NP Satan in Lit

[Monte Davis]

 Kai sez:
 
> Bulgakow's "Master i Margarita" (in the German translation of Thomas
Reschke)  
> is the best book I've read this year so far.  
 
It's a favorite of mine, too. If somehow it could have been published (and
widely translated) in 1937 or 1940, instead of creeping into world literary
consciousness as it did in the 1960s and 1970s -- in variously truncated and
restored versions, and inevitably with some flavor of a "historical
curiosity" -- I think we'd have a different notion of the origins of "black
humor," "magic realism," and allied tendencies (or at least labels) that
turn up in the grab-bag of Pynchonian satire. Fictional stances that our
usual discourse traces to post-WWII Western consumer culture are a
surprisingly good fit for Stalin's Moscow.
 
For those who haven't read it: imagine a mash-up of Faust, the "Grand
Inquisitor" section of Karamazov, and Darkness at Noon. Now make it very
funny, in the sense that the Mittelwerk chase in GR or the LA apocalypse in
The Day of the Locust are funny... y'know, with the stench of death wafting
in from the wings.
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