Sure the big and unusual names are not the most difficult part of this novel of epic proportions, but when one stops worrying about them, things smooth over. Those Russian names are beautiful, but very difficult to imagine how to pronounce them, and we have a tendency of wanting to pronounce everything --even if it is inside our minds. Forget the names.
Names issue aside, "Doctor Zhivago" is a great book --in more than one sense-- telling the story of love, war and revolution. It is possible to argue that Zhivago and Lara's love story is the central spine of the narrative, while the war and revolution work as background. This concept is too reductive, once both war and revolution have main role in bringing the couple together and them apart.
The three issues are what conduce the narrative. Of course the reader has the expectation of seeing the two lovers interacting together, but they spend so much apart from each other that it is impossible not to start to follow attentively the war and then the revolution. These three aspects take turn in the major focus of the action. And this is one of the aspects that make this novel so multi layered. One can find love, adventure, political ideas and a portrait of life in Russia in the period before and right after the revolution, not to mention, the portrait of the human existence that is in the whole book.
The characters are very well developed and human. The unfolding of the action takes time, and this why the novel may seem to be slow going at times. It is not a fault, but actually Pasternak's style. Contemporary readers may be annoyed, but not the ones who care beautiful and deep narratives. This aspect reminded me of Charles Frazier's "Cold Mountain".
To sum up, "Doctor Zhivago" is a very beautiful book, highly recommended. Its story may please those who like adventures, those who prefer love, and those who enjoy political dramas alike.
The novel is a compelling tale of the events during and after the Russian revolution. People are caught up in events not of their own choosing, over which they have no control. The old order collapses to be replaced by a new order coming out of the revolution. Families are torn apart. Dr. Zhivago is separated from Lara, never to find her again (the motion picture includes the enduring song, "Somewhere, My Love").
One of the scenes that sticks in my mind is a battle where men are ordered to fire on the "enemies," i.e., people opposing the politicians running their side of the struggle. One man simply aims at a tree on the battlefield. Occasionally someone chances to come between him and the tree. He considers it a matter over which he has no control.
It is an example of politicians using people as pawns to fight their opponents, the opponents being people who might otherwise have been their friends.
Pasternak was, first and foremost, a very talented and gifted poet, but it's painfully obvious that he didn't have an equal talent for prose. Maybe if he had written other novels his ability in that genre might have improved, but it remains quite obviously a first and only novel. Some of the metaphors, similes, and descriptions he uses are lovely, reflecting his talent as a poet, but some just sound and look laughable and embarrassing when in the form of prose. Some other mistakes are the ones other reviewers have also pointed out-way too much background information on minor characters, no real development of the supposed love story between Yuriy and Lara, let alone on why they got together, no closure of anything at the end, a mostly dead-end and pointless Epilogue and Conclusion (where interesting events begin to be developed but then peter off into nothingness since it's so close to the end there's no time to see them through to their conclusions), characters who disappear for hundreds of pages, too much telling and not enough showing, and way too many coincidences. It's embarrassing how many times Yuriy or someone else bumps back into someone whom we last saw hundreds of pages ago, a truly minor character in most cases, and that chance meeting years later contributes nothing to the plotline.
When they finally get together properly, Yuriy spends more time writing poetry after Lara has fallen asleep than in bed with her, this woman he keeps running into for longer and more significant periods of time, whom he realised he was in love with right before he was kidnapped by the partisans who needed a doctor. I get absolutely no sense whatsoever of why these two fall in love, no sense of why they get together, no sense of them being in love period when they're finally a couple. Why do so many writers insist on having the characters fall into one another's arms with barely a word of explaining their feeling or motivations? There are no love scenes, sex scenes, sweet nothings, nothing that would clearly show them as being a couple madly in love and fated to have gotten together years after having first met.
The book should have properly ended at the end of Chapter 15, sparing us the pointless Epilogue and Conclusion. Then I wouldn't have felt like "That's it?" at the real end of the book. We don't even find out what happens to Lara's daughter Katya, and for a man who was heartbroken while watching Lara and Katya's sleigh pass his field of vision twice in the night, knowing he'd never see them again, he sure doesn't act like it once he goes home. He doesn't go after his family in Paris, he doesn't try to find Lara, he enters a relationship with his childhood friend Marina! What is that all about?
The best part of the book is when Yuriy, Lara, and their friends are all growing up, showing the two different worlds they came from, how Russia was before the Revolution. I still admire Pasternak both as a writer and a human being, but this book remains a nice story that could have been so much more realistic and convincing had it been written by someone with more experience at writing prose.
