MasterAndMargareadalong Post V: The devil, believe me, will arrange everything!

This is it, the final post for the final chapters of this MasterAndMargareadalong, hosted by fearless leader Alice.

I feel so naive. Because, despite all evidence to the contrary, I legitimately thought something was going to happen in these last chapters that were going to pull everything together and shed light on what we just read. My eyes would be opened and I would understand everything.

Let's see if we can make sense of this ending.

Margarita finishes reading the Master's Pilate fanfic, and instead of realizing she's made a terrible mistake, what with the whole deal-with-the-devil-for-this bit, she seems pretty happy with the story. Just...ugh. I hope you guys are happy together.

Some of the people who were disappeared are returned, though no one can explain how Woland & co. were able to do their performance and paperwork around this is a Very Big Deal. Police are trying to figure out where people have been and what's the deal with apartment 50 and oh yeah, Margarita and Natasha seem to have gone missing. Except, OF COURSE they are most concerned with the apartment, so police are dispatched there where they get into a shootout with Behemoth, who sets the apartment on fire and then jumps out the window. Now NO ONE CAN HAVE IT!

Then we get maybe one of the best chapters cos it's just Behemoth and Koroviev screwing with people and I realize I wish the book was just these guys. Maybe these 2 plus Margarita and Natasha being witches together. They show up at the restaurant/house/thing from the early chapters where all the literary people hang out, where they get fancy food before police show up to continue their shootout and another place gets set on fire.

I feel like I may have misunderstood this next part. Like, I hope I am missing something. But what I got was, Matthew Levi shows up to tell Woland that Jesus read the Master's Pilate novel AND LOVES IT!!!

It isn't quite enough to immediately get the Master and Margarita into heaven but they get "peace" and for some reason the Devil is in charge of this?

Azazello poisons M&M but then revives them, except they're still dead but now get to hang out with Woland & co. and ride around on flying horses. They fly off to somewhere and meet Pilate and his dog Banga and the Master gets to release him from his torment and what? What?

Fine. Whatever. I don't know happened with this book. Was this a happy ending? It seemed happy, but honestly I don't even know. Did Woland show up in Moscow to get the Master, and screwing with people was just something to do since he was in the area? Or was the purpose just to randomly mess with Russians and the Master thing just sort of worked out that way? Can someone else make heads or tails of this?

The point is we're finished with the book and now I can say I've read it. So success.

Title quote from page 365

Bulgakov, Mikhail. trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The Master and Margarita. Penguin Classics, 1997. Originally published 1966.

I'm no plucky heroine, claiming ignorance of her quiet beauty and quirky charm

I got The Luckiest Girl as part of the Just The Right Book and I'm beginning to think that while I say I like thrillers, perhaps I am wrong and that's not actually the genre I like. Because yeah, most of the time I end up eye-rolling HARD at those books. Maybe it's crime? Or noir? I dunno. Maybe I just kept getting thrown thrillers that were Not My Thing. Also maybe this isn't really a thriller because genre labels seem so vague ("Thrillers are characterized and defined by the moods they elicit, giving viewers heightened feelings of suspense, excitement, surprise, anticipation and anxiety" so sayeth Wikipedia) so that could also be part of the problem. ANYWAY. This book.

First up: I was going to put this behind a spoiler tag but then I found this link on Book Riot which talks about a part of the book, so if you want zero spoilers maybe skip this paragraph. Anyway, that story (which I can't find now, but I swear is real) was about how the author's real gang rape informed the story so yeah, that happens here, so be warned (those of you who don't mind spoilers. Others I guess, sorry). And how the author's real life behavior (getting a job at Cosmo, focused on getting the right guy and the right zip code) mimicked that of her main character and now I feel bad for the fact that Ani, the main character in this book, is just terrible. I feel like if I say that then I'm saying the author is terrible and I'm sure she's not. Although I guess who knows, maybe she is, I don't know her. But I assume not, because she's a real person and likely has more facets than Ani FaNelli.

So the basic story is Ani has a seemingly perfect life, working for the important The Woman's Magazine* a fashion magazine in the Cosmo realm, she's super skinny, something she works very hard at, she has the TriBeca apartment, a rich fiancee. All that stuff that seems to truly matter in chick-lit style books. Also, she's just the worst. She's manipulative and a liar and superficial. There are cracks in her perfect veneer (not those previous descriptors, that's just her personality) but they don't really amount to much. Then we, the reader, learn about the dark secrets she has in her past.

