JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Slept through an earthquake.

The mosquito zapper was delivered yesterday. Whenever a mosquito commits suicide by dive-bombing the blue light, I rejoice.

Today’s book: The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott, a fictionalized account of the hell that Boris Pasternak and his partner Olga Ivinskaya went through during the writing and publication of Dr. Zhivago, and the stories of the women of the CIA who worked to smuggle the banned novel into the Soviet Union. It’s a Cold War thriller about the power of secrets, as told by multiple narrators in different locations and time periods. It is a riveting read, and I would be surprised if it’s not adapted into a TV series.

Confession: I have not read Dr Zhivago and have only vague memories of the film by David Lean with the musical score I now associate with elevators. (But I love Lawrence of Arabia.)

Fact: During the Cold War, the CIA used literature, music, art, and movies in the propaganda war against Communism. Their goal was to impress upon Soviet citizens that their government was killing free thought and expression. So the agency got into culture, and one of its programs was to publish books that had been banned in the USSR and send them to Soviet citizens. The CIA even funded bookstores, magazines, publishing companies. My generation’s reading habits were formed by the Cold War.

The primary narrators of The Secrets We Kept are three women, which is great because the male characters are less compelling. It’s not the author’s fault, but a reflection of reality: the men had the power, which made them complacent and condescending, and the women had to work harder to get half of what men felt themselves entitled to because they were born with a penis.

I enjoyed the quiet outrage of the female operatives who were spies, saboteurs, badasses in World War II, who had to go back to the secretarial pool when the war ended. There’s an infuriating chapter where Sally Fowler, a seasoned field agent who has used her physical charms to get information from targets, discovers what her desk-bound male colleagues really think of honey traps. (In the series The Americans, which I love, the married spies were both honey traps, and it was problematic but they did not regard each other as sluts.)

The stand-in for the audience is Irina, daughter of a Russian immigrant, who is the wide-eyed ingenue in the story.

Pasternak wrote Dr Zhivago and spent his last years being excoriated by the Soviet establishment, especially when his novel was published abroad and he was awarded the Nobel Prize (which he could not accept). But Olga Ivinskaya paid even more for his words—she was condemned to a labor camp before the novel was even finished. The authorities could not arrest the Soviet Union’s most famous poet, so they tormented his lover, the inspiration for Zhivago’s Lara, and tried to make her denounce the book as anti-Soviet. She lost their baby, but did not crack. After Pasternak’s death they imprisoned her again, just because they could. But she outlived them all, and wrote her own memoir.

Rating: Perfect for escaping the present while thinking about all the crap women go through in order to save the world without making men feel emasculated.