I first read Mikhail Bulgakovs The Master and Margarita on a balcony of theHotel Metropole in Saigon on three summer evenings in 1971. The tropical airwas heavy... » 

I first read Mikhail Bulgakovs The Master and Margarita on a balcony of theHotel Metropole in Saigon on three summer evenings in 1971. The tropical airwas heavy and full of the smells of cordite and motorcycle exhaust and rottingfish and woodfire stoves and the horizon flared ambiguously perhaps fromheat lightning perhaps from bombs. Later each night as was my custom I wouldwander out into the steamy back alleys of the city where no one ever seemed tosleep and crouch in doorways with the people and listen to the stories oftheir culture and their ancestors and their ongoing lives. Bulgakov taught meto hear something in those stories that I had not yet clearly heard. One couldcall it in terms that would soon thereafter gain wide currency magicalrealism. The deadpan mix of the fantastic and the realistic was at the heartof the Vietnamese mythos. It is at the heart of the present zeitgeist. And itwas not invented by Gabriel Garcia Marquez as wonderful as his One HundredYears of Solitude is. Garcia Marquezs landmark work of magical realism waspredated by nearly three decades by Bulgakovs brilliant masterpiece of anovel. That summer in Saigon a vodkaswilling talking black cat a coven ofbeautiful naked witches Pontius Pilate and a whole cast of benighted writersof Stalinist Moscow and Satan himself all took up permanent residence in mycreative unconscious. Their presence perhaps more than anything else from therealm of literature has helped shape the work I am most proud of. Im oftenasked for a list of favorite authors. Here is my advice. Read Bulgakov. Lookaround you at the new century. He will show you things you need to see. «