The Master and Margarita

Bulgakov drops a talking cat into a satire of Soviet Moscow and somehow the prose flows smoothly enough that it never once feels like a gimmick, which is the part that stuck with me longest after finishing. A working knowledge of Russian history helps, I looked up more footnotes than I usually bother with, and even without catching every metaphor I could tell most of the characters here are doing double duty as ideas as much as people. Good and evil aren’t clean categories in this book, the forces that read as good mostly come across as works in progress trying to be good rather than anything settled, which felt truer to how people actually behave than a cleaner allegory would have.

Where it lost me a little was Margarita’s devotion to the Master himself, that thread never quite convinced me the way the satire around it did, it’s the weakest plotline in an otherwise daring book. The backdrop swings between comedic and outright farcical scene to scene, and I found myself less sure whether a given beat was meant as slapstick or something darker until well after I’d read it, which I think is intentional but occasionally left me feeling like I was laughing at the wrong moment.

I finished it thinking this is a genuinely remarkable book given the circumstances it was written under, and also thinking I’d need a second read to actually catch what I missed the first time. I’m comfortable saying both of those things are true. Not every book earns rereading just for the parts you didn’t get. This one does.