Book Review: The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov

Readers of this blog (both of you!) may have caught my previous mention of the strange road I took in finding Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita - not only the book itself but also this particular translation (self-published by Michael Karpelson - more on this later). Without exaggerating, it was well-worth the effort.
How does one describe this book? Well, considering all the fuss over Harry Potter as of late (or perennially, as it would seem), The Master and Margarita would seem a perfect literary tonic for anyone looking for speculative adult fiction. Hailed as one of the best pieces of Russian literature (not just speculative) of the 20th century, such praises can also be intimidating; visions of a depressing, Dostoevskian St. Petersburg, and the obligatory poverty and mental illness which filter to a bleak (if well-rendered) conclusion. This is not that kind of book.

One day, two members of the reigning literary elite meet in a park to discuss problems with the subject matter of one of their poems - it's not atheistic enough, says the elder, and thus not worthy of publishing (this being Soviet Russia, under Stalin's rule). No sooner is the question (and denial) of the devil raised, than the two are greeting by a tall, dark stranger who appears out of the blue and proceeds to describe how one of them will die. And, albeit under fantastic circumstances, it comes true.

Pretty soon, the stranger and his motley troupe - a clownish bloke with a broken pince-nez, a fang-toothed redheaded goul, and a large, talking black cat who walks on his hind legs - occupy a townhouse in the centre of Moscow from which they direct a chaotic spell over the city. Anyone it seems who gets in their way - usually members of the cultural privileged classes - either vanishes, winds up in the sanatorium, or is vanquished to another part of the country.

Who are they? What are they doing? All of this is unravelled (and exploded) the further into the book one reads. We meet the eponymous Master, a discouraged writer whose seminal work on Pontius Pilate is lain to waste by the bureaucratic tendrils of the sycophantic literary scene, and his faithful lover, Margarita - a married woman who would do anything to be free of her chains and reunited with him.

The Master and Margarita is a wild, throw-the-rulebook-out-the-door tale which manages to weave outrageous satire with eloquent speculation on morality. Bulgakov's novel confidently navigates between deft, fantastic comedy and touching, emotional drama - without one disregarding the power of the other. Written under the tyrannical reign of Stalin from 1929 until Bulgakov's death in 1940, it is both a response to the madness of that period and a triumphant individual statement.

I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this book to anyone who is looking for something fantastic and unpredictable to consume them. It is truly a book that can be read and re-read numerous times, with each pass being as fulfilling as the next.

The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov (ISBN: 978-1411683051) is available at a friendly independent bookstore near you. Or online at any number of vendors.

A note about this translation: The translation I refer to above is the latest, by Michael Karpelson. While listed on Amazon, he is currently making small revisions to this edition which, combined with other projects in the works (another book by Bulgakov as well!), means it will not be available for the next while. If you like, I've received permission from Michael to post his email address - if you contact him, he can arrange for a copy of the existing edition to be shipped to you, as he did with me. His email address is: mkarpelson (at) gmail (dot) com. {psst - support independent publications}

Another note (June 24, 2010): I recently read another translation of M&M, by the prodigious team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. I'm a little surprised, because it seems as if it's longer than the Karpelson version (ie. it has slightly more content in places). Maybe that's just me. It's certainly the easier of the two to purchase, so I put this out there for you to contemplate.

Preface This

If there's one trend in film that I cannot understand (or sometimes tolerate) it is the rise of the Director's Introduction.

Today, someone asked if I'd watched the DVD of Bon Cop Bad Cop, a Canadian feature film which had been a box-office smash when it was released last year. He then told me that there was a Director's Intro where Eric Canuel talks about - wait for it - how successful the film was at the box-office. And if that weren't bad enough, you couldn't skip through it to the film that you had just paid money to either rent or buy. Why anyone would think it a good idea to hold the paying audience ransom so that they could congratulate themselves on making a profit is the sort of provincial-minded Canadian bullshit that I've unfortunately come to expect from a country pathologically unable to take its head out of its ass. But why does any film need an introduction in the first place?

I remember renting Spielberg's Munich last year. Not only did he have an intro (optional though it was), but in it he more or less apologized for his film - politically. Could you imagine Bertolucci apologizing for The Conformist or Orson Welles apologizing for Citizen Kane? Spielberg: the man who has brought more money into the box-office than nearly anyone in history, who in his prime innovatively defined, through works like ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind "the film for everyone", now prefaces his work as if there had been a manufacturing error of epic proportions which caused hardcore pornography where there used to be sunsets.