Except, I had a problem with the "dark secrets threaten her current perfect life" deal. She doesn't actually confront anything new. As a matter of fact, most people in the story seem to already know her dark secret. We the reader don't and we're mostly kept in the dark about what really happened, but then you find out that other people around her have know the whole story for awhile. There wasn't tension that the story would come out and people would learn it and her world would fall apart. Cos you know, they already knew. Only we the reader didn't know, so the tension it tried to create didn't really work.

Instead all of the drama comes from us learning about these secrets, mostly through flashback chapters and a bit about a documentary she's doing to "tell her side of the story". But Ani never really changes throughout the story. There's no real arc for her. Not only because there's no opportunity for her to change. Also because the person she is before the Terrible Things sort of matches the person she is after. (NOT saying that she deserved any of the Terrible Things.) There is a bit about how this is a persona she's learned as a defense mechanism, except she came off as superficial and manipulative and focused on the "right" clothes before anything happened, so if it's a defense mechanism then the flashbacks didn't go far back enough to show the trigger for it. UNLESS this is trying to say everyone goes through this phase and the events froze her there? I dunno.

There's a lot of showing how she's the "cool girl" by tearing down other girls and women and I guess at times it reminded me a bit of Amy from Gone Girl except not at all. Because Amy felt like a real (super terrifying, omg she might be the villain I'm most afraid of) person who said things about the cool girl that felt real and true. Ani feels like the bitchy villain in a stereotypical chick-lit book. And ultimately she doesn't grow. She starts out as manipulative and superficial, grows up and continues to be manipulative and superficial, only now she has money to back up a lot of her behavior. Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaybe there's a bit of growth, but if so, it happens in roughly the last pages and still feels pretty self-centered.

Clearly this was Not My Thing, but plenty of people seem to like it (Book of the Week from People magazine, Reese Witherspoon might make it into a movie) so this could be a me thing.

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*I thought that was just a generic name people were referring to the magazine has until I realized that is actually the name of the magazine and not a placeholder until Knoll could come up with something else to put there.

Title quote page 8

Knoll, Jessica. Luckiest Girl Alive. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks. 2015.

MasterAndMargareadalong Post IV: Is that vodka?

It's Monday which means another MasterAndMargareadalong post! Thank you, Alice, for hosting this fever dream of a readalong. Now let's jump right into Devil Dance Party

Woland is having a ball and Margarita has to play hostess, as we learned in the last section. She has to wear a picture of a poodle around her neck because sure. That's what I think of when I think of Devil night wear.

Guests start popping out of coffins that are falling out of the fireplace and it's very exhausting to stand there and wave to people and her arm and leg get super tired. Also there's some racist shit happening here, with a jazz band turning into gorillas and other apes and

Anyway, it's a few hours of this and finally Woland shows up but he's dressed all in rags, which really, everyone else dressed up. Mikhail's (tram death guy from the first section) head is brought out on a platter and while talking over it they kill some guy that was eavesdropping on the party and drink his blood out of the head (or the head becomes a cup. I'm a little confused here). Woland's clothes now turn into something suited for a ball but it's also pretty much time for the ball to end. Also Margarita drinks some of this blood and this should be coming back up, right? I would assume so but who knows with this book.

Me at all times with this book

All of the guests (save for the guy who ended up murdered) had all done terrible things so I guess they're all in Hell but you get to go to fancy parties so seems like an odd version of Hell. Unless they were all really shy people and this is their version of Hell. One of the women attending, Frieda(?), had smothered her child with a handkerchief which yes, very not good but Margarita points out the man that abandoned them should also share part of the blame. Frieda also seems to be the only one tormented for what she did, as a handkerchief follows her around, which seems more like what you'd expect Hell to be like. But I don't know why she's the only one that seems to be punished. Maybe cos she's upset about it? The others seem pretty happy with all the murders they committed so I guess the lesson here is own your terribleness?

Oh hey, also why did all of the women have to be naked but the dudes were all dressed up fancy?

