About to be three posts in and I still have no idea if anyone actually reads this thing or if I'm just writing to hear myself talk, if you'll forgive the mixed metaphor. Regardless, as I told Andrew last night, though it's out there for anyone to read, even it no reads it, giving only myself satisfaction and maybe even some catharsis, that's good enough for me.
One of the stated purposes of this blog is that it gives me an opportunity to write about books and writing and my personal opinions of them. I've read voraciously for about as far as I can remember, and my parents tell me that I started reading the comic sections of the newspaper before they sent me to school. I take their word for this. Their's been a pretty wide range of genres that I've focused on. For the longest time, it was Sci-Fi/Fantasy, well mostly Fantasy, though recently I've gravitated towards early 20th century literature up to 1950. I still occasionally read newly published literature, but find most of it annoying and bad. Also, my McSweeney's reading (an experience to be described in detail shortly) fulfills most of that need. Anyway, here I am blathering and not getting to the point, which is to give my feelings on two books I've read recently, Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak and Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. On a side note, I just amazoned both those books for the author names because I didn't want to get up from my chair and actually pick up the book.
DOCTOR ZHIVAGO BY BORIS PASTERNAK
So, the back of the book says “One of the great novels of the century - A love story for all time” ed: I had to get up and get the book to do that. I'm not completely lazy. I have to take a good deal of issue with this and distinguish between a good novel and an important one because they are distinct categories when applied to this novel. As novels go, it's not the best. On IRead on my Facebook profile, I could only give it 3 stars, mostly because they wouldn't let me do 3.5. In my edition, the novel is 523 pages long, and of those 523 pages, mayhaps (a neologism I'd like to think I created and enjoy using) 150 of them actually deal with the love story. That's 29%...so much for it being a focus of the novel. The love story is actually a love triangle for Dr. Zhivago, as Lara (the blond on the cover) is the woman he's having an affair with though he's actually married to Tonia. Oh, and everyone is more or less okay with this. I often found the dialogue between Zhivago and Lara to be unrealistic, occasionally cloying, and not particularly creative. So even if this main plot took up most of the novel, I don't know that my opinion would have changed all that much. Events between Zhivago and his legitimate family take up another 100-150 pages. Alright, 2/3s of the book covered. Great! But what's the deal with the rest of the book? Well, this is why I say this books is far more important than it is good. As my edition tells me, it was finished in 1954 though suppressed by the Soviet government, but not not before an Italian edition “escaped.” At the time of my edition (1991) there had been editions in more than a dozen languages, not a single one of them Russian. Why? Well, it's pretty critical of the instances leading up to the Soviet Revolution and what happened while the Reds and the Whites were duking it out for control. This was not an argument about what's the best wine to eat with different meats (we all know that Russians only drink vodka, Mandrake) but rather the Russian Civil War. It's all this stuff in the background, the sudden devaluation of the rupel, the intense poverty, the corruption, the complete inefficiency of everything in the country that kept me interested. The text uses aspects of Social Realism to criticize Socialism, rather than justify and extol it. Furthermore, I found the tone of the novel to be very nostalgic. Not necessarily in a “The past is awesome!” sort of way, because the episodes early in the novel during Tsarist Russia are in now way painted as idyllic. However, the past is infinitely better than a pretty shitty present. I guess the nostalgia is more emotional than pertaining to life in general. The only thing that brings Zhivago happiness is his love for Lara, a relationship that is ultimately doomed due to the tumultuous circumstances of the country in which they live. The text is written from a point of view whereby we know that these events have already happened, making us conscious of the fact that we are always looking back on events that have already reached their conclusion, hence heightening our sense of nostalgia. ed. I'm pretty sure that I didn't make that whole nostalgia argument very clear at all. Just sort of trust me that it's there. Or you can read the book for yourself and we can talk about it. All and all, I liked the book and am glad I read it, but I think there are issues with it that prevent it from being both a great and important novel, as opposed to just an important one.
It occurs to me that I've already written quite a bit, and you're probably tired of reading such a long entry, so I'm going to save my critique of Kafka on the Shore for tomorrow where I will pretty much rip it to shreds.
Music listened to while writing this blog: Flashbulb Diary (a friend from college's band that was quite awesome)
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I'm reading
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