And it was not invented by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as wonderful as his One Hundred Years of Solitude is. It is at the heart of the present zeitgeist. The deadpan mix of the fantastic and the realistic was at the heart of the Vietnamese mythos. One could call it, in terms that would soon thereafter gain wide currency, "magical realism". Bulgakov taught me to hear something in those stories that I had not yet clearly heard. Later each night, as was my custom, I would wander out into the steamy back alleys of the city, where no one ever seemed to sleep, and crouch in doorways with the people and listen to the stories of their culture and their ancestors and their ongoing lives. The tropical air was heavy and full of the smells of cordite and motorcycle exhaust and rotting fish and wood-fire stoves, and the horizon flared ambiguously, perhaps from heat lightning, perhaps from bombs. I first read Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita on a balcony of the Hotel Metropole in Saigon on three summer evenings in 1971.
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