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3.7 AVERAGE
3.7 AVERAGE
Her favorite color was purple, violet, the color of especially solemn church vestments, the color of unopened lilacs, the color of her best velvet dress, the color of her wineglasses. The color of happiness, the color of memories, the color of the long-vanished maidenhood of pre-revolutionary Russia also seemed to her to be lilac.
Review first published on February 24th 2021 on my Bookstagram.
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak was the first book I read in 2021, but my journey with this book wasn't without struggle...
✨ Well, there's not much to say about Doctor Zhivago other than that it's probably one of the most underrated epics in Russian Literature. Pasternak wrote a beautiful account of life in Russia in the years leading up to and after the October Revolution. The tale primarily follows the life of Yury Zhivago from boyhood into embittered adulthood, but, as with the other Russian epics, we are entreated to glimpses of the many characters who will in one form or another have a lasting impact on Yury. It's genuinely a beautiful tale, but also a heavy read. Boris Pasternak has such a wonderful, albeit sometimes complicated, prose -and this is where the struggle comes in (and why I have two copies).
✨I originally bought the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation which is a more modern and very literal translation of Pasternak's original work. However since P&V take such a literal approach,⠀the prose is convoluted and incredibly difficult to follow, I spent too much time rereading sentences just to understand what was being said. I was about 100 pages in before I decided to buy the Max Hayward and Manya Harari edition. Not only is theirs the original and most popular translation pre-2010, but it read a lot easier. The downside is, their version didn't have the footnotes that provided insight into all of the socio-political and cultural references Pasternak included in the book.
I give this book 5/5
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak was the first book I read in 2021, but my journey with this book wasn't without struggle...
✨ Well, there's not much to say about Doctor Zhivago other than that it's probably one of the most underrated epics in Russian Literature. Pasternak wrote a beautiful account of life in Russia in the years leading up to and after the October Revolution. The tale primarily follows the life of Yury Zhivago from boyhood into embittered adulthood, but, as with the other Russian epics, we are entreated to glimpses of the many characters who will in one form or another have a lasting impact on Yury. It's genuinely a beautiful tale, but also a heavy read. Boris Pasternak has such a wonderful, albeit sometimes complicated, prose -and this is where the struggle comes in (and why I have two copies).
✨I originally bought the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation which is a more modern and very literal translation of Pasternak's original work. However since P&V take such a literal approach,⠀the prose is convoluted and incredibly difficult to follow, I spent too much time rereading sentences just to understand what was being said. I was about 100 pages in before I decided to buy the Max Hayward and Manya Harari edition. Not only is theirs the original and most popular translation pre-2010, but it read a lot easier. The downside is, their version didn't have the footnotes that provided insight into all of the socio-political and cultural references Pasternak included in the book.
I give this book 5/5
This book didn't live up to my expectations. I was really looking forward to a spectacular love story, and I really didn't find that at all. For starters it takes forever to get going, there are moments where the story moves with a bit of pace, but for the majority I felt that it dragged. This was probably because I am not a huge fan of extended description, and Pasternak loves to do that. But the love story didn't even really start until about 300 pages into the book, and even then, I didn't feel the passion that many others have raved about. I struggled through and finished it, but I wouldn't pick it up again unfortunately.
Beautiful, sweeping, haunting and terribly sad, Pasternak’s tragic story of star-crossed love effectively covers his country’s turbulent transition from czarist Russia to the merciless USSR. Far more than a simple tale of lost love, it is a paean to the land he loves, a romance of both town and countryside, embracing the deep-scented forests in equal measure to the rushing dirty cities, the rumor-ridden towns alternatively enriched and then brutally effaced by war, and the trains - by turns racing and choked into stillness - which interlace the landscape, carrying and impeding hopes and dreams.
Hopelessness is as pervasive as beauty, and poetry lingers like a specter over all. This is not a novel to appeal to all sensibilities. Stark realism oscillates with mystical musings, extended philosophical arguments appear faintly ridiculous when exchanged for the grunts and murmurs of nauseous peasants hiding from the authorities under houses. Forget about happy endings. But the language is beautiful, the descriptions of the natural environment often attain to the sublime, and the story emerges intact, even through the vicissitudes of time and translation.
This isn’t a book that should be forced on high school students. Don’t read it under pressure, or for an assignment. It is meant to be savored, not read in a hurry. The pacing is stately, almost ritualistic, like a poem, and lends itself well to short reading spells. Take your time and breathe. You might catch the tang of new-fallen snow over a rowan tree in a silent forest, the howl of a lone wolf outside of an abandoned house, or train exhaust floating over the smoke of a thousand chimneys. Heave a sigh, sip some tea (strong-brewed Russian Caravan), and then continue.
Hopelessness is as pervasive as beauty, and poetry lingers like a specter over all. This is not a novel to appeal to all sensibilities. Stark realism oscillates with mystical musings, extended philosophical arguments appear faintly ridiculous when exchanged for the grunts and murmurs of nauseous peasants hiding from the authorities under houses. Forget about happy endings. But the language is beautiful, the descriptions of the natural environment often attain to the sublime, and the story emerges intact, even through the vicissitudes of time and translation.
This isn’t a book that should be forced on high school students. Don’t read it under pressure, or for an assignment. It is meant to be savored, not read in a hurry. The pacing is stately, almost ritualistic, like a poem, and lends itself well to short reading spells. Take your time and breathe. You might catch the tang of new-fallen snow over a rowan tree in a silent forest, the howl of a lone wolf outside of an abandoned house, or train exhaust floating over the smoke of a thousand chimneys. Heave a sigh, sip some tea (strong-brewed Russian Caravan), and then continue.
Bless the endless Russian winter... but sometimes it just goes on and on and gives too much time for the Russian writer. Sigh.
I tried so hard to like this book. It took me until "Part Seven" to start getting into it, and I thought my interests had turned towards the light in "Book Two," but I was wrong. This is an incredibly slow story, and my desire to read it never reached a peak. I own it, so perhaps I'll finish it one day, but there are others I'd rather be reading right now.
This book is so much more than an epic historical love story, but I would never have picked up on it earlier in life. It is a Russian philosophical feast. The women in Zhivago's life clearly portray his feelings about Russia and the social changes that it went through. I'm amazed at how Pasternak was able to do this. The audio version was excellent because it provided a short intro that helped me with the magical /folktale part of the book, and then it had an afterword and a short history on Pasternak's life. Just be prepared for its typical Russian length and repetitiveness on theme / thought. Oh, and the love story is magnificent, too.
One of my favorite scene in the book that will stay with me was when Dr. Zhivago is captured by a red army unit and finds himself in an engagement with them and a white army unit that is trying to flank them. Zhivago (who is a medic and not trusted with a weapon) has nothing else to do but lay low on the ground be a spectator. His conscience starts eating him up though and he feels wrong for just being a spectator as young men are dying so he grabs the weapon of someone lying next to him who is already dead. Zhivago tries to shoot at the white army soldiers but he isn't able to muster up the courage to do so as he sympathies with them as much as his own men. As a result he starts shooting at a small tree but one of the rounds does end up hitting and killing a white army soldier. After the engagement Zhivago sees the young man is still alive and nurses him back to health (lying to his men that he is a newly conscripted red army soldier). Later Zhivago lets him go knowing full well that the young man is going back to fight for the white army. It's a great example of the constant war inside Zhivago between his humanity and his duties. The book shows us the dystopian nightmare that man is capable of creating in this world but also man's firm resolve to not despair in his circumstances, to always hope and to act- as Pasternak puts it.
dark
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes