This short but sweet story gives a hilarious look of the ever so familiar creature-the human through the recognizable figures...Adam and Eve.

Mark Twain presents the journals of Adam and Eve. In a satirical tone we see how they cope with new things. Eve names things and animals and is appreciative of nature. She comments on the moon which falls out of the sky and is brought back. She recalls her reflection in the water, but regards this as a separate entity all together. Adam, differently, builds shacks and searches the land. They eventually find a baby, Cain, who for Adam may be a fish, a bear, a kangeroo, or parrot. He eventually sees that the baby is, of course, a premature human.

There are many instances of humour. The reader is left to wonder how it might have been for the 'first' couple. Kierkegaard remarked that Adam and Eve must have felt trapped by their own freedom, not knowing what to do. I myself regard Adam and Eve as mythology but can see the curiosities of what a 'first couple' would have been like. Would they be happy? Would they be attractive? What were their conversations like? It gives to the imagination, undoubtedly. But like Twain, I can't take it seriously.

Mark Twain creates a fascinating experience of a man and a woman discovering each other, learning to live together in the real world, growing up toward being a whole being.

Throughout the entire delicious epic of the story, the two characters grow from unaware children to mature humans, able to make a living together through all difficulties.

Adam, on one side, starts regarding Eve in a critical way that reminds the rigorousness of an engineer and ends warmly with the calm passion given by a lifetime of togetherness.

Eve, on the other, depicted here as the essential expression of the womanhood, appears as a living miracle of contradictions. She is so playful, sunny, innocent and wildly alive, that Adam finally realizes he's happy to be sentenced to love her forever. It is worth saying that even the Sin is reconsidered here rather as an abuse of Eve's ingenuity than an assumed trespassing...

The friendly, optimistic approach to life, the art of putting strong, fundamental feelings into everyday's words, the gentle humor far from cheap melodrama, the subtle metaphor of the joy of living arising from each chapter made me to consider this novel the most touchy love story ever written.

Louis Adamic, a native of what is now Slovenia, emigrated to America as a young man, became a fairly well-regarded writer, and in 1932 received a Guggenheim fellowship to write in Europe. He decided to pay a brief, dutiful visit to his family, whom he hadn't seen in 19 years and who had never met his American wife. But he ended up spending the full term of his fellowship traveling through the (new) country of Yugoslavia and writing this book about his impressions. It's well worth reading if you have roots in this part of the world, or want to know more about the background of the present crisis. Adamic's comments on the relationships and the differences between the various peoples who share the country are telling, and he successfully avoids the Serbian romanticism that mars many other books on Yugoslavia (e.g., Rebecca West's "Black Lamb, Gray Falcon"). The photographs are occasionally hokey, but contain many fascinating details of costume, architecture, and daily life. Yugoslavia in the 1930's was in an uneasy state of equilibrium under an incompetent King, and it's sadly apparent how this state of affairs contributed to the country's many cataclysms later in the century. This isn't a "scholarly" work, it's impressionistic and opinionated, but as an "insider's" perspective it's extremely valuable.