Gustav Meyrink

I'd like to meet:

. [INCIPIT] 1. SLEEP. The moonlight is falling on to the foot of my bed. It lies there like a tremendous stone, flat and gleaming.

As the shape of the full moon begins to dwindle, and its right side start to wane - as age will treat a human face, leaving his trace of wrinkles first upon one hollowing cheek - my soul becomes a pray to vague unrest. It torments me.

At such times of night I cannot sleep; I cannot wake; in its half dreaming state my mind forms a curious compound of things it has seen, things it has read, things it has heard - streams, each with its own degree of clarity and colour, that intermingle, and penetrate my thoughts.

4 HE IS FUMBLING HIS WAY NOW ALONG THE WALL; AT THIS MOMENT HE MUST BE LABORIOUSLY SPELLING OUT THE LETTERS OF MY NAME IN THE DARKNESS, ON MY DOOR... THE DOOR OPENS, AND HE COMES IN... WITH THE GAIT OF A MAN FOR EVER IN FEAR OF FALLING... UNFAMILIAR FACE CLEAN SHAVEN, WITH PROMINENT CHEEK BONES, EYES SLANTING... TERROR TAKES ME BY THE THROAT.

This is the first meeting of Athanasius Pernath, gem-cutter with a shadow in his past, with the Golem, the strange supernatural force reputated to haunt the ancient Ghetto of Prague. From this meeting grows an incredible web of experiences, set within the twisted crumbling walls and dark passages of the Ghetto around the turn of the century. Strange mystical visions, wonderful transformations, lurking terrors and perplexing revelations come into being around the twin personalities of Pernath and the Golem, against a background of hatred and frustrated love, malice and cabalistic saintliness.

The legend of the GOLEM has attracted the attention of many writers, including such important contemporary figures as Isaac Bashevis Singer and Elie Wiesel. Gustav Meyrink's THE GOLEM its most famous fictional treatment and is one of the most famous supernatural novels in modern European literature. Besides being a masterpiece of fantastic fiction, it also has the distinction of being the first important expressionist novel, a work of international stature.

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4 [INCIPIT] CHAPTER ONE. The elegantly-dressed foreigner standing somewhat undecided on the pavement on the Jodenbreetstraat gazed at the strange inscription in remarkably ornate white letters on the black sign outside a shop diagonally opposite: CHIDHER GREEN'S HALL OF RIDDLES. Out of curiosity, or merely in order to get away from the jostling of the crowd, who were commenting with typical Dutch frankness on his frock coat, his gleaming top hat and his gloves, all things which seemed to have rarity value in this quarter of Amsterdam, he crossed the road between two greengrocer's carts drawn by dogs. He was followed by a couple of street-urchins with hunched shoulders, cavernous stomachs and low-slung backsides who slouched along behind him, their hands stuffed deep into the pockets of their incredibly baggy blue canvas trousers, thin clay pipes sticking out through their red neckerchiefs.

Meyrink's THE GREEN FACE is second in visionary power only to The Golem. By creating an all-pervading atmosphere of Kafkaesque mystery and uncertainty, Meyrink succedes in suggesting inexhaustible depths and heights of meaning. The Green Face was first published in 1916. In an Amsterdam that very much resembles the Prague of The Golem, a stranger, Hauberisser, enters by chance a magician's shop. The name on the shop, he believes, is Chidher Green; inside, among several strange customers, he hears an old man, who says his name is Green, explain that, like the Wandering Jew, he has been on earth 'ever since the moon has been circling the heavens'. When Hauberisser catches sight of the old man's face, it makes him sick with horror. The face haunts him. The rest of the novel chronicles Hauberisser's quest for the elusive and horrible old man. The Green Face has the classic Meyrink features: the mystical wedding, the galaxy of grotesque characters and the haunting atmosphere of the Ghetto.

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4 [INCIPIT] ZRCADLO THE ACTOR. A dog barked. Once. A second time. Then a noiseless hush, as if in the darkness the animal were pricking up its ears for any suspicious sounds. 'I think that was Brock barking', said old Baron Elsenwanger. 'That will probably be Schimding coming'. 'Lord hel us, that's no reason for banking', objected Countess Zahradka, an old woman with snow-white ringlets, a sharp Roman nose and bushy brows over her large, black, crazed eyes; she seemed irritated at Brock's unseemly behaviour, and shuffled the pack of cards even faster than she had been doing for the last half hour already. 'What does he actually do, all day long?' asked Dr. Thaddaeus Halberd. With his clean-shaven, intelligent, wrinkled face above an old-fashioned lace cravat, the former Physician to the Imperial Court looked like the spectre of one of his own ancestors; he was sitting opposite the Countess, curled up in a wing chair, his incredibly long, skinny legs drown up ape-like almost to his chin. The students on the Hradschin called him 'The Penguin' [...]

Comic and fantastic, gruesome and grotesque, WALPURGISNACHT uses Prague as the setting for a clash between German officialdom immured in the ancient castle above the Moldau, and a Czech revolution seething in the city below. History, myth and political reality merge in the apocalyptic climax as the rebels, urged on by a drum covered in human skin, storm the castle to crown a poor violinist 'Emperor of the World' in St Vitus Cathedral. Written in 1917, Walpurgisnacht continues the message of The Green Face, of a decadent society on the brink of collapse and of a Europe past salvation. In it we see Meyrink's exceptional narrative powers at their height.

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4 [INCIPIT] CHAPTER ONE. A strange feeling: this packet I am holding in my hand was all neatly tied up and sealed by a dead man! It is as if fine, invisible threads, delicate as a spider's web, lead out from it into a dark realm. The complex pattern of the string, the care with which the blue wrapping paper has been folded - it all bears silent witness to the purposeful designs of a living man sensing the approach of death; he gathers together letters, notes, caskets filled with once vital matters that already belong to the past, suffused with memories that have long since faded, and he arranges them and wraps them up with half a thought for his future heir, for that distant, almost unknown person - me - who will know of his death and who will hear of it at the moment when this sealed packet, left to find its way in the realm of the living, reaches the hand it is destined for.

A complex and ambitious novel which centres on the life of the Elizabethan magus, John Dee, in England, Poland and Prague, as it intertwines past and present, dreams and visions, myth and reality in a world of the occult, culminating in the transmutation of physical reality into a higher spiritual existence. The narrator believes he is becoming possessed by the spirit of his ancestor John Dee. The adventnures of Dee and his disreputable colleague, an earless rogue called Edmund Kelley, form a rollicking 16th century variant on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as they con their way across Europe in a flurry of alchemy and conjured spirits. At one point, Kelley even persuades Dee that the success of an occult enterprise depends on his sleeping with Dee's wife. Past, present and assorted supernatural dimensions become interwined in this odd and thoroughly diverting tale.