Jules

jesus. ok, so, it's good, right? actually, it's fucking beautiful. yes, i needed someone to force me to read it - three separate someones, in fact, all professors with the ability to at least explain why this was worth reading, and to clarify some of the latinate language where needed. but how the fuck are you supposed to rate THE Paradise Lost on an Amazon affiliate? like, this text is the epitome of public university education. it's dusty tomes on library shelves and quiet English reading-rooms with yellow oil light. it's not a beach read, or a bus read, or a sitting-in-bed-after-work-trying-to-just-have-an-interesting-night read. this text is absolutely worth reading, but only for like, 2 percent of all possible reading situations.

so whether i recommend the book comes down to context, as it always does, i guess, but especially here. are you an English Major? are you an English Graduate Student? are you an English - dare I say it - Professor? if so, two things: 1) i'm sorry and 2) read this book, not just because you should, but because you're probably weird enough to enjoy it.

“Manuscripts don't burn.”

“Everything will turn out right. That's what the world was built on.”

“He has not earned light, only peace.”

70% amusing satire of Soviet society with a light comic tone, 30% aching reflection on art and the human experience. Some passages that made me stop and appreciate, though sadly not the kind of thing one can capture in a quote. The story of Pilate defies simple summary and can't be taken apart in brief, at least not by me. It's subtle and very clever, what Bulgakov does with agency, tense, detail. And the story echoes beyond itself a bit, especially towards the end, when Bulgakov was dying and knew his novel would never be published without significant censorship; the exhaustion, the quiet acceptance, the determination that it mattered - the manuscript can burn because “I remember it by heart”, and “I shall never forget anything again.”

Anyway, minus a star for gender politics that are tiresome and predictable, if not malicious. The restrained style doesn't lend itself to rich internality, but Margarita's almost comic-book - she's beautiful and intelligent, but frivolous, and she's utterly devoted to the Master. She's a wife, then a witch, then a wife again, and that's all women are throughout the novel. Margarita gets an intriguing moment at the ball - the episode with Frieda - where she's almost something else, resonating with Yeshua, but it goes away, and in the end she's little more than a dog.

this book is truly fucking punk and it would be a 5/5 if Irvine Welsh could write women beyond their vaginas

edit: i'm not changing the rating but i'm adding it to my favorites shelf because it belongs there, even if it isn't perfect

this is one of those books i read in high school that made me realize i wanted to study books for as long as i could. part of it, i think, is that it's in many ways a Literary Achievement, and on the surface it lends itself to that close reading mumbo-jumbo we all get hammered into our brains. it's a fun game to play and there's plenty to play with in here. but when you go deeper - and i confess, i really need to revisit this book to confirm it, with quotes - there's something unearthly about where she goes with all those earthly techniques. there's always something just beyond a flat-ironed reading, always a little disconnection - a bit of a fuck-off, look-away to it that i really appreciate. again: i have to go back and read again to make that make sense. but i feel like i had to write something down in the meantime.

very nearly wrote an honors thesis on this before i decided to take another path - fascinating play. i'll write a review someday

i would prefer not to write a review at this time

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edit: i find myself thinking about this story way too often. somehow melville was both ahead of his time and precisely in it with this one - published only a few years after the communist manifesto, “bartleby” hits the nail re: managerial capitalism and the experience of its professional class. to be fair, i read this at the tail end of an english major, just before i entered my own little corner of the white-collar workforce. and okay, maybe i write these reviews when i'm putting off work. i could unpack that, but i would prefer not to

Clunky and childish. Not so much fantasy as a 19th century travelogue with a thin coat of paint over some real-world cultures and, allegedly, dragons. I wouldn't mind if it were at least a good travelogue, but it's not. The narrator's voice is strong (if a little twee for my taste) and the main character, while hard to like at times, is well developed. But Brennan can't compose an actual scene to save her life. She's too far in her head, or her character's head, or whatever. I wouldn't mind it if this were a case of involved worldbuilding that turns into a dry but earnest infodump, but it's the opposite - the world barely feels like fantasy at all. Our 19th century #girlboss talks a big game about her scientitic passion for dragons, and you'd expect to hear a lot about them, but instead we plod around Romania saying racist things about the locals and occasionally get a few paragraphs of dragon that are somehow even duller than the rest of it. Pass.