MY WIFE AND I belong to a group called “The Big-Ass Book Club.” Rather than read one normal-length book a month, as most book clubs do, we pick very long books and read them at a rate of about a hundred pages a month. This not only allows us to choose books that would be impractically long for most clubs, but also gives us time to steep in them. The slower pace is helpful since the BABC inclines to novels with a lot going on—The Magic Mountain, Middlemarch, Infinite Jest.
Another fun thing about the BABC is that my wife and I have an established tradition: I read them aloud while she knits. This takes a while, but probably not as long as it would for us both to read the book ourselves separately, and it’s a nice thing to do together. Also, she gets a lot of knitting done.
So, the BABC just finished Doctor Zhivago. I had not wanted to read it, since I had read it long ago, very quickly, for a class I took as an undergraduate, and did not recall much liking it. But the others preferred it to tackling Brothers Karamazov, so there we were.
My wife and I started off with the new (2010) Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, mainly just because it was newer and presumably an improvement. (We had gone with a more recent translation of The Magic Mountain, the one by John Woods, for the same reason.) Funny thing—it was awkward to read aloud. A lot of sentences just did not land right and had to be read twice. (Were P&V trying to be scrupulous about following the Russian word order?) So, I found my parents’ old copy of the first English translation, published 1958–and it was a very clear, natural-sounding read. So we just stuck with that.
And to my own surprise, I liked the novel a lot this time.
Pasternak has a curious trick of hopping over the scenes most novelists would dwell on. We do not get the scene at the party where Lara shoots at but misses Komarovsky, for instance, even though Zhivago is at the same party. Much later in the book, the commencement of Lara’s and Zhivago’s affair is similarly slipped by without being narrated. Instead, we get minute accounts of, for example, a train journey out to the Urals. The revolution, the enormous historical upheaval during which the novel is set, occurs almost entirely offstage.
When I was 20, I would have found that narrative strategy frustrating in the extreme. But this time, it seemed brilliant. All the drama was elsewhere, in the intervals between chapters, off in the capital, and instead we saw people getting haircuts, looking for firewood, talking...and talking, talking, talking. And it struck me now, yes, that’s exactly what it would have been like.
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