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 Click for words events The greatest story never told FICTION REVIEW
In a humanizing story of biblical proportions, Shlomo DuNour delivers a
strange, critical, yet sympathetic take on the saga of mankind's
creation through the eyes of a naïve and inquisitive angel named Adiel.
Originally assigned by an invisible God to guide the sun along its
course from east to west, Adiel is transferred to The Garden (all of
earth before the fall) to be witness to the story of mankind. God tells
Adiel "as a scribe you shall neither add nor subtract... it is not
for
you to judge, to sift or refine, to choose what is fit to be recorded
and what is not." Perhaps dooming for him, but good for the reader,
Adiel fails in his mission.
Retold with an innocent, elegiac and questioning voice, this story of
Genesis, which earned the 1999 Jerusalem Prize for Literature in its
original Hebrew text, is downright soap-operatic. God's devotion to
Adam seems over-the-top narcissistic; the stenchy-smelling angel,
Lilith, flutters above Adam at all hours and engages his sexual
desires.
In exchange for Lilith's promise to allow him to know her in
that
celestial way, the slithering and cunning serpent schemes to rid Adam
of
Eve so that Lilith can have Adam all to herself. Adiel appears to be
romantically enamored with his angel teacher Michael; siblings couple;
sons lust after mom; and God gets fed up with it all and sends the
flood, the violence of which has that soft-core graphic imagery you'd
see on afternoon television, while folding laundry on the couch. Hey,
but this is all in the Bible!
Keenly sensitive to the inherent hierarchy of God's kingdom, Adiel
nevertheless questions God's judgment, which endears the reader to his
plight. In this retelling, all of God's creatures, and God himself,
are
metaphorically stripped down to bare human beings, reflecting many of
the internal forces we continue to struggle with today. The remaining
text has been delivered unto us, and the ending is for us to record.
"Adiel"
by Shlomo DuNour
The Toby Press, $24.95, 304 pages
Also by Kristin Scott
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