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Adam & Eve: A Novel
Adam & Eve: A Novel
Adam & Eve: A Novel
Ebook480 pages7 hours

Adam & Eve: A Novel

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

2.5/5

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“This thriller is rich in brilliant discourses on religion, fanaticism, the meaning of ancient cave art, the speculative future, and love.”
Library Journal

 

Sena Jeter Naslund, the New York Times bestselling author of Ahab’s Wife, Four Spirits, and Abundance explores both the dark nature of fundamentalism and the brightness of true faith in her dazzling novel, Adam & Eve. A provocative, eloquent, and deeply compelling story of a woman caught between two warring worlds—science and religion—Adam & Eve raises timely questions about identity, innocence, and sin, and represents a new literary high-water  mark for New York Times Notable author and Harper Lee Award-winner Naslund.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
Release dateSep 28, 2010
ISBN9780062013828
Author

Sena Jeter Naslund

Sena Jeter Naslund is a cofounder and program director of the Spalding University (Louisville) brief-residency MFA in Writing, where she edits The Louisville Review and Fleur-de-Lis Press. A winner of the Harper Lee Award and the Southeastern Library Association Fiction award, she is the author of eight previous works of fiction, including Ahab's Wife, a finalist for the Orange Prize. She recently retired from her position as Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Louisville.

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Reviews for Adam & Eve

Rating: 2.6904761904761907 out of 5 stars
2.5/5

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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Adam & Eve is unlike anything else I've ever read. Part thriller, part exploration of biblical themes, this is a story that I at first thought would be very close to some other books I have already read. (Dan Brown perhaps?) However when I dove into the story, I was instantly blown away by the beautiful writing style and the metaphors on each and every page. Sena Jeter Naslaund doesn't just write the story for the reader, she shows it.

    Let me go back a bit and explain. The first half (to about 2/3) of the book is dedicated to Lucy and Adam's stories. Lucy's husband was a world renowned astrophysicist who met an untimely death. It's not certain whether this was pure accident, but all Lucy knows is that she is now the sole keeper of files that have the ability to overthrow thinking as we know it. Intriguing, am I right? Then we meet Adam. A soldier who has been dumped in the middle of the desert, Adam believes that he is the Adam from biblical times. Out there alone, in his tiny Eden oasis, he believes he is the beginning of the world. The first man to ever have been made. In fact, he's a poor man who has been beaten half to death, but it's a fascinating parallel.

    As these two characters meet and interact, I was smitten with the way the story progressed. There are lovely allusions to the story of Adam & Eve, along with topics that make you think beyond that. Basically the entire book is a battle between the idea of creationism, and scientific study. It definitely gets a little heavy handed at times, but I was able to loose myself in the overall story. That is, until the end. Once the first half of the book is over and these characters are ripped from their Eden, things were tough to follow. The already slightly overbearing topics of religion and science were even more apparent, and I didn't feel like following anymore. To be honest, I almost didn't even finish the book.

    If I'm being honest, I'm not at all certain how I feel about Adam & Eve. The first half of the book held my attention beautifully, while the second half just descended into confusion for me. Therein lies the problem. I wasn't sure how to rate a book that I loved for half of it. So, I chose this rating. I hope this review accurately explains my views, even though I'm not 100% sure of them myself! If you pick this up to give it a try yourself, let me know what you think!
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I'm not sure what to say about this book. The description sounded interesting so I gave it a chance (the description gave it a kind of Da Vinci Code kind of feel). It just didn't do it for me though.

    A scientist discovers proof of extraterrestrial life. A discovery in the Holy Land of an ancient text that contradicts the biblical book of Genesis. A group from all three major religions that will stop at nothing to keep those secret. ...and a man (Adam) and woman (Lucy) that end up naked in a desert oasis seemingly just to have a naked man and woman in the story to give it that Adam and Eve feel.

    You almost had me at first there.

    To be fair, this book is not my usual genre.

    The plot had an almost dream-like randomness to it. Characters seem to do things with no motivation. Seriously? A woman crash lands her plane and all her clothes burn off. Convenient for the plot. She decides to stay in the oasis with a crazy man she's never met before that thinks he's the biblical Adam? And she's okay with this? There's a feral boy that feeds sheep hearts to unconscious people. Characters show up to advance the story and then disappear or die.

    There's some action in the book towards the end when the bad guys finally show up for a short chase through some caves.

    My favorite character was the old mule-riding father of Pierre.

    If the book had ended with Lucy waking up from a nap and realizing she was late for her lunch date with her husband, I would have believed the book more. Otherwise, it just didn't work.

    IJustFinished.com provided the book for me to review.





