Adam and Eve in Paradise

Translated from Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa, Adam and Eve in Paradise is 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!”

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 …