The Golem

Name: The Golem
Brand: Recyclivre
Author: Gustav Meyrink
ISBN: 9781873982914

Gustav Meyrink

03/03/1995
Dedalus Ltd

NC (0 avis)

Couverture de The Golem par Gustav Meyrink

Résumé

'The Golem had a magnificent reception, and the collected volume published in 1915 sold 200,000 copies. Meyrink went on to write several more books, including The Green Face, Walpurgisnacht, the White Dominican and The Angel of the West Window. All have been published in English by Dedalus Books since the mid-1980s, and Mike Mitchell's excellent 1995 translations are definitely worth seeking out. Meyrink was, of course, a contemporary of Kafka, and his novels have a lot in common with Prague's better-known fantasist. As Robert Irwin says in the introduction to the Dedalus edition of The Golem: We have the Castle which is not Kafka's Castle, the Trial which is not Kafka's Trial, and a Prague which is not Kafka's Prague; HP Lovecraft was more succinct, calling The Golem 'the most magnificent weird thing I've come across in aeons'. A century after its first publication, The Golem endures as a piece of modernist fantasy that deserves to take its place alongside Kafka, from an author whose life was almost as fantastic as his fiction.' The Guardian Book Blog 'A superbly atmospheric story set in the old Prague ghetto featuring the Golem, a kind of rabbinical Frankenstein s monster, which manifests every 33 years in a room without a door. Stranger still, it seems to have the same face as the narrator. Made into a film in 1920, this extraordinary book combines the uncanny psychology of doppelganger stories with expressionism and more than a little melodrama... Meyrink s old Prague like Dickens s London is one of the great creation of city writing, an eerie, claustrophobic and fantastical underworld where anything can happen.' Phil Baker in The Sunday Times