Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

***NO SPOILERS***

No fan of Mark Twain’s work should overlook this slim masterpiece, an ingenious and amusing peek into the minds and lives of Adam and Eve during their first days. The narrative is organized as half Adam’s diary and half Eve’s. The tones are distinct. Adam’s is a straightforward, puzzled, and sometimes cranky daily accounting of the day’s accomplishments and discoveries. He shuns Eve and complains about her to hilarious effect. Eve’s is optimistic, wonderstruck, and feeling. She seeks out Adam and is sad when she doesn’t spot him, sometimes for days at a time. Both diaries have in common a deep curiosity and sense of awe, and both are truly laugh-out-loud comedic in their own ways. Eve’s in particular is moving at times.

It’s difficult to decide what’s best about The Diaries of Adam and Eve. It’s playful and engaging from start to finish, proof that a novella can be just as well-done as any Pulitzer Prize–winner. The story is one giant quotable passage, and little observations Eve records about Adam (and vice versa) highlight how fresh her impressions are (e.g., at one point she notes that his body is shaped like a carrot).

Readers will get a special kick out of the illustrations, which complement the story perfectly. In this edition Adam’s are depicted as his own, coarsely drawn on slabs of stone, and most are funny:



Eve’s are from a third-person perspective and lovely:



Strangely, some versions of this book don't contain illustrations. Readers should seek out an illustrated edition, as the illustrations not only greatly enhance the writing but compose half the story. Each story page has an illustration opposite, and some pages contain only a sentence or two, in plain writing. Readers could easily read this book in a few minutes. A basic knowledge of Genesis—Twain alludes to the part of Genesis that mentions Eve was in charge of naming the animals, for instance—is helpful but not necessary.

The Diaries of Adam and Eve is priceless. It contains Twain’s trademark wit and inventiveness and plays up differences so astutely that one cannot deny just how sharply observant he was in his study of people and how they relate to one another.