Melmoth novel6/7/2023 Karel gives Helen a collection of texts that speak of a wraith-like figure who appears at times of great sorrow, beckoning “with an expression of loneliness so imploring as to be cruel”. This is a book that seeks to provide a model for resistance to contemporary violence It is through a friend called Karel that Helen first comes to hear of the myth of Melmoth, or Melmotka, as she is known in Prague, a woman who wanders the Earth “until she’s weary and her feet are bleeding”, bearing witness to all humanity’s violence and cruelty. She is a pitiable figure, “small, insignificant, having about her an air of sadness whose source you cannot guess at of self-punishment, self-hatred, carried out quietly and diligently and with a minimum of fuss”. The book’s central character is Helen Franklin, a woman in her early 40s working as a translator in Prague. Perry is not the first to update the tale – Balzac wrote a novella called Melmoth Reconciled – but she has transformed Melmoth into a woman and charged the myth with Christian and folkloric resonances, presenting, like Maturin, a series of documents purporting to prove the existence of this ghastly, tormented figure. The titular figure in the original book was a man, a kitsch mashup of Faust and the Wandering Jew, who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for 150 years more time on Earth. Melmoth, Sarah Perry’s third novel and the follow-up to the wildly successful The Essex Serpent, draws both theme and structure from Charles Maturin’s 1820 gothic masterpiece Melmoth the Wanderer.
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