  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I enjoyed the beginning. I thought I knew where the story was going, but I was wrong. I thought it was going to be similar to Mary Doria Russell's the Sparrow but it was more Paul Aster. I don't care for books heaped in symbolism. I also thougt the Characters behaved in illogical ways. I suppose if you really liked her other books you will like this. It will likely offend some Christians.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is an odd and fairly wonderful book. I think it is the best Naslund has done since "Ahab's wife," which I considered unabashedly brilliant. This book shines in many ways, multiple rivulets flashing from a clay jar fountain in the desert. There are creepy plot threads of murder and betrayal which work their way through the stories, and provide a ground. Eve's husband killed by a falling piano; the perrenial watchers and schemers in the background. The pursuit through a world of cave paintings, the underground womb of our people. Hitchcock meets the Golden Bough.Although the plot line could be compelling, dealing with both the discovery of a new Genesis (or text explaining the origin of Genesis); the discovery of life on other worlds or extraterrestrial systems, and efforts by fundamentalists to suppress same, somehow the plot is almost irrelevant and less interesting than the major characters and their series of beginnings and re-beginnings. Like the waves of the sea each beginning throws up its flotsam on the beach, highly decorative and involving and then subsuming inexorably into a new beginning. Adam, with experience corrupting his innocence; Eve, with the utility of her experience compromised by her intrinsic innocence. Eve (or Lucy, an excellent conceit) with the generosity of the Jewish mother who can forgive her dead husband his affairs with "all the Lucys in the world," but carries her husband's thoughts on an albatross of a computer memory stick; who can cope with the mentally ill Adam and his three faces, including the primitive force of male violence that brings testosterone poisoning and murder to their little matriarchal society, their Eden; who can in the end give Adam away, conviently to someone who can support his multiple needs and childlike nature.The writing so beautiful that one does not care until it ends, with new waves about to surge with new life, leaving memory fragments, the dust of bones, scattered in the sand.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    disappointing
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Any gaps in the plot of this spiritual journey are more than made up for by Naslund's wonderful prose. I found myself so entranced with Adam & Lucy/Eve, along with the Sufi stepfather, that I could hardly bear to put the book down. Of course, on a serious note, the author is dealing with the co-existence of science and faith, as well as the very nature of love. I think the author was trying to establish purity in a world which does not really allow or trust it.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I intentionally waited a few days between finishing Adam and Eve and writing this review so that I could be as objective as possible. Indeed, I hoped that waiting a few days would help me appreciate this novel as I had with other books by Sena Jeter Naslund. Despite the distance in time, I am still left with a general feeling of disappointment in Naslund's newest effort. Adam and Eve kept my interest, much like watching the aftermath of an accident. I shouldn't look (or read, in this case), but I kept doing it. Why? I chalk it up to two reasons: (1) A hope that the story would get better; and (2) Wondering if the story could get any weirder. At least the latter came true.Lucy was the widow of a man who found scientific evidence about alien life forms. She accepts an offer to smuggle ancient and controversial texts out of Egypt to France. Little did she realize that a group called Ingenuity was after her and the texts. Her plane crashes in an Eden-like place already inhabited by a deranged American soldier who conveniently was named Adam. He takes care of Lucy and eventually helps her finish her mission.Blech. I can't even make the summary sound tantalizing.Perhaps Naslund was flexing her creative muscles with this story, but I think she strayed from her talent as a historic storyteller. Leave the religious texts, alien theories and love stories to Dan Brown, Mary Doria Russell and Nicholas Sparks, and go back to what you excel at - writing beautiful historic novels.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I don't know what this book wanted to be when it grew up. There are elements of international conspiracy/thriller, too easily overcome. There are elements of back to nature/horrors of war cautionary tale, too easily abandoned. There are elements of relationships, too easily ambiguous. Naslund writes well, but needs to decide what to write.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Adam and Eve is set just a few years in the future where we meet Lucy Bregmann, happily married to Thom, an astrophysicist who may have discovered life elsewhere in the universe. He is tragically killed (murdered?) and she is left only with a flash drive of his last report. The report that may or may not show where that life is.In Egypt Pierre Saad stumbles upon a lost codex with the thoughts of a pre-Biblical man on the origins of Genesis. He needs to get it out of Egypt and translate it.Lucy is attending a conference honoring Thom and there Pierre asks her to fly the codex to France where he lives. As she is cruising the plane starts to fail and she crash lands in a large oasis where she finds Adam; a somewhat delusional US soldier who had been captured, tortured and dumped in the desert to die.Adam thinks he is ADAM, the first man and that he talks to God. He thinks Lucy is Eve and that they are in Eden. He has flashes of lucidity but it's not until they decide to leave Eden that he stays on the right side of sanity for long periods.After reading the synopsis I couldn't wait to begin this book. I was excited at the prospect of delving into a Bible-bending suspense thriller. I am sorry to say that the book didn't live up to its description. Ms. Naslund's way with words IS magical; her descriptions of Adam and Lucy's Eden bring to mind a truly perfect place to live. The way she describes the cave paintings in France brought them completely to life for me. I just wish the story had been as complete. I was drawn in immediately. The first half to two thirds of the book is very good, it started to fall apart for me when another soldier parachuted into Eden, hurt after his plane was damaged. There is minimal explanation for the continuing war. Why was no one sent to find this soldier? Why was no one sent to find Lucy for that matter or Adam? It just makes no earthly sense.Then the mysterious "bad guys" - they are not at all fleshed out. They zoom in and out with no real purpose other than to "get" the codex and the flash drive. I really think that an excellent book was lost in the midst of a philosophical debate over where we came from. It all could have been included but in trying to appease all no one is satisfied.Or maybe I am just too literal and it went over my head. I don't know. I am not sorry I read it but I am sorry it was not what I wanted it to be.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I'm still not sure what to make of "Adam & Eve" by Sena Jeter Naslund. It was an enjoyable read ... I enjoy Naslund's writing style and thought that the various storylines and back stories were written well. At the same time, however, the stories themselves were a bit convoluted. I liked the way it started out ... with Lucy protecting her husband's proof of extraterrestrial life in the universe from a radical religious organization. That storyline seemed to get lost, though, in others that I didn't really care for or find plausible. Overall, it was an enjoyable read, but I guess I just didn't get it and didn't care to. Maybe I need to revisit it again at some point.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Sena Jeter Nashlund is a wonderful writer. However, I had difficulty reading her latest novel, "Adam and Eve". She seemed to struggle with coherency and had difficulty interpreting her own meaning. She was dealing with complex subject matter - theological and philosophical contrasts, love, war and human nature - worthy of pursuit. However, all of the characters were so implausible, it felt ridiculous coming from such a, usually, profound and beautiful writer. It felt more like a Dan Brown, "Da Vinci Code" novel then one written by Nashlund.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Because I loved "Ahab's Wife" I requested a review copy of "Adam & Eve." I also have an interest in the line between spirituality and science. This book did nothing positive for me on any level, I'm afraid. I read every word in the hope of finding *some* redeeming value, but it never came through.In "Adam & Eve," Lucy's husband, a scientist, dies, and leaves her with a "memory stick," his proof of extraterrestrials--a threat to those who believe that “Earth is God's chosen place.” Years later, an acquaintance of Lucy's husband asks her to smuggle a codex out of Egypt to him in France for transcription, but a group of religious fundamentalists, the Perpetuists, learn of her assignment and the search for her (the codex) begins. Her plane crashes, she is saved by a crazy, albeit well-built soldier, they live/heal/bond for months in Eden before they head out to find their way back to France and run into the Perpetuists, from whom they manage to steal a plane and fly off in escape. They all eventually meet again under the roof of Pierre Saad, the hopeful transcriber of the codex.The writing, while at times quite poetic and rich, felt forced too often and the characters/dialogue were not believable. The story, as presented, was far-fetched.Perhaps the strongest negative for me, however, is that I don't think I can trust anything Naslund writes and I'm not sure if I'll ever pick up anything by her again. When the author puts monarch butterflies, tiger swallowtails, crows, cardinals, garden phlox, all North American species, in Africa, even if it is "Eden," how can one trust that she knows anything about religion, the Bible, cave art, codex, or anything else? The book simply did not work for me and was quite a disappointment.Time to move on.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
     Lucy Bergmann has a problem. Her astrophysicist husband has just been killed, crushed to death by a grand piano while walking around in Amsterdam. His Wile E Coyote-inspired exit leaves Lucy in possession of of his just-clinched proof of extraterrestrial life (as evidenced by pulsing red dots in a computer program, apparently) on a flash drive (no backups, but of course). Lucy adopts the weird obsession of wearing this 'memory stick' like a talismanic necklace. Ah. And this is just the first chapter.Then, in whirlwind jags, we're suddenly in Egypt, and Lucy is in the thick of some sort of intrigue that involves a purported ancient manuscript which brings into dispute the authorship of the Book of Genesis. The codex is sealed inside of a French horn case, and Lucy, who can of course pilot aircraft, is roped in to smuggle the thing to France; then there's something about the caves at Lascaux and--wait, what? Lucy is now crashing in flames into a Mesopotamian paradise where she gallivants around naked for several months with an insane man named, sigh, Adam. The book is a mishmash farce of a thriller, replete with cringe-inducing, quasi-religious meditations and incredible coincidences. Naslund, whose 'Ahab's Wife' is not only tolerable but is often held up as a rather good book, here blithely stumbles into a theological minefield and staggers around in it with all the grace of a newspaper tabloid. Meanwhile, the plot fragments bombard the reader like broken glass. Naslund's distracted paragraphs carom off of the halfhearted plot arcs and scatter away, never to resolve themselves. Where did the lurking 'brown man' in the turban, with 'eyes...as dark as dates, but menacing' from chapter five go? Don't know, don't care. The only partial respite from the onslaught is the slightly languorous middle part of the book, where Lucy is discovering a slightly magical Eden with Adam. Problem is, Naslund's stylized neo-Adam isn't cute crazy, he's just crazy crazy. Creepy, loose-cannon crazy. Lucy, who--get this--is nominally an art therapist in a mental institution, sort of seems to forget about this after a while. By the end of the story I think we're supposed to think he's just a bit eccentric.Naslund tries to cram cliched theme after hackneyed symbolism into the space of one novel, as if she's worried she'll never get another chance to write again. As such, everything is treated with the barest of attention before we're barreling on again to something else trite. Men's dominance over and violence toward women. The dangers of rigid literalism in religion. Imperialism. Fidelity and widowhood. Cave art as transcendent expression. The evils of endless war. It's exhausting.Oh, wait, I forgot to mention the hastily pasted-in bit about the international religious conspiracy. And all of this happens in a near future that Naslund utterly fails to take creative advantage of: Flash drives are slightly smaller and the wars in the Middle East are still burning brightly; that's about it.It's not even laughably bad. In fact, it's not entertaining at all, save for a brief moment of hope here and there. It has all the hallmarks of a really bad book without being enjoyably bad. Problem is, Naslund can actually turn a nice phrase. And does. Which makes the ham-fisted, inattentive plotting just that much more jarring.