Fortunately, this is the response everyone seems to have to Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Finished it a few nights ago.
Often I think it is silly or uninteresting for a book to have an Afterword in it. But this time it was a sublime relief and pleasure to read the brilliant essay on the novel by Elendea Proffer. If you are tempted to attempt the book, you must use this Vintage paperback edition for Proffer’s ample notes and this wonderful Afterword.
You finish the book and say, WTHWT? What the heck was that? I did. I understood everything I was reading—mostly—or even lots—but I was just never sure what was going on was really going on and mostly I wondered what I was meant by the Implied Author (cf Wayne Booth’s whole argument about fiction) to understand about what all had been going on. Ellendea assures us that it is the book, not me/us. I’ve read lots of Modernist works, I had thought, and could handle any sort of instability, unreliability, collage and juxtaposition, fluid merging and blending — all of it—and yet Bulgakov’s novel is something else indeed. It is far beyond being just a tour de force. It has haunted me for a few days now, and in casting about to relate it to other works, of course Joyce comes to mind, but so also does Tarantino and Garcia Marquez.
