In Praise of Messy Creation
Reviews
By Kat Solomon
In Genesis, her name occurs only twice. The Bible records two different accounts of her creation—one in which she and Adam appear simultaneously, and another in which she is an afterthought, formed from Adam’s rib. In the third book of Genesis, she violates God’s injunction against eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, precipitating the couple’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. She is last mentioned as the mother of Cain and Abel and thus, it is implied, the mother of all humanity. Then she disappears.
What happened to Eve after birthing her sons? How would she tell her own story were it hers to tell? This is the space inhabited by Carmen Boullosa’s The Book of Eve (translated from the Spanish by Samantha Schnee), a thrillingly profane retelling of the creation myth.
A poet, playwright, and author of over a dozen novels, Boullosa is a prolific writer. A contemporary of Roberto Bolaño, she is well-known in Mexico and not well-known enough in the U.S. Thankfully, this may be changing as a result of the efforts of translator Samantha Schnee and small presses like Deep Vellum and Coffee House.
As its title suggests, The Book of Eve forms a kind of companion piece to The Book of Anna (also translated by Schnee), both of them feminist rewritings of classic texts. The latter, whose publication predates the former, is a sequel of sorts to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. It memorably included a fairytale-like section hinging upon the protagonist’s discovery of her clitoris. The Book of Eve is likewise an encomium to female pleasure. In place of Freud’s penis envy, Boullosa gives us clitoris envy (Deep Vellum leans into this thread with a cheeky cover image). In Eve’s account, her clitoris is created first, and Adam’s penis is formed belatedly from his attempts to ape her pleasure. Both novels feel like a culmination of Boullosa’s previous work. They combine the lyrical evocation of embodied female experience from her first novel Before (as translated by Peter Bush) with the playfulness and epic range of historical fictions such as Texas: The Great Theft (translated by Schnee).
In fact, The Book of Eve begins with a historical conceit. Its preface instructs readers that they “have been granted the privilege of reading Eve’s papers . . . Take good care of them, they have been entrusted to you.” The novel thus also presents itself as a counter-text—its own form of forbidden knowledge. Split into ten “books,” most of the narrative is a first-person account of Eve’s life from the moment she finds herself in Eden up through the flood and the construction of the Tower of Babel. These sections are interspersed with “loose papers,” some written by Eve, others by her daughters, her son Cain, and unknown sources. This structure creates a polyphony that mimics the Biblical experience of reading a text by many authors whose accounts sometimes overlap and even contradict one another.
All stories depend on our perspective, and the traditional story that we know is Adam’s. Not surprisingly, Adam does not come off well in Eve’s account. Initially more cautious than Eve, he envies her various creative abilities. She invents cooking, discovers how to fire clay pots so that they will hold water, and, most crucially, develops the ability to grow other people inside her. Adam’s envy warps his personality and prompts him to invent his own creation story. In his version, Eve came second, fashioned from part of him, and as a result is inherently inferior. He also invents a “He,” a creator who, he claims, made Adam in His image. Here, patriarchy is born out of male insecurity and the need to control women’s reproductive powers. This may be a familiar feminist critique, but Boullosa makes it fresh by returning us to the beginning, inviting us to imagine that things could have gone differently.
Boullosa seems particularly at home in this mythic register. The Book of Eve delights in describing the sensory immersion of Eve’s early time on earth: her discovery of the first rain, the first bees, the first flowers, even of language itself. In Eve’s telling, language is a tool powerful enough to reshape the material world:
We made a name for the way water bubbled up from the ground, as if the words were made in our bodies—carved, cut, and polished there, tanned and stitched together by what lay under our skin, revealing their clarity when they arrived on our lips. The air we breathed morphed into words inside us and took on auditory form when it came back out. We populated the Earth with words. The trees, the plants, and the animals lived alongside them, and some were altered by the effect the syllables had on them.
Schnee’s translation of Boullosa’s prose manages to feel both contemporary and convincingly Biblical. It’s a difficult linguistic feat that is so well-accomplished the reader can mostly take it for granted.
Above all, Boullosa’s Eve is a recognizably flawed human: a creature of desire. According to Eve, Eden is not a paradise. It is more like a primordial holding cell, “a kind of orchard in which everything was artificial because, though there were flowers and fruits, they weren’t true flowers and fruits, they had no vitality.” The food in Eden is tasteless. What’s missing in Eden is embodied experience; the joy of the senses: “The apple’s flavor awakened my taste, my hearing, my smell, my sight: my consciousness.” In Boullosa’s version of the story, Eve is not deceived by a serpent but chooses to eat the fruit of her own free will because it is enticing—and because she wants to. Biting into the apple is Eve’s first act of creation. With it, she awakens human understanding, discovers agency and moral choice, and gives birth to history. And this, she asks, is supposed to be a bad thing?
The novel itself, meanwhile, remains agnostic on the ultimate existence of a creator. Eve muses:
The one and only sweet-smelling, tasty apple hung from the branch of a tree, alone. Could it have been planted there—an intervention? If that were the case, who put it there? Was there a gardener in Eden?
Boullosa’s vision of creation is an omnivorous one, “catholic” with a lower-case “c.” The early pages invoke Chaos, Thunder, and Earth; similarly, references to Titans recall the earliest Greek creation myths. The “loose papers” invoke still other accounts, including that of Cōātlīcue, the Aztec goddess. In its later pages, Eve describes an Earth populated by large reptiles and flying creatures who have yet to develop feathers. Eve, like the reader, has access to only a small piece of the divine puzzle, but, unlike Adam and His God, she never claims omniscience.
Boullosa is a writer whose ambition may be easy to overlook given the high-wire act-like quality of her prose and the evident delight she takes in her material. But The Book of Eve takes up questions that have and will likely continue to have an outsized influence on our religious and political life. What is a woman’s body for, and who does it belong to? What if women were not, from the moment of creation, assigned a position secondary to men? And what if, instead of blaming Eve for centuries as the source of all sin, we could celebrate the moment when a woman who wanted something reached out to grasp it in her hand? Perhaps what is most satisfying about The Book of Eve is the sense that the novel is enacting its subject: a woman enjoying herself in the act of creation.
Kat Solomon is a writer living in the Boston area. Her reviews and criticism have appeared in Chicago Review of Books and on the Ploughshares blog. Her short fiction has been selected for Best Small Fictions 2022 and has been longlisted for The Wigleaf Top 50.
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