From the magazine

This other Eden: Adam and Eve in Paradise, by Eça de Queirós, reviewed

Published in 1897, Queiros’s novella revisits Christianity’s first man and woman, departing from the Creation story in ways both playful and profound

Franklin Nelson
Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, by an unknown Mexican painter.  Francis G. Mayer/Print Collector/ Getty Images
EXPLORE THE ISSUE 25 January 2025
issue 25 January 2025

When José Saramago denounced the Bible as a ‘catalogue of cruelties’ at the launch of his novel Cain in 2009, the response from the Catholic church in Portugal was fast and frosty. The country’s conference of bishops labelled his comments ‘offensive’, adding: ‘Insults do no one any good, particularly from a Nobel prizewinner.’

Saramago might have been taking his cue from the man he considered to be Portugal’s greatest novelist. While serving as a diplomat in Britain, Cuba and France, Eça de Queirós (1845-1900) savaged clerical hypocrisy and national backwardness in what are now considered canonical realist doorstoppers. And a century before Saramago, he caused a similar ruckus with Adam and Eve in Paradise.

The novella, published in 1897 and now translated into English for the first time, revisits Christianity’s first man and woman, departing from the Creation story in ways both playful and profound. Adam’s birth and discovery of paradise in the first of the story’s three parts underlines that 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’.

Later, Eve, given ‘wide, lustrous, liquid eyes’ by God, saves her sleeping partner from a pack of animals keen to kill any prospect of humanity (and thus their subjugation), before the pair establish a kind of primitive domesticity, learning to hunt, cook and make clothes in an increasingly hostile place. Meanwhile, repeated references to their roles as ‘our Father’ and ‘our Mother’ come up against allusions to Darwinian theory, to which the narrator is sympathetic.

GIF Image

Magazine articles are subscriber-only. Keep reading for just £1 a month

SUBSCRIBE TODAY
  • Free delivery of the magazine
  • Unlimited website and app access
  • Subscriber-only newsletters

Comments

Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months

Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.

Already a subscriber? Log in