J. Manfred Weichsel has returned with another unbelievable, ridiculous, and over the top satire. Some of Weichsel’s work, like Jungle Jitters, takes its inspiration from contemporary events. For this book, Weichsel reached back to the Book of Enoch, a bit of Jewish apocalyptic that was likely composed during the time when the Greek successors of Alexander the Great ruled over much of the Middle East.

Even though I haven’t read the Book of Enoch, it is familiar enough, because it has been mined for material by many, many authors of mythic fiction, for example Tim Powers or Neil Gaiman. For the most part, these authors have repurposed the angels or the nephilim featured in the Book of Enoch for their own purposes. Not Weichsel, who has taken it upon himself to retell the Book of Enoch in an entirely modern form.

That’s ambitious, but Weichsel uses his signature style of grotesquerie to translate this earnest religious text into something we moderns can understand.

At first, Not For From Eden seems like many other contemporary works, irreverent and edgy. Yet there is a great deal more here than meets the eye. For example, the opening lines of the book sound like the kind of thing an Internet atheist writes to mock the rubes, describing God as an old man with a long white beard, who in subsequent passages is by turns doddering, neglectful, and vengeful. Yet, when you look at the book as whole, what you find is that the only character in the book who was never surprised and had all of his plans come to fruition is the caricature of a deity.

Ours is not an age that would be able see the acts of God in a straight up act of Providence. However, we just might recognize ourselves in an uncomfortable Gestalt after reading this, and start to wonder about other things.

More: https://www.benespen.com/2022-3-6-not-far-from-eden-by-j-manfred-weichsel/ ( )