The 2025 Winter Reading Challenge has a category “Recommended to You,” which is a bit of a problematic category for me as I don’t have a wide circle of friends, most of the people I know don’t read books, and even people I know do read books, they tend to be of a different variety than I read. For example, my mother-in-law reads a lot of contemporary, modern, and a little messagish literary fiction, and my beautiful wife reads practical for her professional aspiration books like books on sales, technologies, and self-affirmatory books the types of which I buy from time to time but don’t tend to read (which leads to some hijinks at Nogglestead–a couple years back, she gave me a book about networking called Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty, which I said I’d heard of–which I had, as she picked a book from my to-read shelves to give to me as a gag, and no one told me till later). So when Jack Baruth mentioned this book on his Substack, I ordered a copy. I also ordered a copy for my mother-in-law for her birthday as buying a copy for her and for me is a fig leaf for when I want to buy a book which she might also find interesting–I say I’m buying it so we can both read it. To my knowledge, this is the first of such books that I’ve actually read–and she has been a little more dilligent about it than I.
At any rate, this book starts not long after the Soviet revolution in Russia. A gentleman, Count Alexander Rostov, is found to be a problem to the Soviets. However, as he purportedly wrote a pro-revolutionary poem some years before, instead of execution, he is given a modified Minus Six punishment–Minus Six being internal banishment in the USSR where the banishee could not live in the six largest cities and had to eke out an existence somewhere else. Count Rostov, instead, is confined to a grand hotel in Moscow which he cannot leave under the punishment of death. And he’s no longer allowed to stay in the elaborate suite he’d occupied–he’s banished to a small room upstairs.
The book starts pretty linearly with the banishment and the immediate aftermath, but soon starts skipping to incidents and plotlines spanning decades. The Count befriends the young daughter of a party official staying at the hotel, but she grows and becomes a young party participant herself. Eventually, she leaves but returns with a daughter that she wants the Count to watch for a couple of weeks which turns into years so that the Count calls the girl his daughter.
Through the decades, the Count learns to change with the times a bit and to handle the changes in life as he ages and as the Soviet Union and the Party evolves around him (I admit having some preparation for some of it having read some Dostoyevksy and Tolstoi and watching The Death of Stalin last year). There are subplots and threads running through it, including the Count’s relationship with an aging movie actress; a Party-favored fellow rising in the hotel management; and so on, but some of them feel as though they would be resolved or would change in the gaps in the narrative, but here they are, five years later, not much changed.
The writing is a bit florid and sensous in spots, especially when talking about food, and when you get down to it, characters aside from the Count are a bit cipherish, but it’s not a bad read. At 462 pages, it has proven to be the longest of the books I’ve read for the Winter Reading Challenge thus far, but it was a pretty quick read and fairly easy to break away from to fit in another bit of a shorter book during the reading thereof.
Definite life lessons to be learned from it: Changing/adapting with the times so that you’re not merely buffeted by them is the biggest one and to make the most of your surroundings even when they’re limited. Something I surely need to learn over and over again.
I picked this DVD up 
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