NP: The Master and Margarita

[Smoke Teff]

Sup y'all.

I'm rereading this book--P&V translation--and am gratified that it's as
great as I remembered it. I can't recall if I've seen it get any love
around here, but I really recommend. It's a brilliant book. A masterpiece,
I think, if you traffic in this most ridiculous of hyperboles.

Also, I'd put more money than I actually possess (this isn't saying much)
on Pynchon having read it probably before writing *Gravity's Rainbow*, and
definitely before *M&D *comes out (first English trans. of *TMaM* comes out
in I think '67, albeit with 60pp cut out). There are a lot of small details
and moments and atmospheres along the way that make me think this. But
anyway, here's translator Richard Pevear in his intro to my copy: "The
mobile but personal narrative voice of the novel, the closest model for
which Bulgakov may have found in Gogol's *Dead Souls, *is the perfect
medium for this continuous verbal construction. There is no multiplicity of
narrators in the novel. The voice is always the same. But it has unusual
range, picking up, parodying, or ironicaly undercutting the tones of the
novel's many characters, with undertones of lyric and epic poetry and old
popular tales."

At the very least I submit that a young Pynchon would've found some
spirituo-aesthetic kinship in Bulgakov. Lotsa paranoia round these parts.

If you haven't read, I urge.
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