Diaries of Adam and Eve by Mark Twain

Title: The Diaries of Adam and Eve

Work includes: Adam's Diary, Eve's Diary, and 4 other short stories

"Translated" by: Mark Twain (American, 1835-1910)
Originally published: 1906
Page count: 103
Dates read: 2/18/19-2/19/19
2019 book goal progress: 7 out of 41
Back to the Classics category: Classic From the Americas or Caribbean. (Classic set there, or author from there.)
Read my other book reviews from the challenge HERE.


Description on back of book:
Long before the arrival of the serpent, conflict enters the Garden of Eden as Adam and Eve discover in each other a source of continual irritation. Through the light of their diaries, we learn of their halting progression from grudging adversaries to eventual partners.

First line:
"Who am I? What am I? Where am I?"

Favorite quotes:
Eve: "It is best to prove things by actual experiment. Then you know: whereas if you depend on guessing and supposing and conjecturing, you will never get educated. some things you can't find out, but you will never know you can't by guessing and supposing. No, you have to be patient and go on experimenting until you find out that you can't find out. And it is delightful to have it that way; it makes the world so interesting. If there wasn't anything to find out, it would be dull."

Adam: "When the mighty brontosaurus came striding into camp, she regarded it as an acquisition. I considered it a calamity. That is a good sample of the lack of harmony that prevails in our views of things... She believed it could be tamed by kind treatment and would be a good pet; I said a pet twenty-one feet high and eighty-four feet long would be no proper thing to have about the place, because even with the best intentions and without meaning any harm, it could sit down on the house and mash it, for anyone could see by the look of its eye that is was absentminded."

Review:

Eve is very social and tries to befriend Adam. She is optimistic, smart, and curious. Eve sees things through a lens of beauty and how much enjoyment something can give. Adam, in contrast, just wants to be left alone. He finds Eve annoying and tries to emigrate away from her several times. He is pessimistic, lazy, and slow minded. Adam sees everything through a lens of practicality and how useful something is. It isn't until after the fall (they eat the forbidden fruit) that Adam finally warms up to Eve. They work on writing a dictionary together, Eve accidentally discovers fire, and Adam works on a multiplication table (which includes 6x9=27).

Adam always happens to be away whenever Eve gives birth. Though the word 'born' is used, Eve never describes actually giving birth or even being pregnant. She takes to Cain (their first child) right away and is very motherly. Adam, on the other hand, thinks he's a new type of fish and puts him in water. To which, Eve quickly takes the baby out when he doesn't start swimming. When the child starts crawling, Adam thinks him to be a type of Kangaroo; when he starts walking, Adam thinks it to be a type of hairless bear; and when the child starts talking, Adam thinks it to be a strange parrot. It isn't until the child is about 5 or 6 that Adam finally believes him to be a person too.

The realization of death in the end is heartbreaking, but the final diary entry is sweet (and interesting and unexpected). This is an extremely short and very witty book - definitely worth the read. Now I'm off to read another book... but since a review should be more about the author of the book than about the writer of the blog, I will let Mark Twain have the last words:

One of the things that piqued the interest of Adam and Eve is how the cow gets its milk. After they watched a cow day and night, they knew cows don't drink it from elsewhere. Eve "knew at once the explanation: The milk was not taken in by the mouth, it was condensed from the atmosphere through the cow's hair... By a series of experiments we had long ago arrived at the conclusion that atmospheric air consisted of water in invisible suspension; also that the components of water were hydrogen and oxygen, in the proportion of two parts of the former to one of the latter and expressible by the symbol of H2O. My discovery revealed the fact that there was still another ingredient: milk. We enlarged the symbol to H2OM."