The Master and Margarita
The Devil visits Stalin-era Moscow and chaos ensues. Bulgakov wrote it knowing it could never be published in his lifetime; the manuscript was completed around 1940, not published until 1966. The satire is savage, the love story is transcendent, and the magical realism is total.
The first hundred and fifty pages test people badly, a crowd of Moscow literary functionaries where "theater people all blurred together" and audiobook listeners fare worse without spelled names in front of them. The Master arrives late and thin, passive beside Margarita, more occasion for her devotion than a man she might plausibly love, so the central romance gets asserted rather than dramatized. The Pilate chapters keep interrupting the Moscow chapters, and readers who came for the devil's rampage resent every cut back to Judea. Without footnotes the Soviet and biblical references pass by untouched. "Long-winded and clunky writing," one reader concludes, filing it as "one of the most overrated books I've read in a while."
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
