---
product_id: 105235586
title: "The Golem (Dedalus European Classics)"
brand: "gustav meyrink"
price: "$160297"
currency: COP
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 7
url: https://www.desertcart.co/products/105235586-the-golem-dedalus-european-classics
store_origin: CO
region: Colombia
---

# The Golem (Dedalus European Classics)

**Brand:** gustav meyrink
**Price:** $160297
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

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- **What is this?** The Golem (Dedalus European Classics) by gustav meyrink
- **How much does it cost?** $160297 with free shipping
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## Description

The Golem (Dedalus European Classics)

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## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Fascinating early gothic fiction.
  

*by A***S on Reviewed in the United States on April 25, 2015*

The Golem’ by Gustav Meyrink, is an early 20th-century literary gothic (published in 1915). However, instead of the horror or monster drama that we, gentle reader, may be expecting, he explores the meaning of identity, mystically speaking, in the form of a highbrow 19th-century book written in the style of a psychological gothic of the time.The word golem is a word used once in the Bible, specifically in Psalm 139:16, although we English speakers never see it because of translation issues. The KJV version of the Psalm: “Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; And in thy book all my members were written, Which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.” The word golem actually meant originally “my unshaped form’. The word is used sometimes today to describe someone who appears to be an obedient, but thick-witted, cretin.A fairy-tale golem monster is made traditionally by writing the word ‘truth’ somewhere, sometimes on a paper, which is placed into the mouth of a man-like statue made from clay or mud, or sometimes by writing the word on the statue’s forehead. The statue becomes animated by this magical process, but it is an enslaved being, and it must obey the commands of whoever started its animation. The golem is deactivated by changing the inscription from "Truth" to "Death". The oldest versions of the story of making a golem have been traced back to Jewish fairy tales, primarily the story of Adam being created from mud by a god.The author Gustav Meyrink was fascinated by mysticism, so much so that his book, ‘The Golem,’ is loaded with references to his researches; but he seems to explore primarily in this novel the idea of identity in terms of mysticism.  Meyrink weaves into his plot a vague outline of the original golem story to illustrate his ideas with a great deal of playful (intellectually, not comic) literary inventiveness.Athanasius Pernath, our protagonist, lives a life of much mental confusion. He cannot remember very much of his past, and his present often appears to recede from reality into a waking dream. We learn from the events on the first page that Pernath has just finished reading about the life of Buddha, and shortly after he wakes up he immediately begins to experience a vision of a rock which is more like a lump of fat - a shapeless, formless stone of fat, like unformed mud.Pernath is a gem cutter, by trade, but we never see him at work. Instead, he frequents a neighborhood (a Jewish enclave) of housing, restaurants, pubs and shops where he meets his friends and acquaintances (by the way, every character is bleak, mysterious and peculiar, except for one - and it isn’t Pernath). He picks up local gossip and doings, some of which interests him a great deal.A junk dealer, Aaron Wassertrum, is one who particularly interests him because he appears to be a force of negativity or evil, and his daughter (maybe), Rosina, is perhaps a teenage prostitute, a possible victim of Wassertrum’s depravity, whatever it may have been. She certainly is an uninhibited force of unconstrained sexuality in Pernath’s mind.Pernath is attracted to another woman, Miriam, who is moral and responsible, who he met while visiting her father, Shemaiah Hillel. Pernath himself had a nervous breakdown after a previous unhappy love affair, and he is being treated by Shemaiah Hillel with hypnotism to be calm and to forget. Remembering his past (he gets flashbacks) causes Pernath extreme anxiety. He also sees ghostly visions and haunted houses. It may or may not be true he is being haunted by a golem. Pernath is the most undependable narrator I have come across in my reading to date! A lot takes place in Meyrink’s story; but since we see everything through Pernath’s eyes, it is impossible to know how much of what happens is from his real life and what is occurring in a waking dream state. Frankly, most of the book appears to be a dream vision.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    A classic worth reading many times
  

*by T***A on Reviewed in the United States on February 20, 2016*

The Golem by Gustav MeyrinkThis book was suggested to me by someone from Trotsdale in Second Life. I can no longer remember if it was DC, someone else in the intersim team, or whom exactly. I definitely greatly enjoyed the read and was very happy to find a copy in English since, if memory serves, it had originally been written in German.The book is part romance, part mystery, part thriller, and all spiritual. There are several plots all at once. One is the growth of the soul, one is the main character's involvement in protecting a Countess, one is the eventual union of the main character with another, far better, love interest. We then discover at the end that it could be said there were actually two main characters. Your understanding of the various levels of this book will vary depending on your grounding of knowledge of the Kabbalah (there are several alternate spellings, all of which are correct). You don't really need any as it gives you what you need as you read along, but it you are already familiar with the symbols you unlock so much more. This is one definitely worth rereading.I particularly liked how the spiritual quests intertwined with the challenges of the mundane world. Part of me would have liked more description of characters and surroundings, but the way the story is structured it is good that the surroundings can be forgotten about. This makes it easy for the reader to imagine this sort of adventure happening to them, which, on some level it happens to us all. I also very much liked how the book pointed out the three paths available, instead of fixating on just the main two.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    "To die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance to dream ...
  

