A Farewell to Lara

"A Farewell to Lara" is to Boris Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago" what Helen Fielding's "Bridget Jones' Diary" is to Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice": a contemporary re-imagination of a timeless theme - why can't these two people, who so clearly are meant for each other, find a faster way to be together?

Their daughter, Nora, would have done things differently. A child of coincidence, she steers the narrative toward destiny during the three decades that the novel covers. Her parents meet in eighth grade - he, Arvid, is the youngest son of wealthy business man and she, Lara, is caught in the foster care system - when they both vow to lead anything but ordinary lives. Their commitment to each other and to transgression leads them to be expelled at the beginning of tenth grade after a daring sleepover on a beach. They meet again in adventurous and romantic ways: seven years later, Arvid saves Lara's life during a wild fire; seven years after that, Lara, who is now a doctor (as Zhivago was a doctor), saves Arvid's life during surgery at a hospital. Another seven years may have gone by before they met again, if not for the birth of their daughter.

Nora both brings them together and pulls them apart. While Lara's professional success mounts, Arvid leaves the crumbling empire of his family business in Santa Cruz for Prague in the Czech Republic, where Nora orchestrates a meeting between her parents at Easter. Her plan for a family reunion doesn't work out. Instead, it is another family link that unites them: Arvid's search for Lara's biological mother helps them reconnect and consider the past in a different light. The man who believed in destiny is finally claimed as the love of her life by the woman who preferred to see her life as a chain of coincidences. And Lara dies shortly thereafter: a stroke ends her life, against the better narratological wishes of her daughter.