The Master and Margarita

by Mikhail Bulgakov

The devil and his minions come to Moscow to cause mayhem in the literary society.

It all starts harmlessly enough, with the writers Berlioz and Bezdomny having a discussion about Jesus, as a stranger - most likely a foreigner - interjects and begins telling a story about Pontius Pilate. When, unexpectedly, he predicts the death of Berlioz on this very evening the pair of friends question his motives and sanity. The stranger tells of the death in great detail, mentioning some spilled oil and a decapitation. And this is what happens. Berlioz, slipping on oil falls under a street car and loses his head.

Berzdomny, who starts to realize who this stranger may be, follows him over land and water, losing his clothes along the way and ends up in a club wearing only underwear and talking about the devil and his elusiveness. Of course, everybody thinks he is mad and his friends have him brought to an asylum. It is there that he meets the Master in the title, but a few hundred pages into the book.

The devil, or Woland, as he becomes known, next moves into the apartment dead Berlioz left behind and arranges to appear in a varieté to stage a performance in black magic. This is a great success and the tricks he pulls include raining money on the audience and providing the women with new clothes. However, once the audience leave the theater the money turns into pieces of newspaper or - worse! - foreign currency...not something you want to be caught carrying around in Moscow. The clothes simply disappear, leaving women half naked out in the streets.

The on- goings in the apartment are more curious still. People enter it but when law enforcement, now looking for the group of villains, enter it, there is nobody there. Not Woland or one of his two helpers, Koroviev (aka Fagotto) and Behemoth, the cat.

Meanwhile, in the asylum, the Master tells Bezdomny his sad story. He wrote a book about Pontius Pilate that was not received as well as he'd hoped and he voluntarily went to the insane asylum while his lover, Margarita, was away to tell her husband she was going to leave him.

We meet Margarita herself at the beginning of part two (halfway through the book). She turns into a witch and flies on a broom to meet with Woland, where she is for an evening of entertainment dressed up and treated like a queen by a parade of deceased people. For her service, Woland grant her her wish to be reunited with her lover, who appears out of thin air, confused and still wearing his hospital gown.

The Master and Margarita eventually get to spend eternity together and fly off with Woland and his minions, but not after they cause some more damage and burn down a few buildings in their wake.

This book is quite the wild ride, barely catching a breath in the first half. The initial chapter introducing Margarita seems to slow it down a bit, but as soon as the rather gruesome and lengthy ball is over, it picks back up again and is most enjoyable.

It is not as confusing as I may make it sound. Very entertaining.

8/10

The Jane Austen Book Club

by Karen Joy Fowler

All right, here comes the big confession: I am not a Jane Austen fan.

I'll let that just sit there for a while.

...

Are you over it?

Okay then. I have never managed to read one of her books. I tried once - it might have been Pride or Prejudice (I don't even remember) - but what little I did read of it didn't leave much of an impression let alone further interest. Courtship, marriage, good/bad matches...not my cup of tea.

Therefore, I had no expectations whatsoever from this book. That was probably a good thing because I could take the book for what I think it is - a nice story about a bunch of people sharing a common interest (the only interest they share, apparently): Jane Austen. It wasn't asking much and still managed to give me enough interesting stories about the individual characters to go on.

Not that the characters were given much depth. The book covers roughly six months in their lives, so how much can you actually expect to learn about them? They are likable enough, except for Prudie, who would probably just annoy me if I knew her.

What bugged me, though, was the constant use of 'we'. It gave the feeling of an additional (unseen, unheard) book club member, because it was none of the others speaking. This was - I imagine - to give the reader the feeling of being included in the circle, which simply didn't work for me.

Otherwise, enjoyable read. Just don't expect much insight into Jane Austen herself, though.

4/10

Upcoming Reviews and the Reason Why

Over the next few days (weeks?) I will upload a number of reviews on books that I have read a while - in some cases years - ago. Basically, this will be a copy & past job from my musings on goodreads.com with updates to my previous thoughts...whenever memory serves enough to warrant them or, in case the time that has past has made me rethink certain aspects.

The reason is this announcement made by the owners of Goodreads.

 

Let me go into detail.

 

I use Amazon for buying books, as I come from a non-English-speaking country and acquiring specific books in the original English version is not as simple as going into your next (indepentent or chain) book store and picking it up there. The book stores here, even if they do have English language sections, tend to carry mostly 'popular' titles and I have a difficult time finding things that interest me through all the chick-lit that blocks my view. So, for the most part, Amazon it is.

 

However, I don't write Amazon reviews for a number of reasons (don't like the restrictions, couldn't be bothered, don't see it as 'a community', I could go on) and at this point I am not sure how the "merger" (yeah, right) will affect the use and ownership of the reviews I posted on Goodreads. Basically, I don't want to automatically have my thoughts posted on two different websites (with two different log-ins, no less).

 

Also, I always saw Goodreads as an independent site on which I can exchange thoughts with fellow readers - and, yes, real life friends - and don't have to worry about being pc about it (I will use the ocasional swear word). In contrast, Amazon is a business rather than a community. Where on Goodreads I trust that these are real, everyday people like me that share their views, I cannot say the same for the reviewers on Amazon. I don't know who these people are.

 

As for eReaders...I don't have one and at this point I don't want one. However, from the text published by Goodreads it appears that the Kindle readers are a more desired group than the rest of the eReader community. It almost reads like the others might be excluded from content and possibilities granted the Kindle community (there's that word again).

