Sometimes we go up

I finished reading Doctor Zhivago (well, except for the poems) at about 5 a.m. last night. Not because I couldn't put it down but because I woke up unexpectedly and was looking for a way to get back to sleep. All I had left at that point was the epilogue which, if it had looked that engrossing, I would've finished before going to bed in the first place.

It's definitely a book I want to discuss with someone who's read it. (Perhaps with Tuppers, who gave it to me? He was MIA at New Year's and hasn't been in touch since, so I'll be damned if I'm the first to get in touch.) Some parts are still unclear to me, such as Zhivago's motivation for returning to Moscow rather than accompanying the love of his life to Primorye. I'll also probably want to reread it on of these days after I've gotten a better grasp on the events of the Russian Revolution, which provide the backdrop.

I was surprised how much difficulty I had forcing David Lean's movie out of my head while I read it. I remember it having a huge impact on me when I first saw it at age seventeen, but that's rather to be expected and I didn't realise quite how firmly certain images and developments had stuck in my head until I tried to dislodge them. (I don't recall having the same difficulty with Berlin stories vis-à-vis Cabaret, another film I discovered at that impressionable age, but I rather suspect this will happen to me in spades when I come around to rereading Lord of the Rings again.) However stunningly handsome Omar Sharif was, he's not a good match for Zhivago as Pasternak describes him (contrasting him to his part-Kirghiz half brother). Similarly it was difficult to develop an appropriate attitude toward Komarovsky when Rod Steiger's embodiment of him became fuel for my erotic dreams for a sizable chunk of my young life.

At first I thought the film differed not only in excising almost all of the politics (as is standard operating procedure when adapting romantic epics) but also in placing the love story so very much front and centre. It doesn't really take over the narrative reignsrains of the novel until about two-thirds of the way in, which may be one of the reasons I was making such slow progress for a while. The early chapters are more episodic as we are fed backstories for lesser characters who eventually get folded into the main plot. While reading them, I chattered a lot to monshu about adjusting to Pasternak's "rhythm". You expect a thunderbolt when Zhivago meets Lara, but their interest in each other is presented so surprisingly obliquely that without prior knowledge you wouldn't attach much importance to it.

Apparently he got some flak for the succession of coincidences which keep bringing his cast back together. Perhaps it helped knowing about this feature going in or perhaps this is an area where having the movie in mind actually helped, since it's a familiar conceit in film where there's more need for economy in personalities. In any case, I got so inured to it that when I hit the truly outrageous coincidence which caps the final chapter, I took it completely in stride.

In Russia, Pasternak is best known as a poet and that shows in the richness of his descriptive passages. But there's also a lot of philosophising, and that's where I felt my reading was too cursory to do the work justice. He has pretty big chubby for Orthodox Christianity, which made sense once I learned he was the descendent of converts. The poems in the appendix in particular are shot through with religious imagery, scriptural references, and quotations from the Orthodox liturgy, which also have a habit of turning up throughout the body of the novel.

I'm also only a scant few pages from the end of a collection of Turgenev's shorter fiction and I haven't really decided whether to go back to Sketches at that point or begin something completely different. As I mentioned before, I am getting back into Irish at this point, so perhaps there's a sign I should open Irish Literature Month somewhat early.

Bare Game Night

This month's Game Night was at friends in Uptown whose apartment was just a tad cozy for the crowd gathered there. As per usual, I fell in with the Catchphrase crowd in the front room, but eventually I got annoyed enough with the distractions and interruptions that I made a friend sub for me and wandered off. Unfortunately, the other games going on at that point were Nuts in the dining room and elsewhere a game I was calling "Jackass Home Edition". Remember the first appearance of Dr. Marvin Monroe on The Simpsons? I kid you not, that's what it was. Sometimes it's convenient to be able to claim you kind of have a heart condition.

So I drifted back in and things got a little better. As I was telling Scruffy today, I started playing in the larger games because it was a good way of getting to know a lot of people. Now that I'm on nodding terms with most regulars, it may be time to start seeking out smaller ones with the people I really like. I sort of thought that's what I was doing when I agreed to play "Strip Twister", but once word carried throughout the apartment, we soon had quite a crowd in the living room baying for bare ass. To tell the truth, it made me a little uncomfortable and I was glad someone instituted the rule that anyone who interfered with the participants had to strip off as well.

Now we're dealing with the fallout from that on Facebook. Some people seem to think there's no place for that at Game Night, whose raison d'être is to provide a place to socialise away from the bars and bathhouses, others that it's all good clean fun. As a compromise, I proposed an "after hours" rule that what happens after the official ending time is the host's business and anyone who thinks that might be a problem for them is free to leave before then. Jury's still out on that.

In case anyone's curious, I ended up crashing out (literally) before I could get half my kit off, but I stayed undressed until the end out of solidarity with the players, who I didn't think should be the only unclothed people in the room. After that, my South Texan buddy showed up with something called Guesstures and we had a fairly successful game of that despite extreme drunkenness and some shuffling of the teams. Basically, it's speed charades, and once we got the hang of that it went very well. I also determined that one of my team members was (a) a librarian and (b) living very close to us, so I'm going to see what I can do to bring him and his partner into our little orbit.