Behold Metatron: The Recording Angel

by Sol Yurick

Kabbalist idea read into the new virtual world

Genres: Theory, Philosophy, Nonfiction

169 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1985

About the author

Sol Yurick was an American novelist. He was born to a working class family of politically active Jewish immigrants. At the age of 14, Yurick became disillusioned with politics after the Hitler-Stalin pact. He enlisted during World War II, where he trained as a surgical technician. He studied at New York University after the war, majoring in literature. After graduation, he took a job with the welfare department as a social investigator, a job he held until the early 1960s, when he took up writing full time. He was involved in Students for a Democratic Society and the anti-war movement at this time.

His first novel, The Warriors, appeared in 1965. It combined a classical Greek story, Anabasis (Xenophon), with a fictional account of gang wars in New York City. It inspired the 1979 film of the same name. His other works include: Fertig (1966), The Bag (1968), Someone Just Like You/i> (1972), An Island Death (1976), Richard A (1981), Behold Metatron, the Recording Angel (1985), and Confession (1999).

Yurick passed away of complications from lung cancer, at age 87.

Reviews

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 2 out of 5]

From 1985, this badly copy-edited essay compiles a lot of vogueish ideas about the state of the knowledge economy in what was then called "the information age". Some of it recycles the sort of stale tripe recipe that Lyotard donated to the worst cultural theorists of the past 30 years (a low point being a dull misuse of Godel), but there are more interesting passages which do seem to sense the problems of data control that liberal thinktankers agonise over today. Yurick was a decent writer anyway, so he could make bad ideas into good sentences.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this is a meditative exercise that requires an enjoyment of lists strung together for tenuous cohesion