"A favorite of connoisseurs of works of fantasy for many decades." — St. Louis Post-Dispatch. A compelling story of mystical experiences, strange transformations, and profound terror, this is the most famous supernatural novel in modern European literature, set in Ghetto of Old Prague around 1890. 13 black-and-white illustrations. "Not to be missed." — Los Angeles Times.
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Text: English, German (translation)
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37 of 38 people found the following review helpful
By A. C. Walter
Format:Paperback
Gustav Meyrink's first novel, "The Golem," is without a doubt his masterwork. Certainly it presents his central concerns and the mystical pattern for his later writing, but even more, the literary elements of "The Golem" carry a double measure of inspiration. Perhaps the most obvious is the hypnagogia (the state of consciousness between waking and sleeping) through which the narrator drifts in the first three chapters. Such surreal episodes are not uncommon in fiction, but often even the most earnest attempts fail. Meyrink, however, telegraphs the thrill of this state as only a genuine mystic could. His narrative floats tangentially from one idea to the next, travelling in a rough spiral, lingering at times in the natural orbit of certain images and thoughts. It is only upon finishing the novel that one realizes how these chapters establish not only the mood of the story, but also its themes and plot.
The golem itself--a creature whose legend is rooted in Prague's Ghetto, the depressed Jewish quarter--has a special magic. Though the golem might easily have been portrayed with an uninspired knockoff of Frankenstein's monster, Meyrink made it a spiritual creature (a prototype for similar entities in his later work). In fact, the golem seems to exist solely in the realm of possibility, a thing of story, memory, and confused dreams.
The novel's narrator, Pernath, is a fractured personality whose inner turmoil manifests in his strong attraction to three different women and in his literal amnesia--his memory extends only a few years back, to the time since he came to live in the Ghetto. The golem appears to him in private as an enigmatic angel of mercy who hints at a possible healing, while insinuating itself at the same time into Pernath's mind like a spectral parasite. Though their contact is always indirect, Pernath begins to identify in an odd way with the golem. In fact, the one time that a public sighting of the golem stirs the Ghetto, it is actually Pernath who has been mistaken for the creature.
A less striking but equally significant element of the story is the character of Aaron Wassertrum, the Jewish junkdealer whose shop lies on the street below Pernath's room. Possibly Meyrink's most well-drawn villain, essentially an ethical sinkhole, Wassertrum is the perfect foil for Pernath. His furtive malice, consisting largely of absurd lies and meticulous manipulation, is strikingly reminiscent of Kafka, Meyrink's contemporary.
The careful reader can also explore "The Golem" with the source material in mind and find an additional layer to the story. For example, the Jewish legends sometimes describe the golem coming to life when a rabbi writes the name of God on its forehead. Meyrink relates another version in which a magic charm is "placed behind it's teeth." However, in another twist of confused identity, one character in the novel learns that he has switch hats with someone during the day and finds Pernath's name in the hat's lining, possibly just where it may have pressed against the forehead. This event is followed directly by the golem's first appearance.
"The Golem" is certainly one of the great neglected novels of our time. Meyrink's mysticism is always balanced with a portion of skepticism, giving his worldview a tension which holds valuable insight about the time in which he lived. The novel also depicts the intense sort of claustrophobia which grew out of the early industrial era, and the tone of this anxiety draws natural associations with Poe, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky. The fact that Meyrink managed to integrate these qualities with a refined arc of mystical thought demonstrates just important he is to the literary tradition.
Finally, I highly recommend the Dover edition of "The Golem," translated by Madge Pemberton. While Meyrink readers owe an immense debt to Dedalus/Ariadne and translator Mike Mitchell for giving us, over the past decade, Meyrink's four other novels previously unavailable in English, Pemberton's 1928 translation of this novel is a finer read. Mitchell may be an excellent translator, and I am sure his modernization of the text has its own importance. However, Pemberton has an eloquence unmatched by the new translation. Take, for instance, this line from Pemberton, describing a dream image: "...she wore a cloak made all of flowing tears." Mitchell's translation reads: "...she was wearing a cloak of flowing teardrops." The Dover edition, with Pemberton's translation, also includes supplementary material including 8 superb illustrations from the original 1915 edition and an excellent introduction by the editor, E. F. Bleiler, which serves as a fine summary of Meyrink's life and work.