What the hell is going on? Do we not trust ourselves? Are we becoming so fearful of litigation or clouds of doubt on the horizon of our career's posterity that we must now preface our work, selling its merits as if applying for a loan, as if spending the millions of dollars to make the film was, in retrospect, an uncertain mistake?

Guillermo del Toro, in his introduction to the Pan's Labyrinth DVD talks briefly about how much weight he lost during production. Terry Gilliam, who filmed an introduction for the theatrical run of his much-maligned feature, Tideland, stood there reminding us that his film was about the world through the eyes of a child. Indeed, it's as if the general public were being treated like infants.

In my writer's group, during our monthly meetings, we will read new work aloud. We have a firm rule: you do not preface your work. You do not say "I was trying to write about...", or "This is based on a story...". No. Stop it. If it's good, it will stand up on its own accord. If it's good - even if I have questions - I'm comfortable that I will be able to find this out on my own after the fact. If you need to explain your work before you present it to an audience then chances are you have not produced a work that an audience should be seeing (as opposed to, say, yourself).

When I see a film, I want to see the film. I do not want or require a preface where somebody "explains" things for me or, worse still, some risk-averse apologia. I'm a big boy, I can handle it.

Photo: Rebecca Street #1

A Conan For a Different Age...

It's a start...

[yes, the artsy, philosophizing, photo blog has been getting political lately. I will try to balance this out with unnecessary essays on Camus -ed.]

The news just broke that the UN has approved (up to) 26,000 peace keepers to be sent to Darfur. From the Globe and Mail:

July 31, 2007 at 3:59 PM EDT

UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously on Tuesday to authorize up to 26,000 troops and police in an effort to stop attacks on millions of displaced civilians in Sudan's Darfur region.

Expected to cost more than $2-billion in the first year, the combined United Nations-African Union operation aims to quell violence in Darfur, where more than 2.1 million people have been driven into camps and an estimated 200,000 have died over the last four years.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon described the resolution as "historic" and urged member states to offer "capable" troops quickly.

The resolution, number 1769, invokes Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, under which the United Nations can authorize force. The measure allows the use of force to be used for self defence, to ensure the free movement of humanitarian workers and to protect civilians under attack.

But the resolution, which has been watered down several times, no longer allows the new force to seize and dispose of illegal arms. Now they can only monitor such weapons.

Gone also is a threat of future sanctions, but British Prime Minister Gordon Brown warned on Tuesday that "if any party blocks progress and the killings continue, I and others will redouble our efforts to impose further sanctions."

"The plan for Darfur from now on is to achieve a cease-fire, including an end to aerial bombings of civilians; drive forward peace talks ... and, as peace is established, offer to begin to invest in recovery and reconstruction," he said on a visit to the United Nations.

Some (perhaps rightly) are comparing this to Rwanda - not the existing massacre, mind you (that's been done quite well already), but the handcuffing of UN peace keepers. As the article says, UN soldiers can only fight back in self-defence. I can only hope, and call me a blind idealist, that the lessons of Rwanda will have been learnt.

Like the title says, it's a start. Two hundred thousand civilians have already been killed in Darfur. At this point, anything more than a diplomatic gesture is a sign of hope.

Intolerant Alternatives

For those who don't live in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area), there are two papers which demonstrate the zero-sum game of "providing an alternative voice" in mass-market traditional media.

The first, which I submit as The Intolerant Right, is The Toronto Sun, a daily newspaper distributed through most of Southern Ontario. In short, pro-conservative, pro-law-and-order, pro-military, anti-liberal, anti-big-government, anti-humanist. They regularly publish op-ed pieces which make numerous references to City Council as being infested with socialists. They once published an editorial "cartoon" which allowed you to paint-by-numbers a portrait of Toronto's mayor, David Miller, which ended up portraying him as Adolph Hitler.

The second, which I submit as The Intolerant Left, is NOW Magazine, a weekly news/community paper with wide distribution including outside the GTA. As opposed to the Sun, NOW is pro-socialist, pro-community, pro-union, anti-police, anti-military, anti-corporate. NOW operates under the impression that the world's problems can be solved with townhall meetings. The recent clash between the Chilean U-20 soccer team and the police was, without bothering to investigate, blamed squarely on the police who were identified as racists.

