Books Set in North America and Europe

The Secrets We Kept, by Lara Prescot (2019)

The Secrets We Kept is a fascinating historical fiction about how the novel Dr. Zhivago made its way out of the Soviet Union and earned Boris Pasternak the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature.  The CIA played a role in that endeavor.  The novel is told through many voices, including that of Olga Ivinslaya, Pasternak’s long-term lover, and the women in the CIA’s typing pool.

Pasternak’s manuscript had been banned from publication in the Soviet Union on grounds that it shed a bad light on the political situation in that country.  The manuscript was spirited out of the Soviet Union and the Italian publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, had the novel translated into Italian where is was first published.  

The 1950s were marked by the Cold War.  The CIA believed that freedom produced great art, thus initiated its “cultural diplomacy”, designed to expose the non-free world with music and literature of the West.  Russia was known for its great authors and literature.  When rumors abounded that Russian author, Boris Pasternak, had written a sweeping historical epic, interest in the West was piqued.

Once the CIA learned that the manuscript had reached beyond the Iron Curtain, it took steps to publish the novel in Russian and secretly slip it back into its home of origin.  In the 1950s, women had very few employment opportunities.  This novel focuses on several women who were employed by the CIA, ostensibly in the typing pool, but who were also recruited as carriers or swallows for spying on the Soviet Union.  While the women depicted in the novel are fictional, many of the other characters in the novel are real.

This was a fun novel and it has inspired me to find a copy of Dr. Zhivago to re-read.

Read: June 6, 2020

4 Stars