The golem itself--a creature whose legend is rooted in Prague's Ghetto, the depressed Jewish quarter--has a special magic. Though the golem might easily have been portrayed with an uninspired knockoff of Frankenstein's monster, Meyrink made it a spiritual creature (a prototype for similar entities in his later work). In fact, the golem seems to exist solely in the realm of possibility, a thing of story, memory, and confused dreams.
The novel's narrator, Pernath, is a fractured personality whose inner turmoil manifests in his strong attraction to three different women and in his literal amnesia--his memory extends only a few years back, to the time since he came to live in the Ghetto. The golem appears to him in private as an enigmatic angel of mercy who hints at a possible healing, while insinuating itself at the same time into Pernath's mind like a spectral parasite. Though their contact is always indirect, Pernath begins to identify in an odd way with the golem. In fact, the one time that a public sighting of the golem stirs the Ghetto, it is actually Pernath who has been mistaken for the creature.
A less striking but equally significant element of the story is the character of Aaron Wassertrum, the Jewish junkdealer whose shop lies on the street below Pernath's room. Possibly Meyrink's most well-drawn villain, essentially an ethical sinkhole, Wassertrum is the perfect foil for Pernath. His furtive malice, consisting largely of absurd lies and meticulous manipulation, is strikingly reminiscent of Kafka, Meyrink's contemporary.
The careful reader can also explore "The Golem" with the source material in mind and find an additional layer to the story. For example, the Jewish legends sometimes describe the golem coming to life when a rabbi writes the name of God on its forehead. Meyrink relates another version in which a magic charm is "placed behind it's teeth." However, in another twist of confused identity, one character in the novel learns that he has switch hats with someone during the day and finds Pernath's name in the hat's lining, possibly just where it may have pressed against the forehead. This event is followed directly by the golem's first appearance.
"The Golem" is certainly one of the great neglected novels of our time. Meyrink's mysticism is always balanced with a portion of skepticism, giving his worldview a tension which holds valuable insight about the time in which he lived. The novel also depicts the intense sort of claustrophobia which grew out of the early industrial era, and the tone of this anxiety draws natural associations with Poe, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky. The fact that Meyrink managed to integrate these qualities with a refined arc of mystical thought demonstrates just important he is to the literary tradition.
Finally, I highly recommend the Dover edition of "The Golem," translated by Madge Pemberton. While Meyrink readers owe an immense debt to Dedalus/Ariadne and translator Mike Mitchell for giving us, over the past decade, Meyrink's four other novels previously unavailable in English, Pemberton's 1928 translation of this novel is a finer read. Mitchell may be an excellent translator, and I am sure his modernization of the text has its own importance. However, Pemberton has an eloquence unmatched by the new translation. Take, for instance, this line from Pemberton, describing a dream image: "...she wore a cloak made all of flowing tears." Mitchell's translation reads: "...she was wearing a cloak of flowing teardrops." The Dover edition, with Pemberton's translation, also includes supplementary material including 8 superb illustrations from the original 1915 edition and an excellent introduction by the editor, E. F. Bleiler, which serves as a fine summary of Meyrink's life and work.
26 of 27 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Most people know Franz Kafka, but very few have heard of, and still less have read, his Prague contemporary Gustav Meyrink. This book is his masterwork, a brooding paranoid fantasy based on the Jewish Cabbalist legends of the clay automaton, the Golem. However the Golem in this story is simply a symbolic device which sets the backdrop for a tale of madness, obsession and the decay of a whole city and its inhabitants. The whole ensmble is made more poignant by the sad life of its creator- Meyrink was in life a paranoiac who lived his life in fear and spent much time in asylums. This is one of the books of the twentieth century, its dark imaginings foreshadowing much of what was to come in the 1930's and '40's.
