Monday, December 16, 2013

The Master and Margarita








Mikhail Bulgakov’s classic The Master and Margarita grows on you, so the reader should be patient and give the author at least 75 pages to lay the ground work of his masterpiece.

This book would probably not survive by today’s publishing standards.   The reader does not even meet Margarita, the main character, until Part II, page 186!  he would be forced to move her forward in the novel, thereby ruining the dramatic pace.  For she is worth the wait.   
 
Bulgarkov creates a world that is at once frightening and fantastic, at turns magical and mundane.  There is a bit of everything in The Master and Margarita for the patient reader.   And patience will be returned by the end, as this novel reaches a kind of transcendent crescendo.

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