Adam & Eve in Paradise

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. Adam, “father of Mankind,” is a hirsute brute, “a truly alarming sight.” Endowed with consciousness by God on the 28th day of creation, Adam leaves the bliss of the treetops and wanders into a scary world of mastodons, pterodactyls, and wolves. After eating meat for the first time and dozing off, he wakes to find Eve, apparently offering herself to him in “astonished, lascivious submission.” As they struggle to survive in the wilderness, Adam and Eve accidentally invent weapons, learn to make fire, and adopt a puppy, in a hilariously sped-up version of human evolution mostly driven by Eve’s civilizing instincts. Eça de Queirós pokes fun at religion, history, and science, locating Eden in “the grasslands of the Euphrates, or possibly in darkest Ceylon, or among the four clear rivers that now water Hungary, or even in the blessed land” of Lisbon. 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. (Feb.)