Humans deserve our reconsideration

 

I'm enjoying Amor Towles' A Gentleman in Moscow.  I'm reading it in 25-page evening chunks this December.  The writing is lively, descriptive, surprising.  The narrative structure keeps you leaping around through lots of flashback stories, some that are returned to repeatedly, and quick leaps in time forward.  All of these things allow him to expand the narrative frame of "man must live in Moscow hotel and not leave."  I sense a lot of Fitzgerald's influence.  There's a "the orchestra has arrived" scene when describing the kitchen which steals FSF's sudden switch to present tense.  Somewhere I recently read that he loves 100 Years of Solitude, Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, and Swann's Way.

Is the Count, the main character, changing at all?  He is "the gentleman" who embodies the old ways, the honorable and sophisticated ways, as Russia becomes the Soviet Union.  Because of this lack of change, the book feels like a picarequse novel... a collection of short stories about this character.  

If there's a motif, it's about "withholding judgment" of people. (another connection to Gatsby/Nick Carraway)

121? And with that disarming memory, Anna Urbanova was suddenly describing how as a girl she would steal away from her mother at dusk and wind her way down the sloping streets of her village so that she could meet her father on the beach and help him mend his nets. And as she talked, the Count had to acknowledge once again the virtues of with holding judgment.

After all, what can a first impression tell us about someone we've just met for a minute in the lobby of a hotel? For that matter, what can a first impression tell us about anyone? Why, no more than a chord can tell us about Beethoven, or a brushstroke about Botticelli. By their very nature. human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory. that they deserve not only our consideration, but out reconsideration-and out unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour. 

[I just read up to page 200...where we find out that the stories that Anna has told the Count were made up.  The Count is upset by this, almost leaves the warm bed of Anna when he finds out.]

Being open to reconsideration is maybe another way of saying that you have "underestimated" someone.  ("Under" if only in the sense of "not fully" -- that there's always another sense.)

127  Then she leaned back in her chair and appraised the Count in a manner acknowledging that she may have underestimated him.

[Now in the book (190), the Count is worried that this character [Nina] has lost some of her specialness that she had a few years before when he first met her, or was at least 'wasting it' on her focus on communist things.  (She was every bit herself, he claims to the seamstress, "Still full of curiosity, and passion, and self-assurance.' "And yet.." he says... she seems to have become humorless."]