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Lucy's husband, Thom, is a great scientiest on the verge of revealing his great discovery - that there is the possibility maybe other life in the universe, as proved by some red dots on a flash drive. As Thom is on his way to speak on this discovery, he is crushed by a falling paino. Really. Luckily, Lucy is carrying his flash drive with his shocking, non convincing discovery that apparently no other scientest in the world was privy to. So now Lucy is being half-heartedly pursued by those who want to prevent this finding from ever becoming known. Then Lucy meets up with a guy who has a secret other version of Genesis and agrees to transport it, resulting in more half-hearted pursuits. Lucy meets Adam (who thinks she's "Eve") after a plane crash, and . . . nothing ensues.Review: This is easily the most boring, slow moving book I have read in a long, long time. It had no redeeming qualities as a piece of literature that I could find. Some books that a person finds boring, the reader can at least say that they perhaps gained some knowledge or somehow emerged better educated from the experience, but that could not be farther from the truth in this case. It's just plodding for the sake of plodding. My specific gripes: 1) no consistent characterization. The main characters darted all over the place in their attitudes and actions for no particular reason. And half the time the "insane" one displayed the most sanity of any of the characters, while the ones theoretically of sound mind seem unable to act anything but completely ridiculously. Except with no excuse to justify it. 2) Non existent, pathetic bad guys. Considering how scary the reader is told they are, they take their darn time actually trying to get at our characters. And despite being told they are really powerful individuals . . . they're not. It's like a bunch of mildly irritated, easily distracted 13-year-olds are after you. The author refers to them a lot like they're something to be worried about, but the reader is never concerned because they're a non presence. We can only hope that all radical organizations are half as pathetic and ineffective as the group depicted here. 3) Oh my word, this book was literal. What should have been an interesting storyline just came out as a lack of originality. Just read Genesis, it's way more interesting than this novel. And literal translates really easily to predictable when you have the vaguest idea of the Biblical story. 4) It's not enough. It's not enough anything. There's a tepid quasi romance, a less than half-hearted attempt at being a thriller, veiled mentions of war and violence with no commitment to what any of that might mean, a vague attempt at surprise without resolution. Such small bites of different types of writing that they don't even leave you wanting more. 5) Just not believable. I'm a religious person, and I was just never convinced that finding a guy stumbling on a *secret genesis codex* never verified by anyone who mattered at all would throw any religion into irreparable turmoil. After all, the Gnostic gospels didn't overthrow Christianity, people are going to believe what they're going to believe - the major world religions have lasted long enough that I'm unconvinced one random kook coincidentally stubbing his toe on a scroll would mean the end of religion as we know it the way the author seemed to think.Even when I agree with the overly preachy message this book is selling - religions have so much more in common than they have differences! Fundamentalism and intolerance are bad! Education is good! - it was almost unreadable. I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone, period.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    One of the oldest stories ever told, that of Adam and Eve, gets a unique remake of sorts in Sena Jeter Naslund's Adam & Eve.Lucy is in Amsterdam for a scientific conference with her husband Thom, an astrophysicist of renown, who tells Lucy that he has proof of extraterrestrial life. He gives Lucy a memory stick that contains all of his evidence.Thom is killed by a falling piano, and Lucy is devastated. Still grieving her loss three years later, Lucy is invited to welcome scientists to a conference in Cairo. It is too much for her, and she breaks down on stage.She meets a young woman who takes Lucy to her father, a scientist Lucy met at the conference. They convince Lucy to smuggle something out of Egypt for them- an alternate version of the book of Genesis that they have found buried.There are fundamentalist Christians, Muslim extremists and literalist Jews who have banded together to stop anyone from finding out about this discovery, even willing to kill to prevent the world from reading this other Genesis.Lucy agrees to fly a plane to France with the scripture, but her plane crashes and she is discovered by Adam, a young soldier who was kidnapped and assaulted by soldiers. Adam believes that Lucy is his Eve and that they are living in the Garden of Eden.This is a big book, full of so many themes it can make your head spin. Lucy and Adam's life in Eden parallels the Biblical story, particularly when another soldier lands in their garden. His presence dramatically changes the dynamic of the Garden. Is he the embodiment of the devilish snake from Genesis?The violence that is an everyday part of life in the Middle East is explored as a root cause of the rise of dangerous religious fundamentalism. Throw in the possibility of life on other planets and the fear of that knowledge endangering religious doctrine. Add in the discovery of very early human drawings in caves in France and you've got a lot to think about.Naslund has packed a lot of ideas into 350 pages, and her characters are well-drawn and interesting. Lucy and Adam's life in the garden is fascinating, and thriller fans will be rewarded with an action-packed sequence that resolves the story. Adam & Eve is the thinking person's answer to The DaVinci Code.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I had high hopes for this book, because I've enjoyed Naslund's previous books, especially Ahab's Wife and Abundance. Unfortunately, this book was a grave disappointment. It seems like Naslund was trying to do something a little different with Adam & Eve. The result is dialogue filled with non-sequiturs, plot points that are left dangling, and characters who say and do things with no apparent motivation or that are directly at odds with what they have said and done previously (with no accounting for the switch). Although Naslund is to be praised for trying something new, I hope that in her next book she will return to the style that has previously served her (and her readers) so well.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Admittedly, I was expecting something much, much different. I don't mind a writer being unique, taking a different tack, I've even been able to follow, and like, some stories such as Dreaming In Cuban.But I just couldn't get that with this latest by Naslund. I tried, but I just couldn't suspend my disbelief long or hard enough to keep reading.Sadly, this book was one of the rare DNF's I've had in the last few years. But as I always say to others, I read this with my eyes and my sensibilities and they are not the same as yours. All I can say is that I am not the only one disappointed as the overall rating here suggests. I hate, hate, hate giving a bad review or a "no recommendation", but this is going to be one of them.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    In 2017, Lucy Bergmann is walking to meet her husband for lunch when right before her, a piano that was being hoisted up a window falls and kills him. She is traumatized and floats around in grief for about three years. In 2020 she is invited to speak at an event honoring her husband and while on this trip she meets a scientist who was also acquainted with her husband. He asks her to transport a scroll that is of great importance to the world because its revelations will forever alter the three major monotheistic religions forever. For some mysterious reason, Lucy agrees and pilots a plane from Egypt to Paris. Unfortunately, her plane goes down somewhere in the Mesopotamian forest and here she meets a naked man (drop dead gorgeous of course) who is also marooned in the same forest. This gorgeous naked man is named Adam and they set up their version of the garden of Eden. Yep...you read that right, its Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. And just as they are getting comfortable in their home, they find themselves running from killers who want to destroy the scroll that Lucy had set out to deliver. I am not even sure what happened here. I was really excited to read this book but even a day later, I am still in disbelief as to how much this book fell through. The characters are caricatures of real people running around spouting theological tenets that feel more like the author staging her ideas. In addition to all of this, the book is not sure what it is. Is it an anti religious tract, thriller, romance, or all of these and more? Personally I could not tell you because even after 335 pages, I was left with little in the way of insight. I guess it was all some great metaphor that I did not get. *Review Copy provided by Harper Collins publishers.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I was so excited to read this book; the title was intriguing, the synopsis was imaginative. Unfortunately, the book did not deliver. The writer's attempt to tackle religion, philosophy and science did not go well. She was unable to give enough detail to make the reader understand what she was saying and her storytelling left me bewildered and perplexed (not in a good way). Ms. Naslund's subject matter would have been better in a longer novel or a 2 book novel. All-in-all, I was disappointed.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This book was overwritten and overambitious, in my opinion. Firstly, the author introduces the probability of extraterrestrial lifeforms. Next, we revisit the Garden and see a modernized version of Adam and Eve while contemplating mental illness. Then we must reevaluate the whole of Genesis, as a new philosophical text surfaces calling our version of Creation into question. I could hardly breathe...too many ideas are crammed into this single story, and it suffers for it. Also, the apex...translation of the codex...is so incredibly anti-climatic. I slogged through all the rest of it for *that*? Bedswapping, subterfuge, and pretentious descriptives abound. I don't believe I can rightly recommend this one, folks.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Like others I was intrigued by the premise, and I agree the author writes beautifully. There were also some interesting ideas, but they were handled very poorly. (1) How does a physicist determine the existence of 'biomolecules' from thousands of light-years away? What is a 'biomolecule' anyway? (2) What reason is there to think that the presence of 'biomolecules' actually means there are living beings on other planets? What if those 'aliens' are like bacteria or yeast or something? do we still have to feel intimidated because we're not as special as we thought?(3) Why was Lucy willing to risk her life over a religious text? one that she's not at all curious about? and also, she's not religious - why would she care at all?(4) This book was a love letter to the patriarchy. The book is actually about men, despite the 'Eve' in the title. Major and minor male characters (n>=10) get their own chapters, while in the chapters supposedly about the (2) women, they are either talking and thinking constantly about the men, or the chapter actually redirects to being about the men. (5) Pierre a little too obsessed with how much his daughter resembles his dead wife. (6) Why have the subplot with F. Riley, or the 'monkey boy'? (7) The codex, as written about, was barely interesting. You want to knock people's socks off? Try finding scripture saying Jesus was a woman; Jesus married 3 wives, and had 10 kids; half the apostles were women; Jesus was an alien from another planet. You know, something actually surprising.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I had tried to read this book once before when I received it last year and couldn't get into it. I thought maybe it was the timing and that I just wasn't ready to read that type of book right then so I set it aside to read at another time. That time was last week and much to my dismay it wasn't the timing. It really was the book. It starts off interesting enough with Lucy Bergmann's husband dying a tragic death by falling piano (yes, seriously). He leaves her with a thumb drive that contains proof of life on other planets. Some time after her husband's death Lucy is invited to speak at a conference in his honor. She realizes she is still very grief stricken over his untimely demise and while there is contacted by a man who asks her to smuggle an ancient codex giving an alternative version of Genesis out of Egypt. Lucy agrees but when she is flying over Mesopotamia her plane goes down in a lush area that resembles the garden of Eden. There she meets Adam a soldier who has gone slightly mad and actually thinks he is Adam from the Bible.Ok now onto the problems I had with this book (and there are many):1. This book is set about ten years in the future (2017-2020). Is there any reason for this that I could discern while reading the book? No. All the things that occurred in the book could have occurred in the present with no alteration of the story at all.2. The whole reason Lucy is asked to carry the Codex out of Egypt? Well, because she was there and therefore convenient. Apparently no one else in the entire country of Egypt could be found to accomplish this. It must be Lucy. Conveniently enough, she is a pilot as is Arielle, the daughter of the man asking her to undertake this dangerous mission. They must be handing out pilot's licenses like greeting cards ten years into the future.3. The alternate version of Genesis (the Codex) is supposed to rock the three major world religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) to the core. Why? I couldn't really figure out why. The information contained on the flash drive is also supposed to make major life as we know it altering waves. Why? Couldn't figure that out either because it is only vaguely discussed and no clear explanation is given. You would think that since these two items are supposed to cause changes of epic proportions there would be some urgency to the whole matter. The book never really built up any kind of suspense except maybe for one scene. 4. The "Garden of Eden". I understand after surviving a plane crash, Lucy wasn't in the greatest of shape. What is her first course of action upon crashing? To seek out the naked man she saw lying by the river for help. Yeah. That is exactly what I would do if I were injured, I was carrying important historical documents, and my clothes had burned off in the crash-seek out the naked man lying in the mud who may or may not be a homicidal maniac. I'll just have to take my chances that he's not I guess. Also-Adam is dumped off here. Lucy crashes here. Another soldier ends up crashing here. What is this place? The Bermuda Triangle of the Middle East?5. The whole ending for the thumb drive/codex with information that may change the world-completely lackluster. I didn't like the ending at all or the way what little love story the author had going ended up. Didn't like it at all. I found the ending really bizarre.There are a few good parts in this book. I actually enjoyed the parts that were set in "Eden" where Lucy and Adam were helping each other recover. Adam has a child like quality about him that is very endearing and I liked how the two main characters related to each other. Unfortunately, that is about all I liked. As for the writing itself, Naslund writes beautifully but the way the story would focus on Lucy for a chapter then jump to Adam without any kind of transition was a little too spastic for me. I really enjoyed Abundance, her book about Marie Antoinette. I have also heard from several who have liked Ahab's Wife so I will not be giving up on this author. I think this was definitely a miss though.