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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…
"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...Eça de Queirós pokes fun at religion, history, and science...This is sublime." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A writer of mesmerizing literary power. We should be grateful for such blessings." ―Washington Book Post World
"Eça ought to be up there with Dickens, Balzac, and Tolstoy as one of the talismanic names of the nineteenth century." ―The London Observer
This information about Adam and Eve in Paradise was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
One of the leading intellectuals of the "Generation of 1870," José Maria de Eça de Queirós (1845–1900) wrote twenty books, founded literary reviews, and for most of his life also worked as a diplomat, in Havana, London, and Paris. New Directions also publishes his novels The Crime of Father Amaro, The Maias, The Mountain and the City, The Yellow Sofa, and The Illustrious House of Ramires.
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