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. Stranger still, it seems to have the same face as the narrator. '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. Mike Mitchell has revised his translation and a new introduction has been added. In the 1890s Meyrink developed an interest in the occult, and became a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (and also, briefly, the Theosophical Society). '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.' Jorge Luis Borge Gustav Meyrink was the pseudonym of Gustav Meyer, an Austrian who had lived in Prague for twenty years as a banker. But his story is experienced by an anonymous. 'A remarkable work of horror, half- way between Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Frankenstein.'The Observer The novel centers on the life of Athanasius Pernath, a jeweler and art restorer who lives in the ghetto of Prague.
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