MA: Considering the weirdness of the book-Bulgakov traverses like eight genres-I was surprised by how well the pretty conventional love story worked for me. I think that’s the emotional register that satire can thrive in even when many of the characters themselves are more symbolic or technical devices. Outside of specific characters, Bulgakov makes you feel the ache and hope of a Russian populace under a capricious and cruel regime, trying to make sense of reality they’re not allowed to honestly describe, without losing their minds/lives. I did find myself worried about the fates of the random citizens who got swept up in the evil-doing, and I’d sigh relief when Bulgakov settled them into some traumatized but mostly unharmed ending, as he ties up loose ends in the epilogue. He’s sort of the emotional bookends to the story. Homeless mostly disappears from the second half of the book, but he ends up being the only true witness to the whole thing, the only one who can hold it all in his head, and he gets a very poignant ending as well. Margarita gets many more pages devoted to her inner life, though, and I cared about her. "Lovesick historian hermit with beef about his rejected novel" didn’t really get me going. GN: For a guy who made it into the title, I had almost no emotional investment in the nameless Master. But I gotta ask: Did the emotional beats hit for you? Because satire is all well and good but unless there’s some universal truth or some heart underneath, it’s not enough. I guess talking cats have a big leg up.īP: The humor in this book, especially the dark stuff, was expected: That’s sort of famously Russian novelists’ coping mechanism against, uh, being a Russian novelist. GN: Only Hobbes is in the running for me. Also the only other one I can think of is the Cheshire Cat. MA: Is Behemoth the best literary cat? He owns. This was the most intoxicating quality of the novel to me-it could wander anywhere at any time and he had the technical chops to make it feel effortless.īP: In my head I pictured this as a Studio Ghibli joint. I was so entranced by the smoothness of his transitions: sometimes it’s that camera pan sometimes someone starts dreaming sometimes he casually spools off the complete future of some minor character sometimes he riffs as the narrator. There are so many moments where Bulgakov is effectively panning the camera, or zooming out to zoom in on some other antics in the city or even further flung. GN: He’d have a ball with the Ball, and the seance, and really the whole thing. Apparently Baz Luhrmann wants to adapt it. Maitreyi Anantharaman: I did keep thinking about how ripe for cinema it all was-the comedy, but also the atmosphere, and the different kooky sets. But this time, everything clicked for me. Great physical comedy I want to see a movie version of Behemoth’s shootout with the cops. I first read this in my early 20s, and in retrospect I did not get it at all, beyond the antics of Woland’s henchmen. We’re on a good streak of picking oldies that make me write “lol” in the margins.īarry Petchesky: Oh Giri, you are missing out. Giri Nathan: Not to be rude to a whole country’s big and influential literary corpus, but I was shocked by how funny I found The Master and Margarita. We’ll be down in the comments to chat with you as soon as you’re done reading. Gorakh] 32.Welcome back to Defector Reads A Book! Our December DRAB selection was Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, which the Defector book sickos have read and discussed. The Final Adventures of KorovievĪnd Behemoth 29. Schizophrenia, as Predicted [Shizofreniia, The Incident at Griboyedov 6.
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