The Golem, although creatively written, was a disappointment in one area inparticular. The book kept me reading, enticing me with suspense and interesting characters but the ending was dismal. It destroyed the plot that seemed so neatly put together. I felt completely let down by the main character in the end, as I was expecting something entirely different. The Golem, although built well as a novel needs a better ending, one that would become the icing on the cake, so to speak instead of detracting from an otherwise imaginative creation.

I have recently finished reading The Golem and I must say I am very impressed with it. It took me three starts to finally read the novel, it became difficult because of it's dream like atmosfere, it's symbolism and the amount of 'information' that leaves to the interpretation of the reader. It seames to be a novel with many levels of reading, from the most superficial to more profound, where the symbols seam to point to. I found reading it not easy but very rewarding and the novel in itself unique, with an atmosphere unlike any other I have read. I truly recomend it, although it can be difficult at first.

Taking the legend of the Golem, the artificial man who was created by the use of the Kaballah magic power, a legend from the times of rabbi Low, contemporary of the emperor of Germany Rudolph II, Meyrink goes beyong this legend to envelope the reader in a complex atmosphere, the atmosphere of the Jewish quarter of Prague, sinister, sombre, gloomy, just like Kafka's novels. The novel, like all Meyrink's novels, is expressionist to the bottom, the characters are distorted, weird, sinister, or else with a sense of unreality about them, although some of them, like Charoussek the student, Hillel and his daughter Miriam, deeply moving.
As every novel by Meyrink, "The Golem" is very complex and has difficult concealed meanings, full of symbols which are related to the unconscious. It isn't by chance that Meyrink's novels found the enthusiasm of Jung. The novel, thus, can be seen as a wandering through the mind of the main character, Athanasius Pernath, a particular "saison en enfer" descending to the labyrinth of Pernath's unconscious.
However, the novel can also be interpreted from an esoterical point of view, the ancient Eastern doctrine of the Upanishads, the reincarnation, the nature of soul, life and suffering.
It also presents the theme of the "double", a recurrent theme in Literature like, for instance, in Edgar A. Poe's "William Wilson".
What is crucial is that none of Gustav Meyrink's novels can be interpreted literally, because their meanings are hidden, more concerning myth than plain reality. I don't think that "The Golem" should be seen just as a horror or a mystery novel, because it is profoundly esoterical, mystic and onirical. Its meanings are only to be found in the kind of meanings that dreams provide.