Weekend Reading: "The Creator" by Mynona a.k.a. Salomo Friedlaender

This should be titled “airplane reading,” since I’m taking off tomorrow morning for the Sharjah International Book Fair. (If you don’t know already, Sharjah is an emirate very near Dubai. It’s a lot less ostentatious than Dubai though—kind of—and has no booze. Which, yeah.)

Anyway, The Creator came in the other day, and immediately got the attention of everyone in the office. Wakefield Press is one of our favorites, mostly for the very strange, almost unclassifiable books that they do. This one is no exception:

Billed by its author—the pseudonymous Mynona (German for “anonymous” backward)—as “the most profound magical experiment since Nostradamus,” The Creator tells the tale of Gumprecht Weiss, an intellectual who has withdrawn from a life of libertinage to pursue his solitary philosophical ruminations. At first dreaming and then actually encountering an enticing young woman named Elvira, Weiss discovers that she has escaped the clutches of her uncle, the Baron, who has been using her as a guinea pig in his metaphysical experiments. But the Baron catches up with them and persuades Gumprecht and Elvira to come to his laboratory, to engage in an experiment to bridge the divide between waking consciousness and dream by entering a mirror engineered to bend and blend realities. Mynona’s philosophical fable was described by the legendary German publisher Kurt Wolff as “a station farther on the imaginative train of thought of Hoffmann, Villiers, Poe, etc.,” when it appeared in 1920, with illustrations by Alfred Kubin (included here).

The “most profound magical experiment since Nostradamus” is what sold it for me. This sounds so wild, and basically perfect for Halloween . . .

This is translated by Peter Wortsman (who has also translated Musil and Kleist for Archipelago Books), and contains the illustrations from Alfred Kubin.