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    It is a relief to realize that I am not alone in my disliking Naslund’s latest book, Adam and Eve. After reading and loving Ahab’s Wife, I carefully selected Adam and Eve as my Early Reviewer pick, and was thrilled to receive it. However, I ended up confused and baffled by Naslund’s variegated and seemingly unrelated plotlines. There is too much going on.There are three main plots here: extraterrestrial life has been discovered, and Lucy, our protagonist, holds the key to that around her neck; on our own terrain, an ancient codex has also been unearthed that offers an alternative retelling of the Genesis story; and finally, Lucy befriends (for lack of a better term) a mentally damaged man named Adam in a deserted oasis after her plane crashes. The latter two plotlines, I could swallow with, perhaps, a healthy dose of fantasy; they at least tie together in some fashion, since Lucy is responsible for delivering the codex and her plane crashes in the process. The alien life is tacked on as a seeming afterthought and offers nothing to the story.There are way too many coincidences to fully become invested in this novel: Lucy’s husband is killed by a piano; her plane crashes in a modern-day Eden, of all places; and Adam just happens to be located in said oasis—to name a few of the plethora of coincidences. The plot is just not cohesive and it rings of immoderation on the author’s part.I will admit I skimmed over much of the book; Naslund is surprisingly indulgent in much of her prose here. Overall, I would not recommend this book, if only because I have no idea what the heck is going on.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I was disappointed in this book and seem to be batting .500 with Ms. Naslund. I LOVED Ahab's wife and enjoyed the Marie Antoinette book. I abandoned 4 Spirits, which is very rare for me. I found myself really working to get through this book, especially after they returned from Eden. I did enjoy the Eden portion of the book until its gruesome ending. The motivation of the characters was very hard to find. I did want to know more about Adam but am seriously glad the book wasn't longer! I found the whole concept of the book very interesting, especially the link between extraterrestrial life and a Genesis, but feel the author really failed to deliver.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    First, I would like to thank William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers for sending me this uncorrected proof. In return, I am providing an unpaid review of the book containing my personal opinions of Naslund's newest novel Adam and Eve. In her two previous novels, Ahab's Wife and Abundance, the author brought a fictional character to life - Ahab's wife (from Moby Dick) and took a real life character - Marie Antionette, into a fictional world. In her latest novel, Naslund wraps her characters around ancient religious symbols and texts - moving from Amsterdam, to Eden (somewhere in the Middle East), to France.Lucy Bergmann was in Amsterdam when her husband was killed. Shortly before his death Thom, an astrophysicist, had given Lucy his flash drive with the quip that it was the keys to the kingdom. And the kingdom included extraterrestrial life! He could prove it. At this point, I was thinking, oh brother ~ another one of these stories ~ but I persevered! And I loved this book.The book bounces back and forth in time, but is easy to follow. We meet people who are to help Lucy, like Adam who finds himself adrift from a war he never believed in - adrift in Eden. Alone until Lucy ~ his Eve ~ crashes a plane nearby. Together they look for a case Lucy was carrying ~ holding ancient biblical texts. Lucy and Adam are not the only people searching for them and the two find themselves in the center of a battle between the three main ancient religions.I was glued to this book from beginning to end. I had to hear what the ancient texts said, I had to follow Adam and Lucy in Eden, I had to know who the bad guys were, and was there a happily ever after? I hope that you will grab this book and spend some time with it. I plan to read it again as soon as I can and check out the author's previous two books as well.I found this to be a beautiful book that provoked joy and deep thinking about our place in the universe. A perfect blend of mystery, faith, and beauty.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is what you should know: Adam & Eve is a book most people won’t like. If you’re picking it up thinking it will be a fictional retelling about the first Adam and Eve, correct your thinking. This story is set in the very near future, in the year 2020. Lucy Bergmann is a recent widow, who carries evidence for two amazing discoveries: the existence of extraterrestrial life, and newly discovered ancient documents exploring the origins of man. There are those who want to suppress the release of this information, and Lucy is commissioned to secretly fly her precious cargo out of Egypt to the safety of France. Instead, Lucy crash lands in a near-mythical Eden-like oasis, and discovers another inhabitant: the unstable former American soldier, Adam. What follows is an exploration of origins – what are the most basic elements of humanity. Naslund’s story is unusual and dreamlike; suspiciously providential and strange. When I started reading it, I thought, Ugh. This is going to be a chore. Yet, I found myself thinking about it a lot, longing to pick it up again and find out what would happen. In contradiction to most reviewers, I found I quite enjoyed it.Adam & Eve is about beginnings. It is about the big picture of who we are as humans. It is about what makes us special, set apart from animals. However, it is less about “faith versus science”, though that question is certainly posed, than about the tension between spirituality and rationality. Naslund opens a lot of cans of worms. She pokes at fundamentalism, but doesn’t necessarily disparage belief in God. She suggests that the first sacred texts of humanity originate not with Genesis, but with parietal art, that is, cave paintings from tens of thousands of years ago. Both her characters and readers are gently nudged to grasp the bigger picture of the story of humanity. We don’t know everything, she seems to suggest, but we will continue to learn, and that will change how we view ourselves, our history, and our religions, but that this is okay – the fear of doing so is perhaps the greatest of mankind’s failings. What she argues is that most of us have a limited view of ourselves. Yet, having opened the door to dialogue, she doesn’t provide much more of an answer to the age-old questions other than to suggest that people really haven’t changed that much from the beginning of time: we strive to live and love; we kill, we fear; we dance and we die. This open-ended nature of the book will frustrate many readers. So will Naslund’s refusal to try and make profound scientifically and theologically-based arguments. This is a metaphysical meditation.Readers will be looking for Naslund’s own ultimate conclusions about the questions her story raises. However, Naslund’s references to belief in a Higher Being are ambivalent, and yet looking at the unfolding of her narrative, there seems to be Providential/Authorial suggestions. She is content to let the questions stand. Perhaps there is the underlying belief that there is a certain kind of arrogance in “having the answers”; she, and later her characters, are content to live in the mystery of the uncertain and unknown.Surely, there are parts of this book that are downright silly and improbable. For example: as much as Perpetuity seems to know about the secret existence of the codex and Thom Bergmann’s discovery of extraterrestrial life, they take an inexplicably long time to track Lucy, and later Pierre, down. And if they are that “connected”, why don’t they have the police in their pockets? And what is this “Eden” where Lucy and Adam find themselves? It seems to be a sort of cultivated oasis and wildlife preserve that is abandoned, probably because of the war, but is never fully explained. There are many unanswered questions and it seems clear to me that Naslund was very intentional about this. There is a great deal of ambiguity in life, and many people are reluctant to live in the tension of “not knowing”. This willingness of Naslund to take the reader there demonstrates to me what is most frustrating and wonderful about this book.Naslund does not presume to provide any ultimate answer about human origins. But she paints a picture spanning from tens of thousands of years in the past to the suggestion of what wonders lie ahead in the future. Ultimately, I really liked this book. The parts that I thought were the unlikeliest, were strangely resonant and evocative. That said, I don’t think this is a novel that will be easy to stomach for most people.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A total surprise. Having read Naslund's Abundance last I assumed this was historical.. Although it proved to be totally the opposite, I was not disappointed. It was marvelous! Naslund created a well-researched, well-crafted novel that touched on spirituality, art history, humanism, and science. Next on my list is Ahab's Wife. (I know I'm late in the game to this one, but better late than never!)
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I've admired Naslund's writing since I first ran across Ahab's Wife. Her prose style is consistently elegant and intelligent. In that way, Adam and Even does not disappoint. The first chapter in particular is beautifully written. There are sections throughout the book that are lovely to read. A feast for the reader. However, as a coherently plotted novel, I found it problematic.The reason for this is that Adam and Eve is a message book. And message books are very difficult to write successfully. It's difficult to draw three dimensional characters when you must also concentrate on your message. Also, the style of the novel often times runs into "thriller" territory. However, the pacing is all wrong for a thriller. It simply doesn't hold up. You can have cardboard characters in a thriller because we don't have time to realize how unrealistic they are. In Adam and Eve, we have plenty of time to realize that the villains and heroes of this piece are unbelievable, and are doing things that really, they simply would not do. For example, I was never convinced the villains, if they were true villains, would pile into a plane to hunt down the protagonists themselves. How foolish! No, they'd use their vast resources to hire capable mercenaries to do the job, and do it right. It became too difficult for me to believe Lucy, or Adam, or certainly Pierre could possibly be or do the things they were doing. The action scenes were poorly drawn and impossible for me to visualize. The discussions, while lengthy and intended to be interesting, showed a lack of knowledge on the part of the characters about what they were talking about. The fact that Naslund's codex seemed so completely out of step with the time in which it was written in threw me out of the book entirely. A little more research seemed needed.The secondary plot of alien life struck me as unnecessary. It didn't add anything to the plot. That theme was never integrated into the codex, so it was never clear to me why it mattered. It seemed a waste of time. Lucy couldn't do anything with it. Pierre didn't care.I don't know why anyone did.Overall, there were simply too many things that weren't convincing to me, or seemed to have no purpose. Maybe I know too much for this book. Maybe I live in a place were these issues are so completely non-issues, the message lacks urgency to me. I hope to read Naslund's next book, and that she will return to a topic that is more personal to her, since that is where I believe she truly shines.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    **Full Disclosure: I received this book free of charge at a publisher's book event at ALA Annual Conference**Lucy watches as her husband Thom is crushed and killed by a suspended piano. That morning Thom had told her he had discovered extraterrestrial life and gave her his thumb drive with all his research. Unsure what to do now that Thom is dead, Lucy attends a symposium in his name a few years later. There she meets Pierre Saad an anthropologist genuinely interested in her well-being more than Thom's research.A few weeks later while traveling around Egypt, Lucy runs into Pierre and his daughter Arielle. They ask her to smuggle a new codex for the book of Genesis out of the country. Lucy agrees and flies out of Egypt on a small plane. A few hours into the flight she loses control of the place and crashes. She's not sure where she is but is helped to safety, after being badly burned during the crash, by a naked man named Adam.It turns out they are in a modern day "Eden" between multiple war zones in the Middle East. Lucy nurses herself back to health and learns to accept her nudeness as well. Adam doesn't know how long he's been there and he shares how he was raped and left on the side of the road in Iraq. Lucy & Adam learn to trust each other and provide for themselves. They help a pilot who crashes in Eden and search for the codex that Lucy threw out of the place before she crashed.Certain events finally cause them to leave Eden and return the codex to Pierre. At the airport they run into "the bad guys" Perpetuity and somehow escape them. Before escaping Lucy finally gets to see again what is on the memory stick that Thom left her that day. She finds out that he loved other "Lucys" and not just her.Adam and Lucy eventually make it back to Pierre & Arielle safely. The four dive into translating and figuring out the codex. They explore the underground caves under Pierre's house. The bad guys eventually show up and try to take the codex from them but they escape but not without injury.This book was not what I expected after reading the brief synopsis. I thought there would be more science versus religion questioning. But I felt the major theme was more philosophy driven. At times I was confused how the next chapter related to the next. The whole book was set in 2020-2021. I think the premise of the book is interesting but the action of the plot kinda stopped three-quarters of the way through the book. Also parts of the plot were very sparsely described. The author tries to generate a DaVinci Code drama with the Perpetuity group but those chapters were hard to read and link to the other chapters.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Pushes the limits a bit, but interesting.

