Notes on The Master and Margarita

‘MANUSCRIPTS don’t burn’.–Woland, The Master and Margarita

Recently I re-read this classic, long my favourite book, and I re-discovered why that is. It always amazes me how Bulgakov changes his tone and phrasing, here switching to an everyday, very Russian dry humour and wit, and there to an almost science-fiction exposition. Some notes:

‘… Let me see it.’ Woland held out his hand, palm up.

‘Unfortunately, I cannot do that,’ replied the master, ‘because I burned it in the stove.’

‘Forgive me, but I don’t believe you,’ Woland replied, ‘that cannot be: manuscripts don’t burn.’

Ideas: the most incredible and indestructible creation of humankind. Once an idea is created, it can never be destroyed.

‘No, because you’ll be afraid of me. It won’t be very easy for you to look me in the face now that you’ve killed him.’

‘Quiet,’ replied Pilate. ‘Take some money.’

Levi shook his head negatively, and the procurator went on:

‘I know you consider yourself a disciple of Yeshua, but I can tell you that you learned nothing of what he taught you. For if you had, you would certainly take something from me. Bear in mind that before he died he said he did not blame anyone.’ Pilate raised a finger significantly, Pilate’s face was twitching. ‘And he himself would surely have taken something. You are cruel, and he was not cruel….’

How incredible it would be to not be cruel and petty in this world.

‘… You uttered your words as if you don’t acknowledge shadows, or evil either. Kindly consider the question: what would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it? Shadows are cast by objects and people. … Do you want to skin the whole earth, tearing all the trees and living things off it, because of your fantasy of enjoying bare light? You’re a fool.’

Ah, how clean-cut good and evil are to the Devil … on a grand scale, you need evil to balance out the good. Of course, this is ignoring the minutiae … maybe the Devil’s not in the details, but rather in the grand scheme of things?

‘… If it is true that cowardice is the most grievous vice, then the dog at least is not guilty of it. Storms were the only thing the brave dog feared. Well, he who loves must share the lot of the one he loves.’

An echo of the master and Margarita?

St Urbain's Horseman

I’VE read a couple of other Mordecai Richler books by now, but this one was probably the most passionate, the most powerful. A man caught between two generations, between the Holocaust and the hippies, Jake Hersh is driven by a code of conscience and social justice that he feels is the only way to live up to the memory of his cousin and childhood hero, Joey. Joey who stood up to the anti-Semitism of Montreal in the ’40s, only to be run out of town. Who then went on a world-wide walkabout, rousting and rabble-raising and, seemingly, hunting down Nazi war criminals.

Meanwhile, Jake makes a life of comfort and luxury for himself, starts a family and settles for a peaceful home life. All the while tormented by his social conscience, a growing unease and a sense that the world is too unfair to let him live out such a good life without repercussions.

The chapters bled into each other, the pages flew by in a blur, and before I knew it it was over. Still, there were passages which stood out brilliantly, that you devoured because they were just so damn good.

Reading this passage reminded me intensely of the deshi diaspora in Western countries–so ironic:

Sitting with the Hershes, day and night, a bottle of Remy Martin parked between his feet, such was Jake’s astonishment, commingled with pleasure, in their responses, that he could not properly mourn for his father. He felt cradled, not deprived. He also felt like Rip Van Winkle returned to an innocent and ordered world he had mistakenly believed long extinct. Where God watched over all, doing His sums. Where everything fit. Even the holocaust which, after all, had yielded the state of Israel. Where to say, ‘Gentlemen, the Queen,’ was to offer the obligatory toast to Elizabeth II at an affair, not to begin a discussion on Andy Warhol. Where smack was not habit-forming, but what a disrespectful child deserved; pot was what you simmered the chicken soup in; and camp was where you sent the boys for the summer. It was astounding, Jake was incredulous, that after so many years and fevers, after Dachau, after Hiroshima, revolution, rockets in Space, DNA, bestiality in the streets, assassinations in and out of season, there were still brides with shining faces who were married in white gowns, posing for the Star social pages with their prizes, pear-shaped boys in evening clothes. There were aunts who sold raffles and uncles who swore by the Reader’s Digest. French Canadians, like overflying airplanes distorting the TV picture, were only tolerated. DO NOT ADJUST YOUR SET, THE TROUBLE IS TEMPORARY. Aunts still phoned each other every morning to say what kind of cake they were baking. Who had passed this exam, who had survived that operation. A scandal was when a first cousin was invited to the bar mitzvah kiddush, but not the dinner. Eloquence was the rabbi’s sermon. They were ignorant of the arts, they were overdressed, and their taste was appallingly bad. But within their self-contained world, there was order. It worked.

