Dr. Zhivago and other stories

I wasn't completely enamoured with Dr. Zhivago throughout. It is as if by necessity Russian novels are epic, involve horrors and, in Solzhenitsyn's play title, life is like a candle in that wind. There's a lot of great prose, at least in the translation by Richard Peaver and Larissa Volkhonsky but war, hardship and so many characters don't make for my preferred recipe. Except, like a lot of things do, it becomes more meaningful as it approaches its end.

The doubts I had about the film, that Julie Christie was too much of a distraction because she was so improbably beautiful, were dispelled by the book making it clear that Lara is breath-takingly so, and so anyone less than Julie Christie wouldn't be good enough. She's not only that, she's profound, highly capable and suffers. So then it seems she's a bit too perfect but it's based on a true story.

The very end, after all they've been through, projected forwards to 1943 leaves the next generation with,

a happy, tender sense of peace about this holy city and about the whole earth,

and it,

filled them and enveloped them in an inaudible music of happiness, which spread far around.

At what cost, we might ask, and for how long. It seemed to me an echo of how War and Peace ends and, given the references in it to Tolstoy, that might be some of the point. Of course Pasternak belongs alongside him, Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn and them all but I'd be glad of some lighter relief before the library finds me 800+ pages of the biography of Elgar.

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Meanwhile, back on the CD player, and the documentary When Motown Came to Britain, one can sometimes explore a subject too far, get to the bottom of it and find less than one thought. That's not so with Tamla Motowm, which only improves for knowing more of the early music and less of the later tragedies.

The Soulful Moods of Marvin Gaye casts him as the lounge bar crooner with Funny Valentine, Witchcraft and How High the Moon. It wasn't obvious what to do with him, not least because he takes on different roles very convincingly. Personally, I'd have Too Busy Thinkin Bout My Baby and Heard it Through the Grapevine rather than the later socio-political What's Goin' On or this earlier Sinatra style but, like The Marvelettes Essential Collection, which has nothing else to compare with When You're Young and In Love, even when Motown is ordinary by its own standards it's better than most other pop music. 

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The number of songs on very much the same theme produced by a hit factory like that makes me worry that the language will get worn out. I think there are too many poems written and surely, with a lot of words available but ultimately a limited number, the genre will eventually become used up and sterile. I also think that about chess moves although thousands of chess games, nearly all of them slightly different, are being played at any one time.

Neither pop music or poetry, or chess, seem to be grinding to a halt because I'm worried about it. There must be more ideas waiting to be found. One either finds them or recycles previous ones. The likes of Larkin and Gunn, two favourite poets, both found poetry had dried up a few years before they died. I am now the same age as Larkin was when he died. If the only option is thus to repeat oneself, as I think some poets do after the age of 60, maybe I'd better start doing that, or do something else instead.