THE BOOK OF EVE, woman-centered retelling of the Biblical Font of Misogyny

THE BOOK OF EVE
CARMEN BOULLOSA
Deep Vellum (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.49 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: What if everything they’ve told us about the Garden was the other way around? Faced with what appears to be an apocryphal manuscript containing ten books and 91 passages, Eve decides to tell her version: she was neither created from Adam's rib, nor is it exact that she was expelled by the apple and the serpent, nor is story they tell of Abel and Cain true, neither that of the Flood, nor that of the Tower of Babel...

With brilliant prose, Carmen Boullosa gives a twist to the book of Genesis to dismantle the male figure and rebuild the world, the origin of gastronomy, the domestication of animals, the cultivation of land and pleasure, through the feminine gaze. Based on this exploration, sometimes fun and other times painful, The Book of Eve takes a tour through the stories they’ve told us and which have helped to foster (and cement) the absurd idea that woman is the companion, complement, and even accessory to man, which opens the door to criminal violence against women. Boullosa refutes and breaks them in this feminist novel, foundational and brazen.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Feminist retelling of Adam and Eve from Genesis.

As one might expect I was no fan of the patriarchal version, it being part of a religious tradition that I detest. I can't say that flipping the script to make it clear that Eve was hard done by in the Abrahamic original, and offering an Eve-centered corrective, was particularly agreeable, either; the entire religious framework is just so utterly nonsensical that making a shift in viewpoint doesn't make it less ridiculous.

I've seen significant consumer-review criticism of Author Boullosa (of Heavens on Earth fame) for sounding angry and anti-man in this retelling of the ur-text of misogyny. Well, honestly! How silly of the woman to feel some kinda way about a story that's been used for literal millennia to bludgeon women into submission to men in god's name? Outrageous!

The storytelling volume is indeed turned to eleven of ten, and the weird stop on the organ is out all the way. Eve reclaims the Ark myth as her own (which makes a lot of sense TBH) and has a really, um, off-center story of how we all came to have those indispensible things, the anus. Have to read it to find out. But the fact is, neither Adam nor Eve as created being would have one...or a navel...as they never gestated so never grew 'em. What the hell did I just read was my most frequent thought as I kept reading this uncorked, vociferous Eve's take on the stories I value so little.

So, on the one hand, yes indeed this woman's take on a man's story of why women should submit to him is plenty angry, on the other hand it always makes a story more interesting and more relevant to look at it upside down. Author Boullosa is a dab hand at making her characters sound like they are in the room with you. I found this storytelling voice compelling, angry, and Eve herself resolutely unwilling to be a good girl and quiet down. Thank goodness, though in spite of her absence of sham modesty Eve never addressed my most burning Biblical question:

Can anyone explain to me why the myth got started the Eve was created from Adam's rib, when we've all got the same number of these bones? Clearly it makes more sense...insofar as any of this guff does...to have her created from his baculum, since humans ain't got those no more.