I picked this up because it was on everyone’s to-read lists.  I thought it was probably about Cold War spies, maybe something along the lines of John le Carré. This is not a book about Cold War spies. This is the story of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, who has been sentenced to house arrest in the Hotel Metropole, where he is in fact already a resident, for writing a poem. (It could have been worse–it could have been a bullet to the head.) Rostov is […]