Synopsis

This impassioned and original book is an exploration of stories - personal stories, family stories, allegories, histories, myths - and of one myth in particular: the Genesis account of creation. Eric Rhode takes the Genesis narrative and interweaves it with others: with Paradise Lost, with the wanderings of King Lear, with Piero della Francesca’s painting of the Nativity, with Bunyan’s listening in to a group of women as they sat ‘at a door in the sun’, talking about a new birth.

This is not ordinary story-telling. It is autobiographical writing against the grain. Rhode calls it a form of anti-autobiography. He suggests that our need for meaningful stories may blind us to the fact that truth of its nature does not always take symbolic forms. Rhode’s re-telling of the story of Adam becomes an exploration of proto-mental states, in which tales can exist that need no tellers.

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