(I began to wear an ascot and affect a brittle chuckle around the house until my wife told me to cut it out.) Although Towles tells the story in the third person, there’s clearly some deep sympathy here between the protagonist and the author, who retired from a lucrative career in finance to write fiction. No matter: The man makes the home, not the other way around, and the count is convinced that “by the smallest of one’s actions one can restore some sense of order to the world.”Īdmittedly, the whole enterprise depends on how deeply you fall in love with the count. This is a character who has “opted for the life of the purposefully unrushed.” He was raised to appreciate the great conveniences of life, such as keeping “a carriage waiting at the door of one party, so that on a moment’s notice it can whisk you away to another.” Now, that extravagant life must somehow be adjusted to the tight confines of a servant’s bedroom.
The count, though, is consigned to a tiny room on the top floor, crammed with a few pieces of his fine furniture and a set of porcelain plates. It was constructed at the turn of the century and soon seized by the communists to house bureaucrats and impress foreign guests. After all, the Hotel Metropol is a grand Art Nouveau palace - an actual place, still standing. Towles observes that “the Russians were the first people to master the notion of sending a man into exile at home.” But the count’s sentence is hardly the Gulag.
0 kommentar(er)