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Taking the legend of the Golem, the artificial man who was created by the use of the Kaballah magic power, a legend from the times of rabbi Low, contemporary of the emperor of Germany Rudolph II, Meyrink goes beyong this legend to envelope the reader in a complex atmosphere, the atmosphere of the Jewish quarter of Prague, sinister, sombre, gloomy, just like Kafka's novels. The novel, like all Meyrink's novels, is expressionist to the bottom, the characters are distorted, weird, sinister, or else with a sense of unreality about them, although some of them, like Charoussek the student, Hillel and his daughter Miriam, deeply moving.
As every novel by Meyrink, "The Golem" is very complex and has difficult concealed meanings, full of symbols which are related to the unconscious. It isn't by chance that Meyrink's novels found the enthusiasm of Jung. The novel, thus, can be seen as a wandering through the mind of the main character, Athanasius Pernath, a particular "saison en enfer" descending to the labyrinth of Pernath's unconscious.
However, the novel can also be interpreted from an esoterical point of view, the ancient Eastern doctrine of the Upanishads, the reincarnation, the nature of soul, life and suffering.
It also presents the theme of the "double", a recurrent theme in Literature like, for instance, in Edgar A. Poe's "William Wilson".
What is crucial is that none of Gustav Meyrink's novels can be interpreted literally, because their meanings are hidden, more concerning myth than plain reality. I don't think that "The Golem" should be seen just as a horror or a mystery novel, because it is profoundly esoterical, mystic and onirical. Its meanings are only to be found in the kind of meanings that dreams provide.
As every novel by Meyrink, "The Golem" is very complex and has difficult concealed meanings, full of symbols which are related to the unconscious. It isn't by chance that Meyrink's novels found the enthusiasm of Jung. The novel, thus, can be seen as a wandering through the mind of the main character, Athanasius Pernath, a particular "saison en enfer" descending to the labyrinth of Pernath's unconscious.
However, the novel can also be interpreted from an esoterical point of view, the ancient Eastern doctrine of the Upanishads, the reincarnation, the nature of soul, life and suffering.
It also presents the theme of the "double", a recurrent theme in Literature like, for instance, in Edgar A. Poe's "William Wilson".
What is crucial is that none of Gustav Meyrink's novels can be interpreted literally, because their meanings are hidden, more concerning myth than plain reality. I don't think that "The Golem" should be seen just as a horror or a mystery novel, because it is profoundly esoterical, mystic and onirical. Its meanings are only to be found in the kind of meanings that dreams provide.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
Bizarre.
The novel seems to function like one of David Lynch's trippier films (Inland Empire or Eraserhead) where the real world, dreams, and ineffable transcendent experiences are mixed... Read more
Published on September 4, 2010 by Andrew E. Mendelson
5.0 out of 5 stars
A dreamlike story of the supernatural
"The Golem" is a hard novel to describe. It's a very complex novel and one that is beyond the scope of a review here. Read more
Published on July 10, 2007 by J. Givens
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not my favorite
THE GOLEM by Gustav Meyrink is a pretty strange novel. I picked it up once before and couldn't get into it. This time I was more prepared and stuck with it. Read more
Published on July 13, 2005 by Stacey M Jones
5.0 out of 5 stars
A very Interesting and Unique novel
I have recently finished reading The Golem and I must say I am very impressed with it. It took me three starts to finally read the novel, it became difficult because of it's dream... Read more
Published on January 13, 2003
4.0 out of 5 stars
An interesting, imaginative creation
The Golem, although creatively written, was a disappointment in one area inparticular. The book kept me reading, enticing me with suspense and interesting characters but the ending... Read more
Published on July 31, 2001 by Charles Tozer
5.0 out of 5 stars
Expressionist/Existentialist literature.
This is one of those works that happen to come your way out of pure accident. I remember I was looking for a completely different book when I suddenly found this one on the floor... Read more
Published on April 12, 2001 by A. Tamez Elizondo
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very Atmospheric
This is a very atmospheric novel set in Prague. The Golem itself does not actually appear, but serves as a symbol that heightens the overall ambience and mystery of the story. Read more
Published on June 10, 1998
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great book about misteries of Prague.
This is a wonderful and skillfully written book. The action takes place in the Old Jewish Ghetto of Prague, an area of the city haunted with the legend of a Frankenstein's early... Read more
Published on October 24, 1997 by vitali_nessis@ml.com
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