Book preview

Adam & Eve - Sena Jeter Naslund

PART ONE

WHEN THE PIANO FALLS

ANUDE COUPLE is standing in the shade of a small, leafy tree. The quality of the filtered light on their bare skin attracts me, and I stand with them to enjoy the dappled shade. Through pinholes formed where leaves cross, the sunlight creates globules of brightness on the grass. My bare toes nudge inside one of those softly defined orbs, but then I remember to look up.

From the sky, at the rate of 32.2 feet per second per second, a grand piano is hurtling down like a huge black bird of prey over our upturned faces. In that moment is a beginning and an end, alpha and omega, Genesis and Revelation.

Because we always ask, like any logical child, Yes, but what came before the beginning and after the end? I start with the year 2017, three years before I fell into Adam’s world and lived with him in the shade of an apple tree.

The instant before the piano fell, from a block away, I saw only a curiosity in the Amsterdam sky: a grand piano, aloft. To the beat of my rapidly moving feet, the words of the White Rabbit—I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date—played through my mind from Alice in Wonderland. My date was with my beloved husband, Thom Bergmann, an astrophysicist of international reputation. My name was and is Lucy Bergmann, and I was scheduled to join him and his colleagues for lunch. An imaginative, playful group for all their dedication to science, they’d named themselves collectively ELF—Extraterrestrial Life Focus. Using spectroscopy, they analyzed light from distant reaches of the universe to determine if the spectra had been emitted by biomolecules. My husband and his colleagues were searching for the atomic structure of amino acids, essential to life as we know it on Earth.

Not that I had anything to contribute to their scientific inquiry; I merely represented the curiosity of an ordinary, somewhat bright human being. Nonetheless, I knew something that none of them knew. I knew something that my husband had confided to me that morning in our hotel room. Because I had faith in my husband and believed what he told me, I knew a secret to which no person in the history of humankind had been privy. In an effort to contain my extraordinary excitement, I forced myself to watch the ascent of the piano as I hurried past the tall seventeenth-century Dutch houses on Prince Street toward the Blue Tulip Café.

