![]() Josef Hoffman was a young boy, from a German family living in Prague, when the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia. ![]() That is how the story starts, with Karel Prazan meeting his friend Helen Franklin on a street in Prague on a cold winter’s night, and telling her about a letter that he has received from an old man, Josef Adelmar Hoffman, who has just died in seat Number 209 of the National Library in Prague. ![]() It is difficult to imagine how anything could be more horrific than Auschwitz and, for me, Melmoth watching from the shadows in her long, black dress, with her bleeding feet and her attendant jackdaws, simply does not work.īut of course, if there was no-one watching there would not be a witness to the crimes that ordinary people can take part in, and the heroism with which they can confront the dangers around them. ![]() You really have to be a brave and confident author to set a horror story in Prague in 1938, and in the subsequent years. Sarah Perry tries to bring the Maturin story up to date by letting Melmoth see the horrors of the C20th. Therein lies part of the problem that I have with this book. She is, quite simply, a female version of the Wandering Jew. ![]() “Melmoth the Wanderer” is a gothic horror novel written by Charles Maturin, who describes her as a witness of the resurrection of Christ, who denies that it happened and so is condemned to wander the earth witnessing the evil of humanity until the second coming, the end of time. ![]()
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