Many books have been praised for their dreamlike quality, but I've yet to meet one which captured so accurately that nagging unease which the dreamer experiences, as he tries to square the details of his waking life with the situation in which he finds himself, at once so strange and so familiar.

It does for Prague what Joyce did for Dublin and Bely for St.Petersburg. For an esoteric classic Meyrink's novel is short on mysticism and long on materialism. There is no sweetness in the low-life, no salvation in a condemned man's understanding.There is not a letter of sentimentality in The Golem. Its sufferings are not devilish torments, but bitter sex games played in the shadows of Ghetto corridors.

The Golem reveals its secrets in the lives of murderers and thieves, not seers. An hallucination, a wild writer's improvisation on an old Jewish fairy tale. 'The Irish Times' This is a fever of a book. The suffocating bureaucracy of old Central Europe - at once oily and ruthless, petty and overbearing -is very well evoked sand permeates the entire book. There is a hang-dog, in-the-know colloquially seedy quality about the book which is far earthier and grittier than anything in Kafka's The Castle or The Trial. Gustav Meyrink uses this legend in a dream-like setting on the Other Side of the Mirror and he has invested it with a horror so palpable that it has remained in my memory all these years.Ī remarkable work of horror, half- way between Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Frankenstein.

The golem by gustav meyrink