I'm already tempted to scrap my Nobel Prize Reading Project. Are winners chosen as a sort of endurance test for the reading public? I've purposely gone for prose writers, hoping for something gripping and epic, but the most readable authors so far have been more small-scale – I did enjoy Alice Munro and Kazuo Ishiguro (not really part of the reading project, as I read him before I started it). In contrast, I found Vargas Llosa hard to get through, gave up early on García Márquez, and now I've ploughed through Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago I can't help feeling cheated.
I mean, Doctor Zhivago is supposed to be the accessible choice, isn't it? An intense love story later filmed with Omar Sharif and Julie Christie and a star-studded cast overall? Where else would I find the epic experience I was looking for, the kind of novel teeming with colourful characters that 19th-century novelists excelled at? Sadly, my expectations were misplaced – Pasternak may have many estimable qualities, but you couldn't call him a master storyteller.
To be clear: if you go into Doctor Zhivago expecting a tale mostly about the doomed love between the titular doctor and the beautiful Lara you will, like me, be disappointed. It's irritating as many promising ingredients are there, buried beneath lots of other stuff. I expected to find Lara a drag, and I'm not her biggest fan, but in the end I found her far more bearable that Yuri Zhivago himself (more on him later). And she does live an interesting life. Sometimes I wondered if the novel wouldn't have been a better read if it had centered on her instead of on Zhivago, and on random characters loosely connected to him.
What's more, Komorovsky – who has an affair with Lara when she's a young girl and is supposedly responsible for Zhivago's father's suicide – is a promising villain. But he's not in the novel nearly as much as one would expect. After Lara is finally able to cut all strings to him, he disappears completely for a large chunk of the book only to reappear towards the end as a way of getting Lara out of harm's way, but also out of Zhivago's life. Lara's husband Pavel Antipov, hardened by war, revolution and personal experiences, is set up as an interestingly menacing Javert-like character. In the end, though, he actually gets on quite well with Zhivago and only poses a threat indirectly, in that his wife is in danger when he falls foul of the authorities.
Add to the mix Zhivago's wife Tonya, who is lovely and gives her husband no excuse to cheat on her, and you have a love quintet I would have been happy to read at least a mid-sized novel about. But the romantic part of the story is swamped under pages of side plots, or not much plot at all. We spend an inordinate amount of time with secondary (if that) characters of negligible importance to the storyline. One whole section of the book, we follow the wife of a Siberian storekeeper whom Zhivago doesn't even meet. Her son later rats on Antipov in order to save and be reunited with his mother, and that's all the relevance she has to the main story.
For the longest time, I tried to tell myself that my frustration was mostly due to my own vulgar tastes, and that for those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like. I did wonder towards the end, though, exactly who does like this sort of thing. If you're really into descriptions of nature, this novel might be for you, as there are a lot of those, sometimes evocative, sometimes with similes that feel a little strained. ("Even the sun [...] approaching as if timorously, as a cow from the herd grazing nearby would" – how is the sun like a cow?)
Also, if you have a keen interest in everyday life in Russia around the time of the revolution, there are vignettes that, though they don't contribute much story-wise, can be memorable in their own right. Sometimes the lives of the random side characters hook into each other in unexpected ways. An idealistic young commissar who thinks he can win hearts and minds with his oratory is shot when making a failed speech to bunch of rebellious soldiers. Much later, Zhivago meets a fierce partisan soldier who admits that it was he who fired the shot and that it's the one killing he regrets. I did go "Ah, nice" over that one.
If you are more lyrically minded than me, then (Pasternak was primarily a poet), and don't insist on a strong narrative, you may appreciate this novel a lot more than I did. But it wasn't for me. Two more things came in the way of me enjoying it. One was the translation, which is the most recent English one and seems to adhere to the school of thought that puts faithfulness to the original before a natural flow. Seeing the original idioms shine through has it own charm, but it soon palls. The characters speak stilted English, as if continuously expressing themselves in a second language, which means that dialogues are almost as hard to get through as the descriptive passages.
My final gripe is the title character himself. First, I thought he was just a bit bland, but later he does show personality – a pity it's not a very appealing one. Yuri Andreevich Zhivago is an insufferable prig. His nearest circle is remarkably tolerant about this; even his father-in-law, after Zhivago more or less tells him not to embarrass him in front of others with conservative talk, answers graciously and without irony: "I like the way you pose the question". Lara, naturally, thinks he's wonderfully intelligent. Zhivago grows swollen-headed so that he even when he's down on his luck silently judges his critical friends: "The only live and bright thing in you is that you lived at the same time as me and that you knew me." He keeps his thoughts to himself, though, "so as not to distress them".
I'll say this much: I really want to rewatch the film – which I saw ages ago and hardly remember – and watch the TV series now, because I'm curious how these adaptations reshaped the novel into a coherent romantic drama. "One of the greatest love stories ever told", the Daily Mail is quoted as saying on the blurb. They were talking about the film, right?