That fine day in Amsterdam, in the spring of 2017, I thought it strange that the body of the delicate, expensive instrument was not dressed in a quilted case tailored to fit its unique shape. Darkly gleaming above the trees, the grand piano’s ebony-colored sides flashed back the fresh late-morning sunlight, but the three pedals hanging under the keyboard had been fitted with socks of green felt. To protect the piano cabinet from the abrasive cables of the sling at points of contact, plump red cushions had been placed between the twisted wire and the polished wood. Someone who lived on the top floor must have been in a great hurry to have a piano delivered.

My husband had been talking about buying just such a handsome grand. Like many people gifted in mathematics, Thom was also a fine musician.

As I walked down Prince Street, I speculated that the piano was being lifted up the outside of the narrow Dutch house because the interior stairs twirled their way up too tightly to accommodate the passage of so massive an instrument. Almost three centuries earlier, the clever Dutch had anticipated the installation problem posed by furniture too grand for their interior stairs yet essential to their egos as testaments of bourgeois magnificence. During the construction of these multistoried, substantial homes, their builders usually had a hook permanently implanted outside at the apex of the ornate, arched facade of each house. By means of a pulley attached to the hook, large and heavy furnishings could be raised by laborious degrees outside the building to even the highest level.

At the top of this particular Dutch house was a high, large window, subdivided into many small panes, and it had been flung wide from its side hinges, like an open arm, to welcome the huge piano. I tried to see if the glass of the mullioned window was wavy at the bottom of each pane, but my eyesight was not acute enough to detect such an irregularity in glass at that height and distance. I knew glass behaves rather like a slow-flowing liquid; over time, gravity drags its molecules downward. I touched my own just-beginning-to-sag jawline and thought how gravity was beginning to do its work on me, at age thirty-nine.

That Amsterdam day four years ago, I was not only excited but also upset. I had spent the morning of our arrival from the States by visiting the Anne Frank House. The remnants of Anne’s innocence—sepia photographs of movie stars pinned to her bedroom wall—and the horror of what had been done by the Nazis screamed that the world I called home was too terrible a place to abide.

A line from Handel’s Messiah haunted me: But who may abide the day of His coming? In a scrambled way, I thought of Hitler as a kind of Antichrist, and of course millions of people did not abide the day of his coming. Some people—Muslim thinkers—have said that Western civilization ended with all that preceded and comprised the conducting of World War II. Some say that in our beginning are the seeds of our ending, but I believe, more optimistically, that in our endings are new beginnings.

Of course I would not attempt to talk with Thom about the Anne Frank House or the Nazi atrocities until after luncheon, when we were alone. Although I had left the orthodoxy of the Christian religion long ago, I had been spiritually moved, and that was what I wanted to discuss with Thom. I knew the profoundly disturbing Anne Frank House was sacred to the human spirit.

To try to settle myself (my self, not just my nerves, teetering between my stunned wonder at Thom’s scientific discovery and the horror of human willingness to kill fellow humans), I had walked an extra block before I started down Prince Street toward the Blue Tulip. I suppose that decision to take the time, despite being late, to soothe my agitation into a smoother coherence saved my life.

Thinking of the Holocaust, I remembered when my fifth-grade class had visited the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. My school friend Janet Stimson had pointed at the balcony and said, Murder. That’s what happened here. Real murder. Despite Janet’s words, I had been unable to grasp that reality—the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in my hometown. That morning in Amsterdam, at the Anne Frank House, I had felt the edges of murder. Like a thin sizzle crossing from ear to ear, real murder seemed to skewer my mind.

And yes, because of the reality of mass murder, I wanted Thom to buy himself a grand piano. I would tell him that much at lunch—just lean over and whisper in his ear. You don’t have to perform in Carnegie Hall, I would whisper, to deserve to play on a concert grand. Painfully, I wondered as I walked what childish ditties Anne Frank might have sung when she was five or six. At that age she had been a friend of Thom’s mother. Playing tea party, the little girls had lifted thin Dresden cups and saucers over a toy table to their dolls. Equally innocent, one had lived a full life, married, had a brilliant son, and one had not.

Perhaps, I mused as I walked—You’re late, you’re late, for a very important date—Thom and I might have a child: a daughter named Sarah Anne, for Thom’s mother and Anne Frank. Late thirties was by no means too late to have a child.

A dark-skinned man wearing a loosely wrapped white turban leaned over the high windowsill and looked down to check the progress of the piano’s ascent. He might have been from India or Africa. I wondered if Martin Luther King Jr. had visited Africa, the continent of his ancestors and of all our ancestors for that matter, if science is to be believed, before he met death on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. I had the impulse to wave at the man, up there, but decided distraction would be unwelcome. His face seemed carved and soberly set. In the interior of my heart, I gave a discreet little wave. He reached out to touch the cable, almost as though he were twanging a single vertical string of a bass fiddle.

The piano continued to mount the sky. Strangely, it didn’t stop at the high open window, though the man reached out his dark arms through the space to guide it in. The piano continued to rise till the metal loop at the top of its sling slammed against the pulley—I heard the clangor of the collision. Held tightly against the pulley, the naked piano swung wildly. Suddenly the three cables broke apart at the top, opened, and released the expensive instrument and the three red cushions that had been protecting its glossy finish from the sling.

As the huge black piano fell a little crookedly, its lid opened out, flapped slowly like the single stiff wing of a monstrous bird. The protective felt socks dropped away, and sunlight transmogrified the pedals into the brass talons of a stooping bird of prey.

I began to run. Still running, I heard the impact of the instrument, heard how it broke in jangled discord and the terrified screams of people close by. I ran harder. Approaching the door of the café, I gasped first with relief to see our friend Gabriel Plum lying beside the wrecked piano on the cobblestones. Stretched out, unhurt, he held Thom’s eyeglasses with the thick black plastic frame in his hand and seemed to be studying the pavement through one of the lenses. Then I saw a pool of blood seeping from underneath the golden struts and snarled strings, the scattered keys and felted hammers of the shattered piano.

Thom! I screamed. My knees buckled, and I would have fallen but felt under my elbow the supporting male hand of some stranger who muttered in an unknown tongue the word Igtiyal!

Three years later, I would learn that this Arabic word meant murder.

The day of Thom’s death, I felt myself disintegrating, turning into dust, into nothing.

Earlier that morning, after Thom and I got up, Thom had taken his computer flash drive, which I called the memory stick, though the term usually applies to a device for cameras, from around his own neck and lowered the black silk cord over my head. It was a familiar ritual for the first morning after our arrival for a conference in a foreign country. During the scientific meetings, I would venture out mostly on my own; Thom’s flash drive was a talisman, a love token, and a reminder that he was with me on my rambles. Without fail, I would return the memory stick to him at a shared meal just before he spoke at the conference.

That fateful day in our Amsterdam hotel, as he positioned the cord and its pendant around my neck, he said, The keys to the kingdom. Smiling fondly at me, he gave the titanium case of his flash drive a little pat against my breastbone.

Adjusting the stick so that it hung concealed inside my silk blouse between my breasts, I smiled to recall that as a child in Memphis I had sometimes worn the key to my grandmother’s home on a string around my neck.

The keys to which kingdom? I asked Thom.

The inhabited universe.

Only that? I teased.

Let me show you, Ms. Smarty, he said.

Drawing shut the hotel’s blackout curtains, he turned morning into night. By lamplight, his large adept hands moved automatically among the utilitarian instruments of his profession: a small projector, his computer, a connecting cable. When he retrieved the flash drive, cupping it in his hand, he remarked, Already warm, kissed it, and winked at me. Then he inserted the device into a port on the computer and turned off the table lamp.

In the darkness over our heads appeared a dazzling star-studded sky, clouded occasionally with reddish-pinkish zones.

Behold, he said dramatically. Then he spoke in his normal, soft voice, full of intimacy. The reddish clouds indicate a statistical reality—where extraterrestrial life is most likely to be found.

So many reddish areas! My knees felt wobbly. The tints of thin red and purple—sunset colors, dawn colors—looked like veils dropped here and there over the vast array of stars.

How do you know? I asked.

Spectroscopic analysis—new methods—for detecting the presence of biomolecules in deep space. Other life is very far away, but it exists.

