A review by redcover99
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

2.0

I'm lost meandering through this book like the train carrying Yuri and Tonya into the Russian backwaters. I really want to like this book, just listen to this endorsement featured on the back cover: "A book that made a most profound impression upon me and the memory of which still does...not since Shakespeare has love been so fully, vividly, scrupulously and directly communication" and this "..[belongs] to that small group of novels by which all others are ultimately judged". I can appreciate snippets of it like Yuri sleeping for days on the train seemed to really capture the mood of the book at that time, and some little phrases from heaven like the description of the sun coming up through the mist like a fat man in a steam bath. But overall I'm just not captured by it, otherwise I'd be reading it right now instead of writing this. Finally I got to the end and I must say at some point gave up on trying to track through the complex web of characters. Really if you want to enjoy the book take notes of the main characters and how they intersect at different points during the novel. I kind of want to reread it to put all the pieces together but life is far too short for me to bother.