Trying to give you a sense of what it's like to read The Master and Margarita

I'll try to give just a little sense of the oddness of Mikhail Bulgakov's "The Master and Margarita," though it is hard to capture the essence of this novel, hard to convey the sense you get when reading it, hard actually to read it - but completely captivating in its bizarre way. For example: a long chapter near the mid-point in the novel involves the main antagonist, variously known as the foreign visitor, the consultant, the professor - and in this guise as Wolford the Magician (we intuit from the outset and are so informed later that he is in fact Satan come to visit contemporary, i.e., 1930s, Moscow) - conducts a magic act in a theater crowded with the Moscow elite. The act gets off to a sluggish start but become ever more complex and astonishing and ultimately leads to Wolford's beheading of a member of the audience - the man's body sits in a chair and his head is off to the side, screaming in agony and distress - bring me back to my body! - and blood is spurting out from the severed neck. People in the audience scream in terror and pity, and the financial manager of the theater - Rimsky (man characters named after composers, for some odd reason - who knows?) is very upset about potential revenue loss. Wolford relents and reunites head and body. An incredible magic act - no reader would believe it except as pure fantasy concoction - but then we think, what does it mean? It means something on an emotional level and also on a political level: think of the societies where dissenters and outcasts are executed, for example. And how does the rest of the society act while the tyrants behead their opponents? Perhaps with some distress - but also, hey, the show must go on. It's all for entertainment. That's a bit of the mood of this odd novel: the following chapter involves a would-be author who could not get his books published - because they're about Pontius Pilate and they don't meet literary standards of the day - yet even those who won't publish him go to the truble of writing articles denouncing his unpublished writings - so he burns his manuscripts and plunges into madness and despair - in fact all outcast characters, including the now traumatized beheaded man, revert to the mental clinic (run by Stravinsky) - and again the story seems odd and unlikely but think about those - even Bulgakov himself - whose works are suppressed and then they're denounced, without even the benefit of publication. The M&M is on one level an antic romp like many other comic novels - a form particularly popular in the 60s - and on another is a political expose, much more pointed and powerful than, say Darkness at Noon, because of the breadth of its vision of society - not about just one prisoner in despair but about a whole culture - and on a third level is metapolitical, an expose of the horrors of the human mind and of human behavior in extremes, like Kafka but more grounded in a local habitation.