Description
Never before in English, this delectable novella offers a hilarious new version of Genesis, where, rather than living in innocent bliss, Adam and Eve live in terror of being stomped by an Ichthyosaurus
Gloriously translated by Margaret Jull Costa, Adam and Eve in Paradise by Eça de Queirósis not the rosy prelapsarian tale of your childhood Bible: yellow-eyed Adam is a slope-browed Neanderthal all alone and panicked, and Paradise is abominable (seethingly alive with vicious insects and roving primordial carnivores). Luckily for Adam, Eve appears: “O wonder, there before Adam, as if it were both him and not him, was another Being very similar to him, only more slender and covered with a more silken down, and who was regarding him with wide, lustrous, liquid eyes… And slowly, gently rubbing its bare knees together, the whole of this silken, tender Being was offering itself up in astonished, lascivious submission. It was Eve… It was you, O Venerable Mother!”
But still we must pity poor Adam and Eve: “Our Parents’ tireless, desperate efforts were devoted entirely to surviving in the midst of a Nature that was ceaselessly, furiously plotting their destruction. And Adam and Eve spent those days—which Semitic texts celebrate as delightful—always trembling, always whimpering, always fleeing!”
Eça de Queirós’s pleasure in the glories of language and his delight in skewering all complacencies are richly palpable, leaving the reader smiling and sighing: Ahhh, those Genesiac days…
Reviews
"Portugal's greatest novelist. " — José Saramago
"Eça ought to be up there with Dickens, Balzac, and Tolstoy as one of the talismanic names of the nineteenth century." — The London Observer
"A writer of mesmerizing literary power. We should be grateful for such blessings." — Michael Dirda, Washington Book Post World
"His excellent prose glides through real experience and private dream in a manner that is leading on toward the achievements of Proust." — V. S. Pritchett
"The narrator of this superb and archly satirical 1897 novella by Eça de Queirós (The Illustrious House of Ramires) casts the biblical Paradise as a terrifying wilderness. In the author’s funhouse version of Genesis, the orangutans may be happier than man, despite the “many gifts that God gave us.” This is sublime." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Both playful and profound… This is an Eden of contrasts. It is at once intimate and vast, sensuous and red in tooth and claw, with ‘linting marble rocks blushing warm and pink’, while oxen and deer lock horns ‘with the dry crack of oaks felled by the wind’… all the contrasts, perhaps counterintuitively, form a fine, multi-layered whole. And we are in excellent hands with Margaret Jull Costa – a translator who has perhaps done more than anyone to help the literature of Europe’s westernmost country find an international audience. Despite the gap of time, these pages read fluently, avoiding the Portuguese fondness for overlong sentences and inviting us, with wit and respect, to view Adam and Eve, and origin stories great and small, anew." — Franklin Nelson, The Spectator
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