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This is a romp. While reading it I saw somewhere that Salman Rushdie said it was a major influence for him in the writing of The Satanic Verses. I have an inkling, unconfirmed at this point, that Gabriel García Márquez and Italo Calvino were also influenced by it. Several things about it surprise me. No doubt it's loaded with political subtext about Stalin's Russia; it was written during the years of the worst crimes of Stalin's regime. I speak here of "dekulakization," in which some 20 to 50 million people died, many succumbing to cannibalism, and the Moscow show trials so carefully dissected by Robert Conquest in his The Great Terror. But I was oblivious to any such subtext while reading this novel. What struck me was the lively picture it gives one of Moscow in the 1930s. The tenor of the city, its street life, not to mention the look of the place and the landscape surrounding it. The parks and public spaces. I had seen Moscow before in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but that was late 19th century Moscow, a provincial city parroting Parisian culture and language. I also remember--how can I forget?--the sinister Moscow of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. But here we have a Moscow bursting with life, with people enjoying their lives. Yet, it's also a Moscow that aspires to world dominance. It was that contradiction that was always foremost in my mind as I read. One wonders how Bulgakov did it? Turning out this fabulist masterpiece in the midst of such craziness, such instability. But all that aside the book is finally unlike anything I have ever read before. Description is really the book's strength: action and imagery. There's no plot to speak of. (You can look elsewhere in these reviews for a description of the storyline.) It's character driven. And it never flags. An absolutely astonishing book.

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