THE SECRETS WE KEPT by Lara Prescott

I read Doctor Zhivago in preparation for reading this novel about author Boris Pasternak.  However, that step really was not necessary.  I did not love Pasternak’s novel, and I enjoyed this one more, but the author tried to do too much here.  I can’t enumerate all of the first-person narrators, including the first-person plural narrator that represented the typing pool at the CIA during the late 1950s.  And while the narration is all over the map, the plot boils down to two storylines.  One is obviously about Pasternak in his Russian dacha and his mistress Olga, who suffers three years in the Gulag on his behalf.  The other story, which is much more engrossing, concerns efforts on the part of other countries to bring Pasternak’s novel into print, while Russian authorities banned it.  Not only was the novel published in translations in Europe, but U.S. agents surreptitiously distributed copies in the original Russian to Russian visitors at the World’s Fair in Brussels.  This particular storyline was fascinating, and I especially enjoyed the chapters in which a not-so-speedy typist, born in the U.S. to Russian parents, is recruited and trained for espionage.  Kate Atkinson’s Transcription is also about a woman in a clerical job becoming a clandestine agent, and it is still by far the better read.