Doctor Zhivago and Transit of Venus

I've been tired all last week and really must get off to bed, so this is a quick one. I just wanted to share two apparently wonderful love stories that both left me totally cold. Transit of Venus and Doctor Zhivago both failed to really engage me with charaters I felt worthy of betrayal. I finished Doctor Zhivago but only as some kind of penance for my lack of appreciation of what has been lauded as a classic, Transit of Venus got left on the pile of "life is too short to finish these books" pile.
Great love stories have to start from the heart of the characters, give me that and I'll forgive the betrayal and follow them across the desolate Russian winter. Leave it out and I'm lost.

I recently did exactly the same thing with Doctor Zhivago. I had read it as a teenager a few years after seeing David Lean's wonderful movie and was monumentally disappointed. After so many years, I decided I might just have been too young for the book, so I read it again. It's not really a love story, but an account of the Russian Revolution in the form of a novel. The theme has to do with the danger of elevating ideology over humanity, an important theme, but one that sometimes gets lost in the comprehensive and wandering nature of the story Pasternak told.

Sometimes novelists feel a compulsion to pack every thematic issue they feel is important into one novel, and I think this may be the pitfall Pasternak fell into with this one. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature for it, but I think it was really in recognition of the political stand he took against the Soviet ideology, and not really for the work's quality as literature. There are some wonderful passages in it, but I don't feel the book hung together well as a whole.

I haven't read Transit of Venus, but I suspect I would feel the same way you did about that one, too. I did read another of Shirley Hazzard's novels, The Great Fire, and had exactly that reaction. I just didn't feel anything of the supposedly intense love between the two main characters. But this novel was highly praised by critics. I'd be interested to hear from someone who read and liked The Great Fire or Transit of Venus. What did you see in them that we missed?

I'm not really certain what the Nobel committee's rationale for awarding Pasternak the prize was, but I do think it's important here to mention that Pasternak was a very fine and highly innovative poet and that, despite the fame and popularity of Doctor Zhivago in the West, it's his poetry that's most appreciated in Russia and it's books like My Sister, Life, which influenced Madelstam and Tsvetayeva among other great poets, for which he'll likely be remembered.

Thanks for the responses, that gives me some interesting background on Paternak and his work.

Thanks, marietherese - what you pointed out is important. I might add that there are some wonderfully poetic passages in Doctor Zhivago.

I haven't read Dr. Zhivago, but I read and loved Transit of Venus. It was so long ago that most of the plot has completely left me, but my lingering impression is of consistently beautiful language -- I remember going through the book thinking, "What a wonderful way to describe that." In fact I don't think I was that involved in the characters (unusually for me.) I just loved the music of the words. Maybe Shirley Hazzard and Boris Pasternak have more in common than their lovers do.

#3 I'm not really certain what the Nobel committee's rationale for awarding Pasternak the prize was, but I do think it's important here to mention that Pasternak was a very fine and highly innovative poet and that, despite the fame and popularity of Doctor Zhivago in the West, it's his poetry that's most appreciated in Russia and it's books like My Sister, Life, which influenced Madelstam and Tsvetayeva among other great poets, for which he'll likely be remembered.
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Along those lines, I believe that the Nobel Prize in Literature is a career award--by that I mean it's awarded for an author's oeuvre--and not an award for just one piece.

You're right about the Nobel being a career award, Nickelini. And the award committee is based in Sweden, so they are often aware of literature that is not well known in the English-speaking world. Poetry loses so much in translation; can you recommend any of Pasternak's other novels that may be available in English? If so, how do they compare to Zhivago?

Everyone should adore Shirley Hazzard in my opinion. When I read Transit of Venus, it reminded me of books by Thomas Hardy. The beauty of her language, the way it makes you want to savor each sentence and read slowly for the pure pleasure of reading, there aren't many authors who can do that. I usually read fast and for the plot but her books have such a loveliness that I want them to go on forever. I also loved The Great Fire.