 

Right now I am in wait-and-see mode, but upcoming changes (and I guarantee there will be changes) might lead me to leave Goodreads and I don't want to lose the reviews I have on my virtual shelf. If I do leave you will know by the disappearance of the "currently reading" widget on the right.

 

If you have any recommendations about book blogs that are worth following, they are most welcome.

Chinua Achebe, 1930-1913

Chinua Achebe, writer of the brilliant Things Fall Apart, has died, aged 82.

Read the Guardian obituary.

Moonwalking with Einstein

by Joshua Foer

This is the story of how Joshua Foer became the US Memory Champion. He went from covering the event as a journalist to learning the art of memorizing things to winning the US championship in one year.

The book also covers some of the history of remembering and development of techniques to improve one's memory. Before computers or, even, print texts and information were stored by verbal repetition. People remembered things because they had to - like most of us (who are old enough) used to before we had the technical means to store information outside our brains. I myself used to remember phone numbers before I - or anyone else, for that matter - had a cell phone that remembered the numbers for me.

One of staples of memorization is the so-called 'loci' technique aka the memory palace. I have been introduced to it in a course I once participated in. From that one off experiment of trying to recall a list of 30 random words by placing them in different places in the house I grew up in I can confirm that it does actually work. I could recall the list of words forwards and backwards for days.

Mr. Foer meets up with an illustrious group of mnemonics that compete in various championships as well as some so-called 'savants', whose stories he sometimes calls into question (not their abilities, but the way they claim to remember and/or calculate things). All the while, he trains his own brain to prepare for the big event.

The championship includes disciplines like learning the names of people on photo head shots, remembering random numbers, remembering the correct order of stacks of playing cards  etc. 

At the front door, I saw my friend Liz vivisecting a pig (two of hearts, two of diamonds, three of hearts). Just inside, the Incredible Hulk rode a stationary bike while a pair of oversize, loopy earrings weighed down his earlobes (three of clubs, seven of diamonds, jack of spades). Next to the mirror at the bottom of the stairs, Terry Bradshaw balanced on a wheelchair (seven of hearts, nine of diamonds, eight of hearts), and just behind him, a midget jockey in a sombrero parachuted from an airplane with an umbrella (seven of spades, eight of diamonds, four of clubs). [...] I saw my friend Ben urinating on Benedict XVI's papal skullcap (ten of diamonds, two of clubs, six of diamonds), Jerry Seinfeld sprawled out bleeding on the hood of a Lamborghini in the hallway (five of hearts, ace of diamonds, jack of hearts), ad at the foot of my parents' bedroom door, myself moonwalking with Einstein (four of spades, king of hearts, three of diamonds).

Quite interesting and easy read.

7/10

The Green Beads: Edward Gorey and the "Disturbed Person"

A digitalized version of Edward Gorey's rare "The Green Beads" can be found here.

Douglas Adams Is Still the King of Comic Science Fiction

I should have shared this yesterday, as it was Douglas Adam's birthday (and Google took note of it, as well). Read the article in The Guardian.

Be Bold with Bananas

This is a real book, published in 1972. Sadly, it appears to be out of print. Not that I would actually want it, but I would not mind leafing through. There are several sample pictures available on the internet, which show that the color scheme used on the cover (read: ugly) is used for the entire book.

Quote. Joshua Foer

If the point of reading were simply to retain knowledge, it would probably be the single least efficient activity I engage in. I can spend a half dozen hours reading a book and then have only a foggy notion of what it was about. All those facts and anecdotes, even the stuff interesting enough to be worth underlining, have a habit of briefly making an impression on me and then disappearing into who knows where. There are books on my shelf that I can't even remember whether I've read or not.

from Moonwalking with Einstein

I hear ya, Joshua Foer, I hear ya.

Case Histories

by Kate Atkinson

Mystery novels and female authors are not really my thing (and yes, I know how that last bit sounds).

Kate Atkinson is one of the glorious exceptions. This is the third book I read by her, the others being Behind the Scenes at the Museum (which I adored) and When Will There Be Good News (like Case Histories, a Jackson Brodie mystery).

Case Histories is the first in the Jackson Brodie series. Jackson has quit the police force a few years back, is a newly divorced weekend dad to young Marlee and his work as a PI is rather slow going. Then he is asked to investigate a three cases in short succession.

Firstly, the diappearence of little Olivia from a tent in the garden over a decade ago.

Secondly, the murder of a young woman by a man in a yellow sweater - also a while back.

Thirdly, a runaway whose mother was found beside the dead body of her husband, axe still in hand - also a while back.

All three get dragged back up by relatives of the victims for various reasons. Jackson starts to investigate, all the while having angry exchanges with his ex-wife and meetings with a strange elderly woman (his first ever client Binky Rain) who keeps calling him about her cats getting 'stolen'. And in the middle of it all, someone is trying to kill him.

Whereas the premise sounds overly confusing, Ms. Atkinson manages to weave all these stories into one bigger picture with overlapping conclusions to all three cases.

Really entertaining.

7/10

Literary Caucus

Philip Roth is the greatest US writer. This according to a panel made up of 30 "notables" (whatever that means). It is detailed in this Volture article.

I'm not sure what gives me more pause - that I have never read a book by Philip Roth or that of all the writers included in the panel (such as Bret Easton Ellis, Neil LaBute, Jonathan Lethem, Sam Lipsyte) the headline names James Franco along with Salman Rushdie.