Minicthulhu Wrote:
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> Beautiful old Prague? ...
> "Golem" takes place strictly in the Jewish ghetto
> before the huge sanation (almost 150 unique houses
> were pulled down) that took place in the first
> years of the 19. Century. So the reader cannot
> expect some beautiful architecture, .... old, dirty houses; mysterious,
> ill-lit alleys; inscrutable nooks; nets of
> underground vaulted cellars etc. On the other
> hand, this decrepit and unattractive environment
> perfectly matches the story.
I see, not all pleasant then, ... although I am sure Lovecraft for one, would have enjoyed exploring the underground vaulted cellars, and alleys with spectral peaked gables, in an ecstatic mood of "adventurous expectancy".
Minicthulhu Wrote:
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> By the way, Meyrink wrote many short stories, some
> of them very bizzare and weird. The best ones are
> probably “Dr. Cinderella´s Plants“ about
> hideous experiments with plants and human bodies,
> “Das Präparat“ (I do not know if this story
> has been translated into English) where certain
> things of a room equipment (the bell-pull, the
> clock, the door-knob) are made of parts of a human
> body, and “Der Verdunstete Gehrin“ (also not
> sure if this one exists in an English translation)
> dealing with a crazy, deadly hallucination
> produced by consumption of poisonous mushrooms.
> Meyrink is definitely worth reading though
> sometimes he is hard to understand and tedious in
> places.
Sounds interesting, ... and rather decadent. Makes me think of Ewers and his
Alraune (by the way, is
Alraune available online in the original English translation by Guy Endore?), who was also writing around the same time in central Europe. Very different from the contemporary writers up in England; Blackwood, Machen, M. R. James, and W. H. Hodgson. The variance between Germanic and Anglo-Saxon cultural approach, I assume, although I can't quite put my finger on the dividing line in this context.
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?588823