A01=Eca de Queiros
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Author_Eca de Queiros
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B06=Margaret Jull Costa
biblical
Category1=Fiction
Category=FA
Category=FBA
Category=FW
COP=United States
creation myth
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eden
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=0
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_modern-contemporary
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_philosophy-religion
garden of eden
iconoclastic
Language_English
old testament
PA=Not yet available
Price_€10 to €20
PS=Forthcoming
satire
softlaunch
Product details
- ISBN 9780811239141
- Weight: 55g
- Dimensions: 114 x 185mm
- Publication Date: 04 Feb 2025
- Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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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…
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. Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson have translated the work of Lúcio Cardoso, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, and Clarice Lispector, among others. They live in England.
