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Lucas
read and liked
Baobhan Sidhe's
review of Eve: A Novel of the First Woman:
"I couldn't help being reminded of Anita Diamant's The Red Tent while reading Eve: A Novel of the First Woman. It's inevitable, I guess. Both books take place in Biblical times and retell popular Genesis myths from a decidedly female point-of-view. Th...more
I couldn't help being reminded of Anita Diamant's The Red Tent while reading Eve: A Novel of the First Woman. It's inevitable, I guess. Both books take place in Biblical times and retell popular Genesis myths from a decidedly female point-of-view. The main difference being that Eve -- unlike Jacob's daughter, Dinah, the heroine in The Red Tent -- is a prominent figure in Biblical myth, not merely a name mentioned in passing. That is both a blessing and curse, I think. With a name so recognized as that of Eve's, and a myth so widely known as that of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, an author has less freedom to expand, but also more material to draw inspiration from.
In Eve, Elliott attempts to explore so many themes -- the relationship between man and wife, the relationship between mother and child, loss of faith, urban growth vs. rural preservation, jealousy and its repercussions, etc -- that she fails to fully explore any of them and the story as a whole ends up scattered and unfocused with some large, glaring omissions of much needed information. For a good chunk of the book we're led to believe that Adam and Eve, along with their children, are the only people on earth. Then, BAM!, one day a group of Sumerians show up and build a large, bustling city nearby. Um, setting aside actual history for a second, if, in both the context of this book and the myth it's inspired by, Adam and Eve are the first two people on the face of the planet, and their children haven't yet gone forth to multiply, where, exactly, did the Sumerians come from again? Were they created by their own gods? Did they evolve via natural selection? Were they the spawn of Lilith, perhaps? How can you present the reader with a group of people so pivotal to the events that take place in the latter half of the book -- a group of people with generations of rich, varied history behind them -- and not give the reader a clear answer as to where those people came from? Did I miss something?
Eve's later struggle with her faith in god also didn't ring true for me. I mean, it's not like she ever really needed faith in god to begin with, right? Believing in the existence of something isn't a matter of faith when that something shows up in the garden he created for you on an almost daily basis just to shoot the shit. I don't need faith to believe that my husband exists, not when he talks to me and makes love to me and snores by me as frequently as he does. He's a very real part of my very real reality and I can't just wake up one day and start doubting that he's really here, as much as I might like to when he leaves coffee rings on the kitchen counter for the too-many-times-I've-lost-count time. I can understand being angry at god for kicking you out of his naked tea party because you had the gall to eat a cookie off of the cookie platter uninvited but to start doubting his actual existence? Color me puzzled. And hungry. I like cookies.
But my biggest disappointment is in Elliott's generic, one-dimensional depiction of Cain. I was hoping for a bit more depth to the world's first bad boy. I'll admit, it was a selfish want, as Cain is one of the Biblical figures that interests me the most. (Other favorites being Salome, Judas, and, yes, Satan himself, make of that what you will. Personally, I think it would make for an interesting dinner party. Or naked tea party, perhaps.) I'm not saying he needed to be reframed as some kind of innocent, wide-eyed hero. That's Abel's job and he does it nauseatingly well. But I would have liked to see some believable internal conflict and a realistic exploration of how jealousy and resentment can, in rare cases, lead to something as extreme as murder. Instead, we get a Cain who's just bad from birth. That's it. He's destined to kill his brother because he killed butterflies as a child and hated to mind his mother. In Elliott's hands, Cain and Abel are little more than the Goofus and Gallant of the Biblical age.
And yet, as you can see by my rating, three stars = liked it which means I, well, liked it. It was a fine, but flawed, effort, and maybe I'm just picking at its flaws because my hands are blistered from working under the IV hood all day and I can't physically pick at much else right now. So, bad on me, or the hospital for asking me to snap together one-thousand too many Protonix.(less)
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