I liked it at the beginning, but I've been on a Russian history and culture kick this year, and as the book went on the implausibility of the plot and the sense of entitlement of the main character became more and more annoying. Stop here if you don't want spoilers.
I can buy the main premise - aristocratic Russian is tried by the new-in-power Communists but instead of being executed - and the Bolsheviks killed just about every member of the old regime they could get their hands on - his sentenced to "house arrest" for life in the most luxurious hotel in Moscow. just because he wrote poem that said nice things about a proletariat revolution, or something. OK, I'll go along with that for the purpose of setting up the story and maybe getting some conflict into it, but as the novel goes on our hero seems unaffected by what's going on in his country beyond his hotel lobby. Lots of philosophizing and descriptions of luxurious dinners cover the time until the mid 1930s - then the book skips to the late 1940s. I guess the privations, sufferings, and sacrifices of the Great Patriotic War were just something our hero didn't want to sully his beautiful aristocratic mind with. The author manages to make the plot even more preposterous, IMHO, after that. The prose itself isn't bad (although every chapter title starts with "A"
, and if it had been half the length and set anywhere else other than in a dictatorship during a period of unrest and shortages it could have been a decent if not great book.
If you want to try it, I recommend the audio book: at least the narrator has a nice voice.
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