After the party the gang is hanging out in Woland's room and at this point Margarita is expecting her wish to be granted, since that was the deal. But no one seems to be paying attention and Azazello and Behemoth have a shooting contest. Finally they ask Margarita what she wants and instead of asking for the Master she asks that Frieda be forgiven. Which is sweet and is granted but is also sort of anticlimactic. I mean, we saw Frieda for like 2 seconds and there isn't a lot of drama around the idea that Margarita is using her one request not for herself.

Not that it matters cos then Woland brings back the Master anyway and disappears the guy that had moved into their basement apartment so they can live there. He then starts granting a bunch of wishes like giving the Master back his burned manuscript, letting Natasha stay a witch (good choice, Tash), giving the pig-man (who is back to a regular man) a certificate saying where he was last night (...is that a thing?), and turns the vampire guy back into people. Woland even gives Margarita a gold and diamond horseshoe and then sends she and the Master back to their apartment, instead of Margarita deciding to stay with Natasha.

Margarita briefly loses the horseshoe, which is found by the lady that spilled the sunflower oil that caused Mikhail's death, but Azazello gets it back and again, it doesn't seem like much happens in this scene and I don't know why we needed it. But I'm sure it's a biting satire about...something important.

The Margarita starts reading the now-unburned manuscript which means we get some more chapters from it and uuugh. Well, we learn that Pilate's dog is named Banga, so that's fun. Otherwise Pilate orders that Judah should be protected but actually means that he should be killed and then he is killed and Jesus is sad.

You guys, I don't even anymore. I have no idea what happened in the ball or why it happened; I don't know why the devil is granting all these requests; I don't understand the shooting contest or the bit with the gold horseshoe. I have no idea anymore and this section, which lacked a flying Margarita was far less interesting than last week's read. And I have no idea what's going to happen in the end. Maybe Margarita will finish reading Master's book and decide the critics were right? Maybe she'll get sent back to the devil cos of the witch-being and blood-drinking? What about the people back in the hospital?

One section left and perhaps all of our questions will be answered!

Title quote from page 276

Bulgakov, Mikhail. trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The Master and Margarita. Penguin Classics, 1997. Originally published 1966.

Those who know the human gut intimately see beauty

I thought I was doing a good job keeping up with reviews. I know I'm a bit behind but I thought I was getting into the swing of things. Then I checked my list to see what's up next for review and realized it's a book I finished back in July. In that time I've done some book shelf rearranging which means naturally I don't even know where the book is and man. Two steps forward, one step back over here.

In my defense, part of this is because I started doing NetGalley and I try to review those as soon as I finish them rather than going in order of when I've finished reading the books, so that pushes the books I'm reading on my own back.

ANYWAY, the good news is that I found the book and it's Mary Roach's Gulp so even though this isn't going to be the most well-thought-review* it's Roach and she's great. So, here we go.

First things first, I love Roach. I am all about science books by non-science but very curious people and thus far she hasn't steered me wrong.** So on a trip to Boston when I saw Gulp I had to get it. Obviously. And once again, Roach manages to be hilarious and make me feel like I learned something.

This time Roach takes the reader through the alimentary canal, starting at the top and working her way down. There's the normal stuff you'd expect from a book on the digestive system, such as the role smell plays in taste, how the teeth and stomach do their thing to turn the food you eat into the calories you need. But then there's the off-the-beaten-path stuff that makes her so much fun. There are chapters such as: "Big Gulp: How to survive being swallowed alive", "The Longest Meal: Can thorough chewing lower the national debt", and "Up Theirs: The alimentary canal as criminal accomplice". Truly something for everyone.

And of course a big thing in Roach's work is talking to the scientists that are obsessed with their particular line of study. No one can wax poetic about the benefits of salvia quite like Erika Silletti, or can tell you ALL the nuances to chewing like Andries van der Bilt or the dozens of other scientists that make it their business to understand all their is to know about the taste buds, the stomach, the colon, etc.

She delves into some of the scientific history of how we know what we know about digestion, which includes some disturbing relationships, such as that of William Beaumont and Alexis St. Martin and involves one man dropping food into the other man's stomach via a hole in his side (think of it as fishing) to see how stomach acid does its thing.

Depending on your squick factor, there can be some stuff here's that's too gross. I don't think she goes overboard or dwells on anything for too long, and some of the stuff can be gross, but she seems to delight in this grossness which makes it a lot easier to swallow.

