period of time.’’
Still, he admitted, “If you’re going to be confined anywhere for 30 years, a grand hotel is about as good as it gets.’’
Towles will read at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard St, Brookline, and also at 7 p.m. Thursday at Wellesley Books, 82 Central St., Wellesley.
Kate Tuttle, a writer and editor, can be reached at kate.tuttle@gmail.com.