Like heaven, but where? I wanted to ask. Cloudy wisps of colors represented various biomolecules—pink, magenta, lavender, orange, a waver of green. Overlapping and combining in some places, the colors veiled the swirls of galaxies, stars, and golden intergalactic dust.

It’s gorgeous, I said, and my voice trembled. You represent statistical reality as gorgeous. I was moved by his graphic, the way works of art sometimes move me in their ability to combine truth and beauty. Sometimes the paintings of my patients moved me that way—I was an art therapist at University Hospital in Iowa City.

I suppose we’re hardwired to see creation as beautiful, he replied.

In one reddish area, a drop of pure crimson, red as blood, caught my eye. I pointed and said, It’s throbbing.

Growing larger, actually, he said.

As the dot enlarged, it lost its circularity and took on the point and lobes of a valentine. I realized I was seeing a love note from Thom emerge from the universe. The dot had become a heart. Hubris! I thought, but I was amused and pleased, too. In a red arch across the night sky I saw letters emerging. A message: A Valentine to all the Lucys of the Universe. I felt embarrassed, giddy, and terribly in love.

Oh, Thom! I said. You’re not going to show this at the meeting. It’s too much!

No, he said. Not this part.

Then he made the sun rise. The stars on the ceiling dimmed, and finally the letters faded away into artificial dawn. While Thom opened the curtains to admit the real world of a busy Dutch morning, he mentioned that the flash drive held his backup data and the programs for interpreting it. Much of it’s also on the printout in my briefcase—the part I’m ready to present at the meeting. He unplugged the drive from the computer and placed its cord around my neck again. But you’ll bring me the memory stick, like always? In the early days of our travels I had wondered why Thom wanted to risk the possibility that perhaps I would be delayed, through no fault of my own. Then this gesture of trust—in me, in good luck—became a ritual of our faith in each other. Again he patted the titanium case against my heart. I won’t show ELF my love letter, he answered.

As he bent to kiss my forehead, he remarked, I’m not ready to tell them yet.

Tell them what?

It’s more than statistical probability. The place marked by pure red—that’s it.

What do you mean? I felt blood suffuse my face, while my body flooded with fear.

It’s there. The red dot marks the place. It’s there. Some form of extraterrestrial life.

I was stunned. It was as though I were seeing an alien in Thom. Then came an impulse to throw my arms around him, to recover my Thom with a barrage of kisses all over his face, his head, his neck. Instead, I kissed him once, slowly and tenderly on the mouth.

Gabriel Plum called last night, Thom said quietly.

Gabriel was British, very dry and rational, a dear enough friend so that sometimes we called him Sherlock to tease him. Part of the Geneva group, he was enthusiastic about finding planets.

Thom went on, Some fundamentalist group feels threatened by our search for extraterrestrial life. My husband spoke the sentence thoughtfully; it wasn’t his style to ridicule anybody. They contacted Gabriel.

You’ve told Gabriel? The red dot?

Before showing you? Not on my life. He smiled at me. But we communicate. He knows my methods for analyzing the data. He knows a discovery is imminent.

When will you announce it? At the meeting? At lunch?

All the amino acids are there, in the spectra. It’s life. I’m sure of it.

But? I could feel his hesitation.

Thom glanced away from me. He studied the carpet in our hotel room. He seemed embarrassed. You know Gabriel is looking for planets.

We’ve found thousands, I said.

They’re sterile. Gabriel wants them to be sterile.

Why?

He wants us to be the only ones. Earth is God’s chosen place. Where he sent his Son, in Gabriel’s belief.

But Gabriel was your student, years ago. He wants ELF to succeed. I took off the memory stick. I don’t want to wear it, Thom. It’s too important.

He shrugged. Then he tapped his head. It’s all in here. I could do it again if I needed to.

Yes, but how long would it take?

A few years. The programs are on the drive, too, the ones that make sense of the data.

I heard the enthusiasm in Thom’s voice. Next he would offer to show me the programs, but I’d seen programs before—a jungle of numbers, tedious ones strewn with symbols, full of repetition. I had no training or ability to read them.

I want to prepare people for the news. They aren’t ready. It’s too big. It will affect everything about our identity, about being human.

I knew myself to be shaken in a hair-raising way. It’s an earthquake of an idea, I agreed. A tsunami. I squelched the impulse to ask him again, Have you really found life in space? Real life?

I’ve invited an anthropologist, a Franco-Egyptian, to talk to them about the social and moral impact of scientific discoveries. He’ll come to lunch. Remember Einstein’s letter to President Roosevelt?

What would a discovery of extraterrestrial life mean to people?

Different things, of course. Fundamentalists in any religion are literalists. They take the words of their scriptures to be true in a literal sense, not evocative, not symbolic, not sometimes mysterious and incomprehensible, not reflective of the historic moment when they were written. Beyond their literalist interpretations, they’re cocky enough to think they believe they have access to the mind of God.

What did Gabriel want you to do?

Thom kissed first one cheek and then the other. ‘Consider the repercussions,’ was all Gabriel said. Adam was created in God’s image. If extraterrestrial life looks like green mold, then so must their god, I suppose.

I thought Adam was made of mud.

"From the dust of the soil—adamah, in Hebrew—hence Adam. But made in the image of God."

Maybe polytheism is a better belief, I said provocatively. I always thought monotheism was an arrogant idea designed to serve repressive political goals. We ought to go back to the Greeks—the Egyptians! Over to India! Dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of gods.

After remarking that those cultures certainly had had their own forms of political oppression, Thom added, Think how the discovery that the sun did not travel around the earth influenced our concept of our cosmic importance.

Why does Gabriel engage in extraterrestrial research if he doesn’t want to find life on any of the new planets?

Sometimes one does research to prove an idea is wrong.

Squinting in the bathroom mirror the way he always did, Thom made his usual effort to part his curly hair with a small fine-toothed comb. Twenty-twenty could be the scientists’ Year of Clear Vision, he replied. Let’s hope we’re ready by then. Today I’ll just talk about refinements in the methods of spectroscopy. Amused at the prospect of seeing clearly, Thom turned to regard me through his own thick lenses. He slid his glasses to the end of his nose. Remember, a president of the United States thought the rights of his God would be violated by stem cell research.

In five minutes I knew those loose brown curls, increasingly tinged with gray, would be all over Thom’s head again in sweet disarray. He was a large man and strong; I thought he was aging just as gracefully as he did everything else.

I replied, I’ll just meet you inside the Blue Tulip, right?

When I explained how I planned to spend the morning at the house where the Frank family had hidden, Thom reminded me that his mother had known Anne Frank when they were both young children.

I remember, I said.

Sometimes, he said soberly, I think we should achieve peace on earth before we deal with extraterrestrial life. It would be a sign that we’re ready. Fission and fusion, the bombs, came too soon.

I felt a surge of love for Thom. He was a scientist who cared about human life, about politics, about culture. But I said, Thom, I feel frightened. I don’t think I should wear the memory stick.

It’s safer on you than on me. I could be kidnapped. He smiled.

So could I. And what should I do if—

If I keeled over from a heart attack?

If anything?

Well, wait for a sign. Wait till your heart tells you it’s time, till you see clearly. Consult Gabriel if you want to.

The conversation was too spooky. We both stopped. Dazzled. My mind was dazzled by the magnitude of Thom’s discovery. He bent down, and I stretched up. Tenderly, we exchanged our last kiss.

More than twenty years earlier, in 1995, I had been a better-than-fair high school classical musician, but upon graduation I renounced playing the viola; I knew I was already nearing the limits of my musical talent, though not of my intellectual curiosity about my own mind or the minds of others. The last year in high school I read psychology on my own and insisted on taking the standardized exam for graduating college psychology majors. I scored well. In selecting a college from among several offering nice scholarships, I told my grandmother, "I want to be in the middle of the country," and I somewhat capriciously chose Iowa as the heart of the Midwest, though I considered Chicago. Three weeks after my arrival in Iowa City, I met Thom at an orchestral rehearsal held in the Union at the University of Iowa. Despite having aborted my own musical career, in my loneliness I had been drawn toward the familiar scene of rehearsal.