As nobody bothered to honor them, they very sensibly celebrated each other at fund-raising synagogue dinners, taking turns at being Man-of-the-Year, awarding each other ornate plates to hang over the bar in the rumpus room. Furthermore, God was interested in the fate of the Hershes, with time and consideration for each one. To pray was to be heard. There was not even death, only an interlude below ground. For one day, as Rabbi Polsky assured them, the Messiah would blow his horn, they would rise as one and return to Zion … .

And this captured the exact feeling of when you suspect that you have it too good, that you’re one of the top percentiles out of the billions on this planet:

… From the beginning, he had expected the outer, brutalized world to intrude on their little one, inflated by love but ultimately self-serving and cocooned by money. The times were depraved. Tenderness in one house, he had come to fear, was no more possible, without corruption, than socialism in a single country. And so, from the earliest, halcyon days with Nancy, he had expected the coming of the vandals. Above all, the injustice-collectors. The concentration camp survivors. The emaciated millions of India. The starvelings of Africa.

I probably didn’t get most of the jokes. There were scenes and passages that brought a smile to my face, but nothing like the laugh-out-loud humour others seemed to find. Not like Barney’s Version, but of course that’s a story for another blog post.

Logicomix--Mathematics & Madness

I BOUGHT Logicomix last Sunday and, reading feverishly on my lunch breaks, and in transit between home and work, finished it yesterday. Admittedly, I tried at first to draw out the pleasure, but finally gave up and glutted myself.

One thing: Logicomix is, as the name suggests, a comic book. Or rather, a graphic novel. But from here on I refer to it as a book because frankly, it's just trying to tell a story in the most interesting way possible.

Starting at the beginning though, I have to say I'd never have learned about it if not for this fine New York Times review. The book is on their best-seller list, and deservedly.

How do I describe the story? It's a story-within-a-story-within-a-story. The authors put themselves in the book, discussing the process by which they're trying to present the life and ideas of Bertrand Russell. That makes the book self-referential, which is ironic in the context of the story it's telling.

The main story is the life of the mathematician-philosopher Bertrand Russell and his titanic struggle to uncover the most fundamental meaning of logic (and therefore math, science and philosophy).

Russell lived in a time of great upheaval in the mathematical, logic and philosophy communities. He collaborated, and sparred, intellectually with such greats as Alfred North Whitehead, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gottlob Frege, Georg Cantor, Kurt Gödel and David Hilbert (to name just a few). Their passion and drive is explored, and the authors actively try to explain, what made them so great, so insanely driven? (Russell and Whitehead worked on a book trying to explain all of mathematics for ten years before finally giving up and releasing it, unfinished.)

The authors seem to think there was a connection between their logical worldviews and some innate streak of madness. And they don't shy away from exploring this graphically, taking full advantage of the comic medium to show, for example, Russell waking from a nightmare of chaos, face contorted in fear and near-insanity.

Indeed, the authors are definitely not afraid of taking liberties with details of the story to add to the dramatic tension. They've done extensive research on the lives and ideas of everyone in the book--turn to the bibliography in the back if you don't believe me--and they feel, and I agree with them, that these changes add to the tightness and structure of the story. Sometimes you do get a feeling that a conversation seems too contrived, but honestly, the feeling is just washed away by the incredible ideas you encounter.

So is this a math book, stuffed full of math? Well yes and no. It's stuffed full of math and logic ideas, but there's not a single equation in the whole story. The ideas are explained by their creators and their best lovers, the protagonists of the story. You grasp them from the bird's-eye view and you get them, without needing to do a single sum.

So near the beginning of this post, I said it's ironic that the book is self-referential. Let me explain: the problem of logical statements that are self-referential is one that has puzzled great minds, including Russell's, for centuries. For example, how to interpret the following statement?

This statement is false.

If the above statement is false, then it must be true. And if it's true, it must be false!

Near the end, the authors hint that the end of their story is really just the beginning of the much greater story of the renaissance of mathematics with computer science. I'm eagerly looking forward to a follow-up book (or books?). Wishing every success to the authors.

Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna.

Offtopic: Trying out the MarsEdit blog editor on the Mac to see if it's worth paying for.

The Master and Margarita

I STARTED writing a small review of this book on my Facebook `Books' application, but then realised I had a lot to say about it. And one of the small book-review applications on Facebook is not a good place for a book such as this. (Which is actually a sad indictment of all my other book reviews there. Have to get them out here sometime.)

I heard about this book some time back, while I was in Malaysia I guess, as part of a controversy--a Russian film adaptation had been made, and was being denounced by religious groups there as being demonic because it showed a witch on a broomstick (and other things). If they had read the book, they would have seen how ludicrous that is.

It's a very complex book, hard to describe. I wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone who loves to read, though. The editorial review on the book's Amazon.com page certainly does it a lot of justice.

Having read it a long time ago, I'm fuzzy on the plot details, but I do remember this: I found the book absolutely gripping, right from the first chapter. It's a story about Yeshua (Jesus Christ) in Jerusalem shortly after he was denounced by Judas Iscariot and brought before Pontius Pilate; the Master (a persecuted and marginalised writer in Soviet Russia), his faithful lover Margarita, and the Devil, Woland. That is certainly a wide-ranging story. And the plots are mixed in such a way that blurs the distinction between story and story-teller.

Bulgakov's imagination is certainly gripping. The characters and antics he dreams up are surreal and, at times, chilling. Woland comes to Moscow with his retinue of disguised demons; wreaks havoc on the Soviet literary establishment and high society; tempts Margarita with the promise of complete freedom from society's rules and boundaries; and in the process causes the Master and Margarita to be reunited, and their mutual story about Yeshua to be completed as they ride off, the Master healed after all his years in the wilderness, and Margarita finally at peace by his side.

Seriously. Read it. Update: read it with U2's Until the End of the World playing in the background.

The Trojan War was never this good

Read Dan Simmons' Ilium and Olympos a couple of months ago, but haven't gotten round to talking about them till now. First of all, it's true that they're actually one book published as two, probably because if they were published in one piece nobody would buy a book that fat, and sales would be half as much as they were with two books instead of one.

Second, the book is not about the gods and Trojans and Greeks of the recreated Trojan war battlefield of far-future Mars; it's really about the future of humanity and what shape it might take. Simmons draws from a lot of literary sources, primarily Shakespeare (The Tempest) but also Proust (stuff I'm not familiar with) and Vernes (i.e. his Time Machine Eloi and Morlocks ideas).

The thing is, the story starts off with the scholic Thomas Hockenberry telling of the recreated war, and it's immediately gripping, especially to a guy like me who grew up reading his sci-fi on one hand and Greek/Norse/Egyptian mythology on the other. It's gripping for all the reasons the original mythologies are gripping -- the heroes and their stories are larger than life, etc. But the Trojan War storyline intercuts with that of the humans on Earth and the Moravecs on Jupiter, which takes the wind out of it somewhat, because you have all these new characters you didn't know before that you have to deal with, and you just want to get back to reading what Achilles did next.

Achilles by the way is the most interesting character in the story and Simmons lavishes him with detailed description, enough to satisfy any geek. Achilles the man-killer, Achilles the god-killer, Achilles the fleet-footed, Achilles this, and Achilles that. For some reason I kept imagining Brad Pitt as Achilles throughout the story, and it fit, right to the end. (But Eric Bana as Hector didn't -- Hector needs a stronger jawline, and a taller, more muscular figure).

The stories do converge, but they approach convergence from different points, and there's a lot of suspense. I won't bother with a detailed analysis of the thing here, but it's definitely enjoyable. I do want to talk about some of Simmons' ideas for the future of humanity though. Humans ten thousand years in the future are a sad, childlike lot, with every need catered to by robot servants and, who don't know how to read because they don't need to, and spend most of their time partying and pursuing other pleasures. Sounds perfect, but there's no intellectual stuff, no advanced thought. Simmons has a characters in the books disparagingly refer to them as `post-literate'. Ouch.

