Virtues of the Novel

It's no secret that I'm a non-fiction girl. Memoir, specifically. I get annoyed by good, fascinating novels when I think about the fact that it's all made up and didn't actually happen. For me, it's much more satisfying to read about something that actually happened. More than that, something written by the person it happened to (as opposed to a biographer or historian). There's just no comparison to real life, and the fascinating, heartbreaking, and triumphant situations we get ourselves into.

That being said, in my regular line-up of exclusively memoirs, I usually read one novel per year. To change it up, really, and because there's usually some novel that enough people have recommended that I feel like I ought to read. This year's novel is A Gentleman in Moscow, which I swear I've been hearing about for years. It's been on my radar, and when my sweet Mom recently gifted me a copy, I felt I couldn't put it off any longer.

Here's the thing with novels that I always forget because I read them so infrequently. THEY ARE SO DECRIPTIVE. It's like a whole different world of lush language and description. This one in particular is filled to the brim (500 pages is VERY long for me) with descriptions of every single detail of the hotel where the story takes place. I forgot how all this description creates visuals of the setting and story in your mind, really without you even trying or actively envisioning it. It just happens. This is something you don't often get with memoir, in that much of the book is the author's thoughts, and the stories are much more succinct and measured. There simply isn't the opportunity to picture an entirely new setting in your mind and feel completely transported each time you open the book.

I still prefer memoir, and I probably always will, but there's certainly a place for the well-written, all-encompassing novel, and this one is a true gem.