*by G***O on Reviewed in the United States on June 11, 2010*

... ay there's the rub!" Prince Hamlet, that Man of Rationality, knew that his logic was no match for the inexorable irrationality of dreams: "I could be bounded in a nut-shell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." There are no allusions to Shakespeare in Gustav Meyrink's unique masterpiece "The Golem" -- all the obscure lore of the book is drawn from  Jewish folk tales and Kabbalistic esoterica -- but the narrator, Athanasius Pernath is troubled by the baddest of bad dreams. Like Hamlet, the rationalist reader will get nowhere by striving to order and make sense of Pernath's dreams, as even the dreamer himself is tormented by his uncertainty about his own reality, about the conundrum of whether he is merely dreaming, or in fact dreaming that he is dreaming.Nothing I've ever read captures the harrowing, inescapable irrationality of a nightmare as authentically as The Golem. That's its transcendent accomplishment. It's one of the most bizarre books ever published, and much of its strange atmosphere is due to the reader's constant uncertainty about the border between 'reality' and dream. Pernath is an aging gem-cutter, perhaps a gifted craftsman, perhaps a madman released from an asylum after a cure by hypnosis, ostensibly the scion of a family of wealth but stricken with almost total amnesia. Pernath lives in the ancient ghetto of Prague, amid Jews of the oddest racial/cultural traits. Pernath himself doesn't seem to be Jewish. He can't read Hebrew, yet he is obsessed with Hebraic, especially Kabbalistic, symbolism and myth. Particularly, he is obsessed with the image of the Golem, the artificial man made of clay, the created servant who runs destructively amok. Pernath thinks/dreams that he is himself the Golem ... or not. But Pernath is also the observer, or the dreamer, of other people's lives, or dreams. The nightmarishly disjointed 'plot' of the Golem includes murders, patricide, infidelity, rape, revenge, and Faustian quests for magical powers. The aging Pernath falls into an idyllic platonic love, or a dream of love, and eventually is jailed on false charges of murder. He shares his cell for a single night with a 'holy sinner', a young man condemned for the rape/murder of a woman whom Pernath begins to fear to be his own beloved, yet the young murderer convinces Pernath that he is fulfilling a mystical course toward redemption.Author Gustav Meyrink was an illegitimate child of a German Baron and an actress. He was raised as a Protestant. In his early twenties, he suffered a "nervous breakdown", attempted suicide, then threw himself into occultism, beginning with theosophy. He progressed to alchemy and Kabbalah, stimulated by use of hashish. Meanwhile, almost implausibly, he conducted the affairs of a major bank and was known as a dashing 'man about town'. Eventually he was accused of fraud, imprisoned, financially ruined, and partially paralyzed. He recovered his health, he said, by the practice of yoga. He turned to writing to support himself, beginning The Golem in 1907 and publishing it in serial form in 1913. His later life was almost as disjointed and dreamlike as his writing.Younger readers of The Golem might well be tempted to compare it to the Harry Potter novels, delighting in its tingle-inducing fantasy, or to The Hobbit, for its vivid evocation of a world of dark forces. But The Golem is far more earnest, profoundly rooted in actual historical beliefs in super-rational forces of good and evil than all the fantasy literature of later decades. Some readers might see The Golem as a Middle European antecedent of "magical realism". Borges, in fact, acknowledged Meyrink as an influence. But the magic in The Golem transcends literary manipulation and artifice. One can't help feeling that Meyrink tapped a deeper aquifer of cultural memory; if ever a book made Karl Jung's claptrap psychology plausible, it would be The Golem. The closest comparison to The Golem, in my mind, would be the supernatural tales of Edgar Allen Poe. Imagine the creepy atmosphere of "Tell-tale Heart" or "The Masque of the Red Death" extended to the full length of a novel, and replete with even more haunting revenants of one's own worst dreams....Meyrink was not a master stylist in the German language. His syntax was often crabbed and awkward. None of his other works -- forgive me please, members of the fantasy fan club -- approach The Golem in power. But translator Mike Mitchell is a genius in his vocation. His translations of German classics like Simplicius Simplicissimus and The Golem are unaffected, unostentatious, plain-English wonders of readability. You won't lose much by reading The Golem in this translation. But don't try to rationalize it!

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*Product available on Desertcart Colombia*
*Store origin: CO*
*Last updated: 2026-02-26*