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The Master and Margarita

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The Master and Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov $13.00 Vintage Books ISBN: 0679760806 average review: Reviews: This gets: a from samantha: This Russian story targets adolescents, but is also enjoyable for young adults. It's a story about the Devil who enters an unassuming town and wreaks havoc on the logic and sanity of its townspeople. With an interesting array of very colorful characters, it's a constant play on the reader's mind, but is very intriguing and entertaining. From the back cover: A literary sensation from its first publication, The Master and Margarita has become an astonishing publishing phenomenon in Russia and has been translated into more than twenty languages, and made into plays and films. Mikhail Bulgakov's novel is now considered one of the seminal works of twentieth-century Russian literature. In this imaginative extravaganza the devil, disguised as a magician, descends upon Moscow in the 1930s with his riotous band, which includes a talking cat and an expert assassin. Together they succeed in comically befuddling a population which denies the devil's existence, even as it is confronted with the diabolic resuits of a magic act gone wrong. This visit to the capital of world atheism has several aims, one of which concerns the fate of the Master, a writer who has written a novel about Pontius Pilate, and is now in a mental hospital. Margarita, the despairing and daring heroine, becomes a witch in an effort to save the Master, and agrees to become the devil's hostess at his annual spring ball. By turns acidly satiric, fantastic, and ironically philosophical, this work constantly surprises and entertains, as the action switches back and forth between the Moscow of the 1930s and first-century Jerusalem. In a brilliant tour de force, Bulgakov provides a startlingly different version of Pontius Pilate's encounter with one Yeshua, a naive believer in the goodness of man. The interplay of these two narratives is part of the ingenious pleasure of this work which defies all genre classifications and expectations. The commentary and afterword provide new insight into the mysterious subtexts of the novel, and here, for the first time, The Master and Margarita is revealed in all its complexity. eryka.com scale: So good you just can't stand it. Almost that good. Sort of good. Generally a waste of time. Destined for the recycler. If you'd like to review this book, or another, click here Similar books by category: russian Go home | Go to fiction home © 2002 eryka.com. All rights reserved.