Doctor Zhivago
Pasternak's Nobel Prize-winning epic uses a love story to explore the soul of a nation being destroyed. Zhivago and Lara's passion is inseparable from the chaos of revolution; love as the only private thing left in a world where everything is being collectivized. Haunting and enormous.
Detractors call the central love triangle unconvincing outright, with one writing that “the famous love triangle at the centre of this book was unconvincing” given how often Yuri's commitment wavers. The opening hundred pages introduce a dense cast of names, patronymics, and nicknames that mostly vanish and never return, and readers say the dialogue suffers for it: “His characters don't talk, they orate.” The sheer number of coincidental reunions across the vastness of Russia strains credulity too, with one reader complaining “people keep running into each other every other page.” A critic calls Zhivago's wartime journal entries, where he pauses for literary criticism while people starve around him, “the ultimate self-indulgence.” Even the translation is a live fight, with fans of each version calling the other clunky and stiff.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