At the rehearsal I became irritated when the conductor had the violin and viola soloists skip over the unaccompanied duet section of the Mozart Sinfonia. The conductor was depriving me and the rest of the rehearsal audience of hearing one of the best parts. I was mad at myself, too, for feeling desolate and missing my friends, especially Janet Stimson, and my grandmother, with whom I lived. (When I was nine, my parents had gone, as missionaries, to live in Japan.) Partly just because I wanted to have contact with somebody, I remarked crossly to the man sitting near but not next to me, Haven’t they left out the cadenza?

The man looked startled. He had a large head and wore thick glasses. His hair was curly and soft. I don’t know, he answered quietly. I’m not familiar with this piece. He turned back to the orchestra. In profile his nose and lips were large—suitable for his large head, I decided. The black temple piece of his thick glasses gleamed silvery in the mellow houselights. I forgot him.

No, after the music had been poignant in the way only Mozart could conceive, I glanced at my neighbor and noticed the quality of his attention. He wore the expression of one who could be moved by beauty. Then I forgot him.

Until, in a pause in the rehearsal, he blew his large nose into the neat white square of a folded cloth handkerchief. As a girl, I had learned to iron by ironing my grandfather’s similar 100 percent cotton white handkerchiefs, but my rehearsal neighbor wasn’t old. Older than I, but not old. Probably a doctoral student.

When I stood to go back to my dorm room, he smiled at me. It was the most purely welcoming smile I had ever seen—free of all intent but sheer friendliness.

So they left out the cadenza? he asked.

A cadenza from eighteenth-century music characteristically ends with trills, I answered. We heard the trills, but no cadenza. I’m an old viola player.

He looked at me quizzically. Old? Then he grinned. Which high school do you go to?

I knew I looked young: my hair was in two braids. I’m sure I flushed. I’m a student at the university. From Memphis. Are you a graduate student?

I’m an associate professor in the physics department.

We had both misjudged each other. I laughed, and he smiled.

He waited, and then with unexpected sophistication I realized what I must say if the conversation was to continue. I must exempt myself from being a student in his department.

I’m a psychology major, I said.

A junior? he asked, still smiling, and I knew he needed to guess my age.

I’m a freshman, I answered, but they accepted me as a psych major because I aced the advanced test in psychology on the Graduate Record Exam. It had been difficult to get permission to take the GRE; most high school students took the SAT.

Did you? He was obviously pleased for me. Perhaps he was pleased with me.

I’m eighteen, I added. I bet you waited too late to get a ticket to the performance. Like me. Suddenly my confidence faltered, and I relied on stereotype. A typical absentminded professor?

Actually, he answered, I do have a ticket. I just like coming to dress rehearsals. It’s more relaxed.

I procrastinated, I confessed. I meant to get a ticket.

I always get two. Usually the second one goes to waste. Maybe you’d like to have it?

Yes, I said. Thank you.

As he handed over the ticket, he remarked, The two seats are together.

Of course, I answered, though I hadn’t thought that far ahead.

He grinned more broadly, amused at both of us. I’m forty-one.

The next day before the concert, I walked to the inexpensive beauty school near the campus and asked for a student stylist who could do an updo with curls. With wings over the tops of the ears, I added. For the first time, I wanted to be transformed from a big child into a young woman. Entranced with studies, teachers, and a few good friends, throughout high school, I’d never dated anyone.

While the stylist combed through my hair, I avoided my reflection in the mirror by mentally reviewing the appearance of the physics professor—his steep, rather forbidding forehead, the thick lenses of his glasses—what did he want to see through those glasses? Big black frames. I realized I didn’t know his name. A physicist—someone who wanted to understand the physical world in mathematical terms—E=mc²: Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. A physicist was someone whose inquiry concerned the basic nature of the physical world. Probably he didn’t consider psychology to be much of a science, but I wanted to understand the immaterial realm—what were thought and feeling? What did being human mean?

Did you bring a clip? the hairstylist asked.

No.

That’s okay. I can just pin it.

I enjoyed tipping back my head and fitting my neck against the rounded curve of the big sink. My grandmother always said, I love going to the beauty parlor—the shampoo. I relaxed into the warm water flowing through my hair, the impersonal fingertips of the stylist pushing into my scalp and against the bone of my skull; I enjoyed considering how my brain was just beyond the stylist’s touch. Shampoo provided a time to wander effortlessly through one’s sense of self. How smoothly awareness moved from impression to thought to thought! What to make of it all? What did it mean to think? Even to see?

Sitting in the stylist’s chair before the glass, I passively watched how the shaping of my hair was changing the meaning of my face, my future.

On the way back to my dorm on Iowa Avenue, I paused in front of a shop window and immediately decided to buy a white eyelet dress, Edwardian, with a long skirt and a long overblouse. As we shifted hangers along the rack of dresses to find the right size, the dress clerk said to me, Your hair is lovely. Just add earrings—sky blue. I have some.

That night, I came to the crowded concert hall only a few minutes early. I was afraid I wouldn’t have anything interesting to say to the professor if we had a lot of time to fill. From a distance, I paused to notice how the professor was shifting nervously in his seat as he waited.

He glanced at his watch; he tucked his chin down and studied his diagonally striped tie; he pulled down the cuffs of his white dress shirt. He wore large midnight blue glass cuff links, arched like two blue-tending-toward-black marbles. He had dressed up, too. He shuffled his feet; he pushed his thick glasses up onto the bridge of his nose. When he saw me at the end of the aisle, he grinned. Happy that I had come, he was at ease with himself again.

As I stepped sideways across the knees of those already seated, he stood up, stretched out his hand to shake hands with me, to welcome me, and said, My name is Thom Bergmann.

I’m Lucy, I answered, not bothering with my last name, for in the loveliness of the moment, I felt sure my name, too, would someday be Bergmann.

Each year of marriage seemed better than the one before. I grew up, really, within the safe boundaries of a loving marriage. My study of psychology and my deep-rooted interest in the importance of aesthetic expression led to my career as an art therapist for those who suffer a range of mental disorders. Thom went on to be promoted to professor in his department, then to occupy the Van Allen-Bergmann Chair. Coincidentally the hyphenated chair was named for Gustav Bergmann, an eminent professor of ontology and the philosophy of science who happened to be a distant relative of my Thom Bergmann. Eventually Thom became known internationally for his work in spectroscopy, and we traveled the world together because of his lectures and scientific connections.

I still believe the piano crashing into the Amsterdam pavement crushed the best brain in astrophysics in the world—my husband, my gallant lover.

In a few years, with war in the Middle East seeming like an immutable fact of life, my path would take me back among the scientists. At the same time, another story—one I would come to know as well as my own—another connection that would redirect my life, had its genesis.

2020: THE GATHERING OF THE DUST

ONE MORNING in Mesopotamia the strong Middle Eastern sun sought to warm the lifeless body of a nude man lying diagonally, like a slash, across an almost flat, bare riverbank. Vulnerable and exposed, he lay on his back on moist, sandy clay. His heels rested in the scarcely moving shallow water of the river. No life stirred in him, but he was not a corpse. To any who looked down and saw him from the sky, the beautifully formed young man would have been a puzzle piece. However, for a time there was no other to look down on his perfect, helpless flesh. A puff of fog hovered over his body for a moment before dissipating in the strong light.

It was the heat of the sun, the discomfort of it, that first caused Adam to stir to consciousness. He wanted relief. While he lay on his back in the mud on the sandy, moist riverbank, the sun of the Middle East baked him till he knew he was done. That was the first thing he knew, even before he opened his eyes, that he was too hot to stay as he was—in the oven, so to speak. He was done.

A cooling breeze passed over him, and he was washed by the coolness, the need of which had awakened him, though his eyes remained closed. The gentle energy of wafting breezes entered his nostrils, and the moving air tunneled its way as though it had volition through his nose, down his throat, and into his lungs. What had been outside him, and refreshing to him, was now gently invading him. When the breeze moved within him, he believed he was One with what was Beyond him because It had freely visited him. He sucked air into himself and was blessed with life.

As Adam lay on his back, he both felt and heard his breathing—the in and out of it—and he heard also, beyond the quietly flowing river, the sound of not too distant surf, with its own rhythm of coming in and going out. The sea, he named that sound, though he had yet to see it.

He knew his parts before he knew the wholeness of his being. There was something that thumped at the center of him. From the inside of his body beneath the bone of his chest, he felt its drumming.

Feeling—touch—was the first sense to awaken fully.

He folded the lobe of one ear and pressed it against

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