Customer Reviews

The golem,: A novel

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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.

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.

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.

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. It was written and published as a serial in 1913-14, and I bought it because it was about characters in Prague by a Prague writer. (Ironically, Meyrink and Kafka both knew Max Brod.)

The story of the Golem of Prague is what drew me to the title, which I bought in an English-language bookstore while I lived in Prague. The legend is that Rabbi Loew, in the Jewish quarter in the sixteenth century, created a man out of mud from the Vltava River (the Moldau) and gave him life by putting Hebrew characters on a paper in the man's mouth, or by writing EMETH (truth) on the golem's brow, and taking that life away by erasing the first later, leaving METH (death). He used him to labor in the synagogue, and in some stories the golem protects the Jews from murderous pogroms. Sometimes the golem breaks free or is forgotten and violence is rained down on his community. In Prague, I used to hear the legend that the body of the golem was still kept in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue in the Jewish quarter.

But this book isn't that much about the golem, and is more about a single man, Anthanasius Pernath, a gentile who lives in the Jewish Quarter in Prague at the end of the 19th century. He is an engraver of precious stones, and has many odd and paranormal experiences in the quarter, as he narrates about the people he knows there. One of the events is that the golem brings him a mysterious book. In another incident, he follows a winding staircase through the Quarter and finds himself in a room with the golem's clothing. There is intrigue, crime, mystery and, many, many odd, seemingly unexplainable incidents that occur.

Meyrink was really into the occult, including astral projection (when the soul, leaves the body and can sense and remember all that it sees in its distant journeys). These influences come into the book more than the golem and its legend do, I think. The book was made into two German expressionist films, and reading the book, one can see the logic of this kind of treatment of the story from another medium.

I'm not sure, however, that I liked it. As I mentioned it had a lot of paranormal occurences, and the golem was really the least of them. I felt there were probably many references that I wasn't getting, and I also felt the work was pretentious. There were segments that were definitely reminiscent of Kafka, even though it is published before (I guess it's just that I read The Trial before I read this), including a long section in which a character is held in jail by secret police. I liked the segments on Prague and the Quarter very much for nostaligia's sake, and I found the ending poetic and interesting.

But unless you are into Meyrink particularly or the occult generally and experimental fiction overall, I would suggest you skip this one. (For a more thoughtful and touching treatment of the legend of the golem, I recommend Chaim Potok's IN THE BEGINNING.)

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 predecessor, Golem. As the story unveils, we learn that a once-in-century appearance of this misterious creature is likely to happen very soon. This awful premonition stirs old memories and rekindles long-forgotten loves and hatreds of ghetto's inhabitants. However, the story of Golem serves only as a backdrop to a marvellous picture of old decaying city laden with symbols and remnants of the past. Meyrink has weaved a dreamlike web of reminiscences, images, and apparitions. And in this web the main characters are entangled, hazy reality intricately intertwined with lucid hallucinations. The magic of the book is all-penetrating and by the end you don't know if you actually read it or just dreamed this sad and a bit creepy story. The book is superb and rivals Kafka, Borges, and Garcia Marquez in "magic reality" genre of fiction.

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. If you're interested in litrerary expressionism, this book should be considered necessary reading.

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 of a bookstore. I picked it up mainly intrigued by the book's title (and because I was studying German back then, so I began to develop an interest in Germanic literature) and got it home.

The Golem actually makes no act of presence here, but it exists in the story just as a vague idea or concept as a symbol of the moral decay of the gettho and the inner struggles of the main character.

This is a very enigmatic work and I highly recommend it to absolutely everyone who is looking for a piece of hallucinogenic fiction.

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 like atmosfere, it's symbolism and the amount of 'information' that leaves to the interpretation of the reader. It seames to be a novel with many levels of reading, from the most superficial to more profound, where the symbols seam to point to. I found reading it not easy but very rewarding and the novel in itself unique, with an atmosphere unlike any other I have read. I truly recomend it, although it can be difficult at first.

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 together which leaves the reader unsure of what is or isn't real. Sounds cool right? Really avante-garde? Unfortunately, The Golem suffers from some pretty basic flaws in my opinion.

From what I can tell, Gustav Meyrink was heavily influenced by Jewish mysticism and there are even some Buddhist references. Again, sounds interesting, but a lot of the time Meyrink just crams these esoteric ideas into lengthy, forced dialogue through some character that doesn't feel developed. I was left feeling more confused and apathetic than curious.

The constant shift between reality and some strange innerworld was interesting at first, but by the time I got to the last 50 pages I had to force my way through. I kept thinking "Oh look the protagonist is undergoing some amazingly profound experience...again."

This novel is certainly ambitious and it has its moments, but Meyrink's writing isn't compelling enough to inspire me to dig deeper into his mystic ideas.

"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. I suggest doing some outside reading on Gustav Meyrink and his novel. It's a very philosophical book, which seems to be, from what little I know, typical of Czech writers - i.e. Kafka, Milan Kundera, etc. Themes of revenge, hatred, love, poverty and the human condition are all present in this novel. The novel is a very dream like, almost maddening story. You don't know what is real, imaginary, or the product of dreams. The story relies heavily on ideas borrowed from Jewish mysticism and the Kabala. The setting of story is in the Jewish Ghetto of Prague prior in the early part of last century (is this correct?). It follows the life of Athanasius Pernath, and is loosely based on the legend of the Golem, a lifeless clay creation made living through magical means. It is hinted that Pernath was at one point insane, and even he seems to doubt what is really going on and what is a dream, hallucination, or his slipping sanity. All of this makes for a very surreal work. It's definitely a book not to be missed. The atmosphere is wonderfully constructed, and the philosophical threads are fascinating additions to the story.