Pontius Pilate by The Master

 

Title: Pontius Pilate

Author: The Master

Publisher: not known 

Source book: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov 

I keep reading that The Master and Margarita (originally titled The Engineer’s Hoof!) is a well known example of a book containing a fictional book. So I thought I ought to bite the bullet and write it up.

Let’s be honest. I am never going to read the source book. If you could have written a description of a book which is unlikely to appeal to me, well, a description of The Master and Margarita would be a good place to start. Apparently Mikhail Bulgakov spent years writing his book in secret. I feel a bit bad for rejecting it out of hand, but life is short, and a lot of other people think it’s a fabulous work of literature. He shouldn’t be too offended. I abandoned the work of Charles Dickens about 20 years ago and he hasn’t come back to haunt me yet. Fingers crossed eh?

Here’s how Wikipedia put me off.

Here’s how I was put off by an over enthusiastic review on Literary Hub.

And here’s a review from goodreads.com. And then there’s this.

All of which add up to a firm no thank you from me. Or as Americans apparently say, it’s a hard pass.

However, there is a fictional book within this weird sounding fairy tale about the devil visiting Soviet Russia. It seems it’s about a dubious Pontius Pilate meeting Jesus of Nazareth, or possibly Jesus the Nazarene, which is not the same thing. Unfortunately, I can’t find any website to tell me if this fictional book has a title, and if it does, what is it? 

Now, I’m not going to say any more. If you’ve read The Master and Margarita you will perhaps understand why I don’t want to attempt it, and there’s no point me struggling facts that you already know, from random webpages. If you haven’t read it, one of the links might persuade you to try. Or not.

But I thought I should mention it anyway, it being so well known. People do write books about strange things though, don’t they?

By all means do let me know if you think I shouldn’t have chickened out.

Both images ©️the fabulous Julian Rad Wildlife from Instagram