Don't get me wrong, NOW has a good arts section. The Toronto Sun, for that matter, excels in sports coverage. However, as regards editorial thrust, both papers are heinously biased and often responsible for stoking the coals of hatred.

And thus we come to that auspicious moniker: the "outsider" or "alternative" media voice. People who devour the Sun feel that everyone else is too liberally biased and that their paper "tells it like it is". Those who fawn over NOW feel as if every page uncovers the organic truth, conspiratorially cloaked by the interests of Big Business. Yet, despite the obvious differences between the two, faithful readers of both feel as if they are getting the inside track on enlightenment.

This is one of the pernicious problems with being the "outsider" or the "alternative" in the traditional media market - it's bullshit. You know it. I know it. Yet - and kudos for consistency to both the Toronto Sun and NOW - one can predictably ascertain the editorial reaction of both papers without as much as a few seconds of applied imagination.

Me? Generally, I'm left-of-centre, I do think there is a clear history of corporate greed which has threatened to extinguish individual rights (let alone entrepreneurship), and I don't want our laws to be dictated by the tenets of any organized religion. However, pure socialism is a Romantic Dream - it assumes everyone is the same, which is the summit of naivety if we must include the criminally violent or the unfortunately stupid. Yet, I believe that culture needs federal funding and should not be treated like an elitist nice-to-have. Also, I would rather have another 4 years of David Miller's ineffectiveness than yet another malicious, vindictive clown like Mel (The Black Cauldron) Lastman or a ruinous corporate-minded manipulator like Mike Harris at the provincial helm.

The problem with any form of media claiming to the be an "alternative" is that "being alternative" (as opposed to say, trying to approach the complexity of the average person's viewpoint) becomes a ball-and-chain by which they have to editorially tow the line, whether or not it devolves into predictability (or self-parody).

Photo: Café Bernate #2

"The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe."

- Peter De Vries

How To Measure Progress When Not Much Is Really Changing

I'm a fiction writer.

This is what I tell people, which is often followed by digging my fingernails into my palms, hoping they don't ask me if-

"Have you been published?"

No. The answer is no. And no, you can't tell them that a poem you wrote in high school was published in the local paper - you're over 30 and nearly twice the age of that (wonderfully talented) kid.

"Um...not yet."

This is about as affirmative as it gets. It's like telling someone you're a bus driver, and when they ask a perfectly normal question like "Oh, where? For what company?", you reply: "Actually, I'm not driving a bus right now...I'm hoping that someone will allow me to drive a bus soon.".

I'm a bus driver without a bus, albeit with a route of sorts and sufficient credentials to do the work without injuring passengers (save for their sensibilities at times). I'll let that analogy fizzle like a wet campfire. Needless to say, telling people you're a fiction writer without having anything to show in terms of published work, one feels like an impostor after a while. Gladly, writers naturally feel like impostors so it's not that bad.

The reality is not quite as depressing as it appears ^tm. I've only been at this seriously for a few years, having spent a few years before that working on a novel which I ultimately decided to shelve, lest I spend years more perfecting something I'd outgrown and was really tired of staring at. Since then, I've crafted several solid short stories and have started a new novel. The more I work on short stories, the more improvements I see in my writing overall which then reflects in the novel. It's a nice arrangement, save for the fact that the time/energy I devote to the short stories are subtracted from what's going toward the book.

My strategy is that the short stories - the good ones, not the ones I hand people and preface with "It's an experiement!" - are "easier" to get published, if only because they require less time to write/revise than a novel. Thus, with some sort of publishing precedent, it would be easier to attract a publisher for the novel.

Of course, I've yet to have anything of note published. I'm trying to keep at least two submissions outbound at all times, but even that's tricky because you want to gear the right type of story (stylistically, etc.) to a publisher who will be most receptive to what you're offering. Add to this that waiting for acceptance or rejection (the latter being all the rage these days) can take anywhere from 3 weeks to 6 months with ethical penalties if you submit the same piece to more than one publisher at a time. So, let's say you spend two months on a short story - from ink on the page (I still do my rough drafts by hand) to "rev. #12f" on my laptop. If the publisher you submit to (assuming, like what happened to me and the magazine Maisonneuve, the post office doesn't return it claiming they can't find the address) takes 3 months to get back to you, that's almost half a year spent with no dividends to show (aside from the aforementioned improvements in your writing, which, when you receive a rejection letter, isn't very compelling at all).

