november 2023

The Master and Margarita [Мастер и Маргарита, Master i Margarita], Mikhail Bulgakov. 1967. 415pp. Transl. by Michael Glenny. I have no idea where I got this book; maybe it appeared spontaneously in my house.

The Devil comes to Moscow as a Looney Toon. Its high stature puzzles me some, which is not to say I didn't like it. Among so many scenes of wacky demonic slapstick (p. 360, "the cat whipped a Browning automatic from behind its back"), the sequences with deeper ambitions are outnumbered, but some are captivating--the woman, freed from social decorum by the Devil, bathing naked in the black river; that troubling (bedevilling?) novel-within-a-novel of Pontius Pilate. Confusing to follow at times, for which I feel secure, after Brothers Karamazov, blaming Bulgakov and not myself.

+++

Travels in Hyperreality, Umberto Eco. 1986. 324pp. Transl. by William Weaver. Shed Bookstore, Calgary, AB.

Eco's great enthusiasm for everything and willingness to speak on anything are perhaps marks of overambition that characterize the popular academic philosopher, but the results are often endearing and interesting. Stellar  turns of thought appear scattered throughout; the gestalt doesn't always strike the balance of rigour and poetics. The title essay is worth the rest of the collection. Writers at the level of fame Eco attained are often incentivized to publish their less favourite works alongside their excellent works so as to make up the length of a book, and I have the impression many of these pieces were written under deadline for magazines. Prendiamo quello pane, Eco.

p. 217: "...marked by the plots of the symbolic, which, as always happens, has proved producer of reality."

+++

Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence, eds. Rosemary Curb and Nancy Manahan. 1985. 362pp. The Book Shop, Penticton, BC.

This collection of almost 50 submitted essays and interviews from women across North America of the titular description are striking and beautiful for their great alikeness. Of course, as a result, the reader without pre-existing interest in the archival and consciousness-raising aims of the collection may find she hits saturation somewhere in the middle. Across the cloistered worlds described, the interpretations of desires and the boundaries between them are blurred, friendship between women is as troublesome as marriage, making love often occurs over the clothes, "chastity" is employed to describe a hundred middle positions of promise and compromise. A short and memorable essay comes from a South American woman--she withholds the name of her home country for privacy--who joins, then leaves, a Benedictine convent in Connecticut after her female lover dies in a plane crash. She says, p. 215:  "Sometimes, I remember little things. I can see my cell right now. I can see the chapel. Somehow I cannot see the garden; it is lost. I walked there many times but I cannot see it now."

+++

Movies and TV:

• Stop Making Sense (1984) dir. Jonathan Demme, again
• Anatomy of a Fall (2023) dir. Justine Triet
• Salt of the Earth (1954) dir. Herbert J. Biberman
• Sisters [Māsas] (2023) dir. Linda Olte
• The Master (2012) dir. Paul Thomas Anderson
• Birdy (1984) dir. Alan Parker
• Breaking Dawn Part 1 (2011) dir. Bill Condon

♫