But these Eloi do have an interesting feature: they have been genetically modified to contain a hundred cybernetic functions, like a map/locator function that projects holographic images of the person being located; body status query functions; and advanced stuff like infonet access, the infonet being a semi-conscious web of information evolved from the internet which now blankets the planet. This infonet is extremely powerful -- it contains a huge amount of data, like information about every molecule in every cell of a tree the infonet user might be looking at. It's described as being totally overwhelming. You see the information, but you don't understand most of the knowledge contained in it. Oh, and you activate these functions by visualising combinations of coloured geometric shapes in your mind's eye. At least, until you can do it without thinking.

The `old-style', Earth-human protagonists introduced have a destiny to fulfill -- to recover the ability to use these advanced functions and recover the technological knowledge lost to the human race. But that's about it. There is some stuff about recovering some ten thousand humans encoded in a tachyon beam orbiting the Earth, but that's just another problem in the myriad collection of problems and mysteries the humans are faced with.

The infonet plays a large part in the book, actually -- combined with some really wild interpretations of quantum theory and post-human technology. It's a good read, but I still think the Trojan War part of the story should have been a different story altogether -- or rather, the story of the old-style humans on Earth should have been a different story, say The Final Fax. The Trojan War parts of the books would have made a kick-ass movie -- especially Achilles' visit to the pit of Tartarus in Hades, in the presence of the original Greek gods, the Titans, imprisoned there by Zeus.

The Wheel of Time -- The Eye of the World

Wheeling Round and Round

Finished Robert Jordan's The Eye of the World and it was a whopper. The story itself is 782 pages. Not the longest I've read, but remarkable because the whole book is nothing more than a setup, even a leaflet, for the rest of the series. And wheels within wheels: almost the whole of the book is a setup for the last couple of chapters, where it really gets exciting.

The book as a whole is a long journey, a long series of hair-breadth escapes, interspersed with threatening dreams, drawn out but at the same time picking up more and more pace, until the explosive ending. The ending makes you want to go out and get the next book pretty much immediately.

But that's not the first thing that struck me, by far, while I was reading it. That would be the similarities to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Here are a basic few:

• Two Rivers = The Shire
• Tam al'Thor = Frodo, brings back `ring' (either Rand or the sword, or both, depending on how you look at it) from his adventures abroad
  
• Fellowship sets out on quest
• Mischievious Mat Cauthon = Mischevious Pippin Took
• Moiraine = Gandalf
• Lan = Aragorn
  
• Sauron = Ba'alzamon
• Fades hunting our `hobbits' = Ringwraiths
• Trollocs = orcs
  
• Padan Fain = Gollum
• Journey to Blight = Trip to Mordor. Pack light, heroes! :-)
• Children of the Light capture Perrin & Egwene = Faramir's gang captures Frodo, Sam & Gollum. OK, this is stretching it a bit
• Green Man = Tom Bombadil, only sadder
• Green Man = Ent
• Egwene sounds like Éowyn
  

Um, am I forgetting anything?

Anyway, I do appreciate that there are definitely big differences. Jordan writes in more modern prose, with more short, sharp sentences for dramatic effect. Short. Dramatic. And he avoids, for the most part, Tolkien's rambling descriptions of this valley here, that nook and cranny there, that seem to go on for days. Oh, and a blessed avoidance of accented characters in names. But they're more than made up for with a liberal dose of apostrophes. Check out the names of some of the main Trolloc tribes (and I've thrown in their roots in monster names): Ahf'frait (afreet), Al'ghol (ghoul), Bhan'sheen (banshee), Dha'vol (devil), Dhai'mon (guess this one), Dhjin'nen (djinn), Ghar'ghael (gargoyle), Ghob'hlin (again, guess), Gho'hlem (golem), Ghraem'lan (gremlin).

But I digress. There is the One Power, a mystical force which comes from the True Source of the universe, drives the eternal Wheel of Time, and empowers a few chosen individuals with great power but at the risk of death and/or madness. But then again, it's like Tolkien's One Ring where it gives you power against the bad guy but the price is high. The real revelation is the turning of the Wheel of Time, where apparently the ages come and go and come again; nothing new ever happens. Civilisations rise and fall, and fall some more, in the eternal battle (you know the one, Good v Evil). Mankind continues to lose science and technology because it just can't get a firm foothold on the Earth before it's all toppled away again. Bleak outlook, really. But then I've heard there are thirteen books in this series, each one presumably as fat as the first. With that kind of length, what else could Jordan be doing but telling the story of the liberation of humanity from the yoke of the Wheel? Guess I'll have to find out. But it's what I would do.