Fun.

Yet, if I didn't think my work was good, I wouldn't bother. If I didn't see improvements in my skill, I wouldn't bother. I have to remind myself that, although I don't have anything to show for my efforts as regards to getting published, I do have the work itself, which is no small accomplishment by anyone's measurement. In any case, it's all I have at the moment - that and will.

And the moniker, "fiction writer".

Translation, Traducción, and перевод

I used to hang-out in cafés when I was in my early twenties. It was a means to get out of the house without going to bars. Chances were, the conversations were better in cafés, and - depending upon the type of café - the people were usually a little more sophisticated [why writing that word feels like an elitist thing, I'm not sure - is there something wrong with sophistication?]. Most of all, cafés are cheaper than bars, and when you're in college and starving, it made sense to choose the former if you wanted to avoid the bottleneck of debt.

There was a place in Burlington (Ontario, sorry Vermont) which lasted perhaps only a year (as all good things die early in Burlington, including the dreams of its youth...but I digress). I can't even remember the name - French, I think. The owner was a very interesting fellow, an accomplished academic who'd lived and studied in Paris previously. I'm not sure how he managed to afford a café in the middle of a very chi chi shopping square, but he made the best of it: poetry readings, live music, parties. It was all very fin de siècle; nothing like that can live for very long in a town as complacent and suburban as Burlington was at the time.

I remember one afternoon, sitting with him (his name escapes me...so much of the years from 1990 -> 1995 escape me), and chatting. The topic arose of translation. He revealed that he wrote about the aesthetics and potential controversies of translation. Can you imagine having a book published about translation? I couldn't then - it was something I simply took for granted and sometimes still do. The more we talked, the more I realised how much blind trust we put in the hands of the person whose job it is to convert the prose of the world's great non-English-speaking writers. It never crosses our minds that a translator could be culturally prejudiced, or simply unimaginative for that matter.

Let's face it: when I recently read Crime and Punishment I didn't hesitate to think that I was reading anything but the prose of Fyodor Dostoevsky. But, of course, it was a translation. I can only assume it was accurate, not that I would have any way to tell as I only have an elementary understanding of Cyrillic (let alone Russian). What is astounding to me, is to think of how effortless and transparent the best translations are - when I consider the acrobatics some of them must go through in order to preserve the magic of the original text (the rhythm, the flow, the style, the weight, the economy) I always conclude that it must be such a rewarding and paradoxically unheralded role to play. Who translated the copy of Crime and Punishment that I just finished reading? Couldn't tell you. I didn't look.

This was brought to my attention most recently, and most magically, with the appearance of the book The Master and Margarita in my life. I was speaking with a Russian composer one day, relating how much I enjoyed speculative fiction from former-Soviet countries (Stanislaw Lem, the Strugatsky brothers...) when he mentioned, "Have you read Master and Margarita, by Bulgakov?". "Who??" was my response. Let's face it, Bulgakov is not a name etched in the collective memory of popular literature. "You must read Master and Margarita." was all he said, with that particularly curt Slavic insistence which intones the inherent universal importance of whatever it is that's being recommended, without question. So, I went on my laptop and did some searching - what I found was that there were, at last count, five English translations of the book.

Five.

As it turned-out, one was based on the censored Soviet text, another was marked as simply not in-depth enough, with three more ranging in response from capable to great. So - aware of the inherent importance of translation and having my curiosity piqued by the book itself - I did more research and found that the most recent translation had been done in 2006 by a fellow Canadian, Michael Karpelson (highlighted in this article from an otherwise obscure right-wing news site). To make a long story short, this translation was self-published through LuLu.com and was off-line due to small revisions Karpelson wanted to make. I ended up getting his email address from LuLu and contacted him directly - he was very nice and offered to sell me a copy from the existing print run. By the time I received it, I had no less than five other people, without prompting, ask whether I'd read the book. Talk about destiny.

So, for the Michael Karpelson's of the literary world, without whom authors as diverse as Camus, Marquez, Borges, and the Dalai Lama would have no means to speak to English-speaking readers, I raise a toast of appreciation.

[note: I will have a proper review of The Master and Margarita within the next week or so]