Her footnotes are hilarious. Sometimes they shine additional light on whatever the topic is and other points you get things like this:

Also join Litsy

So yeah. Roach is super fun and I highly recommend you check her out.

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*In addition to being behind on reviews I also apparently forgot to take notes after reading this so starting from scratch here. AND I didn't even write down any page numbers with quotes I like. Past me is such an ass.
**Other titles of hers I've liked: Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, and Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Title quote from page 326

Roach, Mary. Gulp: Adventures On The Alimentary Canal. W.W. Norton & Company, 2013.

MasterAndMargareadalong Post III: Don't dream of any apartments in Moscow

It's Monday so it's another #MasterAndMargareadalong post (chapters 17-22), wherein we try to make sense of this fever dream. Or at least use a lot of gifs. Thank you, Alice, because there is no way I could have got through this without readalong support.

We are now more than 60% through this book. And are things making any more sense?

But I do believe this is a truly biting satire for anyone with an understanding of Soviet Moscow during this time. Really, housing sounds terrible and I understand the pain of trying to get an apartment in a city.

All of the money that the devil & co. rained from the sky during the magic show keeps turning into scraps of paper, which is causing chaos in the wider city as all these cab drivers and other merchants are getting paid in what appears to be money, but turns out to be trash. The only guy left running the theater is the bookkeeper* cos everyone else has been disappeared in one way or another. He's trying to report what happened to someone important, so he goes to visit Petrovich except instead of it being a guy, it's just his suit. Sitting at his desk, conducting business as usual.

Not wanting to file his complaint with a sentient suit, Vasily (bookkeeper) goes to another office but everyone there keeps bursting into song. In between verses they try to explain to Vasily that they can't help themselves and the choirmaster has done this to them. Everyone is taken to Homeless's hospital because I do seriously think everyone will end up there. And then Vasily is arrested cos his money from the theater show turns into foreign money and of course. Everyone is either arrested or ends up in the hospital. Or Yalta.

Berlioz's (guy who got his head cut off) uncle gets a telegram from Berlioz announcing his own funeral. Which is odd but his uncle is ALL ABOUT getting his hands on a sweet Moscow apartment and I get it, but man, we are beating a dead horse over this Moscow housing thing. He doesn't get the apartment, however, because instead one of the devil's cronies beats him with a roast chicken.

Part of me wants to know what the satirical significance of that is and another part of me wants to never find out a deeper meaning and just enjoy the Boston Market Beatdown for what it is.

Another guy, the bartender from the theater, is at the apartment to ask Woland what is up with the fake money. The devil is instead concerned with the fact that the bartender was serving rotten food during the show and hey, fair point. Feta cheese should NOT be green. So then the giant cat beats him up, sans-poultry.

We then FINALLY meet Margarita. I mean, we somewhat met her before, in the Master's stupid story, though we never technically got her name. But now we know and she is far better than the Master made her out to be. She's still super in love with him and sad that he's gone and makes a pact with the devil (or really, one of the devil's friends, the one who administers chicken beatings), to rub this mysterious cream all over her body. She knows she's walking into something dangerous but doesn't care.

She rubs the cream on her as instructed and it turns her into a 20 year old and also gives her the power of flight and makes her invisible. So that's neat. Before she becomes invisible her housekeeper(?) Natasha sees her and is pretty impressed that she looks so good and also I think a little cos she's naked and OH MAN,

this is already a way better relationship than between the Master and Margarita.

Margarita flies off on a broom and decides to go fuck things up for one of the critics that was mean to the Masters (terrible, terrible) book. He's not home, since he's at Berlioz's funeral, so she smashes her way in through one of the windows, destroys everything with a hammer and then floods not only his apartments but the ones below too.

After she's done with her destruction who shows up but Natasha, also naked and flying on a pig who was actually some guy who really would rather be a person and not a flying pig. Natasha and Margarita have a good laugh and think how awesome it is that they're witches now and then Natasha flies off while Margarita follows Azazello's instructions. She lands and then is picked up by a rook driving a car and is driven to a party.

Back at that Moscow apartment everyone wants their hands on, the devil is having a little get together and needs a female hostess, hence Margarita's transformation. The cat is cheating at a game of chess, while the vampire woman Hella rubs some sort of fire and brimstone salve on the devil's knee. He's looking at a globe which is actually the real globe and Margarita is intrigued because let's face it, that's pretty neat. Then Natasha and her flying pig show up, and please, let's just have Natasha and Margarita get together, hmmm?

