Do You like book The Golem (2000)?
Review of The Golem I'm a big fan of Meyrink's work, because I love novels that one can read many times and still find something new and inspiring to focus on. I found Golem to be so atmospheric that I felt as if I was there in the old Jewish Town, feeling the claustrophobic melancholy of the place, seeing the variety of people who lived there, hearing the old medieval houses whispering their ancient secrets, absorbing the mystery of the stones. I was born in Prague and grew up in the city, but the Jewish Town (also called the Fifth Quarter) was destroyed at the end of 19th century and so the picturesque mystical part of Prague survived only in memories, paintings and in its very basis, the cellars underground. Though most of the houses were torn down, the magic perseveres and one can imagine that it lured Meyrink to write such a story. Also, the mystery of Golem and the House by the Last Lantern in the Golden Lane are intriguingly inspiring. I found the idea of the main hero experiencing a life of an artist who lived in the Jewish Town and most probably later moved to another dimension of Prague very interesting. I was unaware of the terms ibbur or dybbuk and found that this story explained it for me. And so while some of the characters appear to be haunted by some lost spirit (Golem?), the main hero experiences an attachment to a soul that teaches him something of great value. Perhaps Meyrink himself felt that Athanasius Pernath was his ibbur for awhile and by thinking what he was thinking and feeling what he was feeling, he was able to make his life-story real. Meyrink's writing style, his language and the construction of sentences are so poetic! I think this is a book to return to from time to time, as it stays inscribed inside one's heart.
—Iva Kenaz
Question: I am thinking of an author of novels and short stories, a speaker and writer of German, who lived in a predominately Czech-speaking area of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the early years of the 20th Century. His works are often set in the city of Prague, a setting he fills with menace and dark surrealism. He seems both attracted and repelled by Judaism, an ambiguity reflected in his themes of patriarchy and autonomy, authority and law, isolation and identity in an unjust and chaotic world. Who is the writer I am thinking of?Answer: Franz Kafka, of course.Response: No. Nice try, but I was thinking of Gustav Meyrink. In spite of these similarities, Kafka and Meyrink are very different. Kafka's biography reveals the Modernist pattern we see in Eliot, Pessoa, Stevens: the alienated artist, a middle-class product, disappears into a bureaucracy of trade, banking, or insurance, preserving his originality through a series of expressive masks. Meyrink's biography, on the other hand, shows him to be less like a Modernist than like a flamboyant German Romantic of the early 19th century. The bastard son of a Wurttemburg baron and a Viennese actress, he was indeed a bank worker--a bank director, to be precise--but he was never drab or calculatingly anonymous: a survivor of nervous collapse, tuberculosis, and attempted suicide, he was a bon vivant, a fighter of duels, an unashamed devotee of the occult. Perhaps this last was just too much for his staid middle-class investors: accused of combining spiritualist consultations with executive decisions, Meyrink was arrested for bank fraud and sent to prison for two and a half months. There he suffered both physical paralysis and financial ruin; he cured himself of the former through the postures of yoga and of the latter through the profession of writing. With “The Golem”--a re-imagining of the old Jewish tale—Meyrink's reputation became secure.Kafka's ambiguity towards Judaism derived from fear of his father and and a tentative connection to his own Jewish heritage. Meyrink, on the other hand, was not Jewish at all (although some sources mistakenly assert his mother was). It was through his occult explorations that he became fascinated with Judaism: the force of the folk tales, the truth of the sayings, the splendor of the mystical writings. At the same time, he seems both attracted and repelled by the exotic squalor of Prague's Jewish Quarter. I detect a whiff of anti-semitism here, but I also sense that Meyrink sees the Jews as representative of humanity, illuminated by the divine spirit even though debased and enmired in a fallen world. It is this sense of spiritual potential in a shattered world that most dramatically distinguishes Meyrink. There is little of this theme in Kafka; his protagonists are modern men, vainly attempting to assert their improbable existence in the context of an absurd world. Although Meyrink has much to say about the mystery of identity, his approach seems more gothic, more faux medieval. “The Golem,” a dark fairy tale, may be filled with false identities, fragmented quests, and madness disguised as transformation (or is it the other way round?), but throughout everything, the self and its potential for spiritual illumination never lose reality. The problem is that our world is in pieces: the individual no longer knows himself, for he is buried by fragments of pettiness and posing, spleen and crime. Meyrink reverenced the Kabbalah, and the narrative of “The Golem” seems to embody the myth of the Shevirat haKeilim : although the vessels, unable to contain the Light, have shattered, they shall be restored, in the Lord's good time. Until then, their shards, reflecting the Light, help to illuminate our darkened world.
—Bill Kerwin
Con ‘El Golem’ no hay término medio. O la consideras una obra capital dentro del gótico del siglo XX, o la desprecias sin más, teniéndola por una novela enrevesada y pesada. Yo soy de los primeros. Al principio, y sin tener mucha idea de lo que me iba a encontrar, pensaba leer una historia de terror con la figura del mito del Golem de la literatura judía como tema principal. Y no es así, porque el terror brilla por su ausencia. Es posible que este sea uno de los principales motivos por los que la gran mayoría de lectores se lleven una decepción una vez metidos en su lectura, ya que esperan algo que no llega a surgir nunca, además de encontrarse con una prosa llena de simbolismos.La novela tiene como protagonista a Athanasius Pernath y transcurre en el gueto de Praga, tal vez a finales del siglo XIX. Entre sueños y alucinaciones, donde es difícil distinguir qué es real, Meyrink nos va adentrando más y más en esa Praga oscura de la mano de Pernath y de los demás personajes secundarios, mezclando sus historias tal como van surgiendo, espontáneamente. Pero lo que puede parecer confuso para el lector, realmente lo que hace es crear una atmósfera de tal intensidad que es imposible no seguir con obsesión la historia de Pernath, que transcurre entre edificios con entradas secretas, personajes que buscan venganza, amantes con oscuros secretos, amigos que no lo son tanto y enemigos ruines, y todo ello le sucede a un Pernath que no recuerda muy bien su pasado y que deambula por un presente que le sobrepasa.Sin lugar a dudas, ‘El Golem’, publicado en 1915, es un libro que no deja indiferente a nadie. Seguramente no sea una lectura para todo el mundo y tenga un tipo de lector específico, pero si logras adentrarte en sus páginas, llenas de imágenes poderosas, el recuerdo que deja es imborrable.
—Oscar
