“Moacyr Scliar’s novel The Woman Who Wrote the Bible, in a rollicking English translation by Heath Wing, is hilarious, irreverent, and thought-provoking. The author’s use of language, by turns modern and archaic, ribald and refined, sets this biting satire of the rigors and absurdities of the patriarchal order apart. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite like it.”
Description
The bestselling Brazilian satire, now available in English for the first time.
Moacyr Scliar was the preeminent literary voice of the Jewish immigrant experience in modern Brazil. Now his most ambitiously satirical and irreverent novel is at last translated into English, offering not just a significant contribution to Latin American and Jewish literature but to world literature as well.
In a past-life therapy session, a mysterious woman makes a remarkable breakthrough when she discovers that in a previous life she was one of King Solomon’s seven hundred wives. In language that hilariously mixes modern jargon and biblical diction, she sets out to tell the story of her earlier incarnation three thousand years in the past, revealing how she went from a provincial nobody to a queen.
Yet being royalty isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. As the least desirable of King Solomon’s wives and concubines, she is unceremoniously discarded and forgotten in his harem. But as luck would have it, she possesses a unique gift: she is a woman who knows how to read and write. Once her talent is discovered, King Solomon charges her with writing what will become one of the most important texts in human history. Along the way our nameless narrator leverages her newfound status as royal scribe to bring about her own secret agenda.
A brilliant feminist critique skewering the absurdities of patriarchy, The Woman Who Wrote the Bible is a comic masterpiece of truly biblical proportions.
Reviews
“The Woman Who Wrote the Bible is a rowdy and sensual novel by Moacyr Scliar, one of the most important Latin American Jewish writers and a prize-winning Brazilian novelist. Heath Wing’s translation from the Portuguese well replicates the fast-paced and sexy narrative.”
“Thrilling. . . . The mere possibility that a woman is behind key portions of the Torah, in the hands of such a superb storyteller, is an exquisite invitation to rethink the book many people have rigid, fixed ideas about.”