So yeah, Margarita is pretty cool and not the subservient wilting flower Master described. I guess that's the cream's doing but I'd like to think it was there all along. At the same time, she is sort of a dick, destroying that guy's apartment cos he, a critic, criticized the Master's book. But still, she's at least interesting to read now, especially that I've given up trying to make heads or tales of things. A bird driving a car while a witch flies a pig? Of course!

I can't begin to predict what will happen next week since I hardly know what's happened up to this point. I'm sure it will be bonkers.

*FUN FACT totally unrelated to this book at all, but every time I see the word "bookkeeper" it reminds me of an Encyclopedia Brown story where they had to come up with a word that had 3 double letters in a row and they came up with this one and somehow that blew the case wide open. That is all. Back to the Russian fever dream.

Title quote from page 200

Bulgakov, Mikhail. trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The Master and Margarita. Penguin Classics, 1997. Originally published 1966.

Don't make me undone by loving you

I received a copy of Difficult Women from NetGalley in exchange for a review and after reading her collection of essays Bad Feminist I was pretty excited for this one. Where Bad Feminist had a mixture of tackling tough issues and more light-hearted fare, this one was a punch in the gut. But in a good way.

Difficult Women is aptly named as it gives vignettes about a bunch of difficult women. Either women put in difficult situations, or complicated women, or a mix of both. There are few what I would consider stories, but it's more a glimpse into the lives of many different women. There are a few themes throughout the work. There's a lot of sex (I think in every story). Many of the stories deal with rape and there are a few stories about child abuse (so quick warnings to people who may want to pick this up. Nothing is too explicit and it doesn't feel gratuitous but it is rough). There are unhealthy relationships. A number of the stories take place in Michigan. There's a few about professors. Siblings and especially twins come up a few times.

There's not much in the way of plot in any of the stories. Nothing necessarily happens. Mostly it's a quick look at the lives these women lead. My favorite story, "Difficult Women", is even more a collection of vignettes of different types of women. Loose Women and Frigid Women and Crazy Women, what they do and how they act and why they are.

I loved "Florida" too, which followed "Difficult Women" and again, gives us vignettes about a number of different people although instead of female archetypes its different people in and around a gated community in Florida. Some are the wealthy women who have lived within the community for years, others are newcomers trying to figure out where or if they fit in here, and others are women who interact with the women of this community but are on the outside. This also included one of my favorite parts in the collection

"Por favor, Caridad," they said, "no mas." The ladies in her classes loved to speak to Caridad in broken Spanish, to show her they were comfortable with her ethnicity despite the paleness of their skin and the wealth of their husbands. Each morning before work, Caridad stared at her reflection in the mirror and practiced not rolling her eyes so she could smile politely at the ladies in her classes.

The story "North Country" is probably the most like an actual full short story. A woman has recently gotten a position at an engineering college in the Upper Peninsula and she's trying to find her place both in this new landscape as well as in a department where she is not only the sole woman but the only black person (everyone assumes she's from Detroit). She meets a lumberjack but has trouble opening herself up to a relationship, sabotaging things at every possible step.

There are a few stories that are on the stranger side of things, like the woman who is married to a man who is an identical twin and the men switch places every once in awhile. There's another story of a woman married to a sweet man who loves her but she also has a boyfriend (that the husband knows about) who physically abuses her. Someone she stays with because she feels she deserves the punishment.

A couple other quotes I highlighted

We were young once and then we weren't. 

She tries to walk not too fast and not too slow. She doesn't want to attract any attention. She pretends she doesn't hear the whistles and catcalls and lewd comments. Sometimes she forgets and leaves her house in a skirt or a tank top because its a warm day and she wants to feel warm air on her bare skin. Before long, she remembers. 

Parker stared at his plate, cleared his throat softly, wondered when he became the kind of man who looked down instead of standing up.

This is not necessarily a collection I will find myself returning too. The stories have a beauty to them and writing is wonderful, but they can also be difficult to face.

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Also totally unrelated to the book, but if you do not follow Roxane Gay on Twitter, especially when she's live tweeting House Hunters, you are missing out.

Title quote from location 2430

Gay, Roxane. Difficult Women. Grove Press, 2017. NetGalley.