Η άλλη Εδέμ

by Paul Harding, Μιχάλης Μακρόπουλος (Translator)

Το 1792, ο πρώην σκλάβος Μπέντζαμιν Χάνι και η Ιρλανδή γυναίκα του Πέισιενς εγκαθίστανται σ’ ένα ερημονήσι απέναντι από τις ακτές του Μέιν. Ο Μπέντζαμιν φυτεύει μηλιές στο μικρό του νησάκι, όπου σιγά σιγά βρίσκουν καταφύγιο κι άλλοι άνθρωποι – μαύροι, ιθαγενείς, απόκληροι…

Έναν αιώνα αργότερα, οι λιγοστοί απόγονοί τους ζουν στο νησί πάμ­πτωχοι και απομονωμένοι, αλλά τουλάχιστον μακριά από την εχθρότητα που τους περιμένει στην ενδοχώρα.

Το καλοκαίρι του 1912, ένας ιδεαλιστής αλλά γεμάτος προκαταλήψεις ιεραπόστολος, που έρχεται να μορφώσει τα παιδιά του νησιού, τραβά την προσοχή των αρχών. Μια επιτροπή ειδικών καταφθάνει και κρίνει ότι η «εκφυλισμένη» κοινότητα πρέπει να διαλυθεί. Μόνο ο Ίθαν Χάνι, που διαθέτει ταλέντο στη ζωγραφική, ίσως έχει μια ευκαιρία να ξεφύγει, καθώς οι κάτοικοι απομακρύνονται με τη βία και στέλνονται σε ιδρύματα, ενώ τα σπίτια τους γκρεμίζονται για να μετατραπεί το νησί σε θέρετρο…

Ένα συγκλονιστικό βιβλίο, βασισμένο σε αληθινά γεγονότα, για τις Εδέμ και τους Κατακλυσμούς που φτιάχνουν τις ανθρώπινες ιστορίες. Και τις Κιβωτούς που διασώζουν έστω την ανάμνησή τους.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Book Club, Audiobook, Historical, Race

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2023

About the author

Paul Harding has an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop (2000) and was a 2000–2001 Fiction Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, in Provincetown, MA. He has published short stories in Shakepainter and The Harvard Review. Paul currently teaches creative writing at Harvard. His first novel, Tinkers, won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Reviews

[Adina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Update! Now shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023

Longlisted for Booker Prize 2023

Book 1/13

I’ve read none of the nominees before the longlist was announced so I had to start from scratch. I chose This Other Eden as my first try because it was shorter and it was narrated by Edoardo Ballerini. I enjoyed his narration of my Struggle Book 2 by Kar Ove Knausgaard so I was looking forward to hear him again. The narration was good but a bit rushed.

The novel is inspired by true facts. The book centres around the eviction of a small mixed race community who found home on Apple Island (Malaga Island off the coast of Maine). Due to the segregation laws, most were considered feeble minded and institutionalised. The novel starts with the beginnings of the community and then introduces us to the back story of some of the families.
The novel was both a history lesson and a lyrical, beautiful weaved emotional story.

[Beata · Rating 5 out of 5]

A powerful novel on the uniquness of happiness and on the destruction brought about by powers that claim to have the right to decide for the others.
Based on real events, the book describes generations of inhabitants of an island, descendants of different cultures who create their own world away from the so-called civilisation. Their cosmos begins to disintegrate when the Honeys receive attention of the authorities seeking to implement social standards which vary from those of the islanders.
I felt for all characters and animals and was devastated when they met their fate ...
The narrator reads the book a little too fast in my opinion, as if he were in a hurry, however, the quality of his interpretation is high.
*A big thank-you to Paul Harding, RB Media, and NetGalley for the audiobook in exchange for my honest review.*

[Sujoya - theoverbookedbibliophile · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25⭐️

*Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023*

The mixed-race community of Apple Island dated back to 1793 when Benjamin Honey, a formerly enslaved man settled on the island with his Irish wife Patience. Six generations later in 1911, their descendants have continued to live on the island and their community includes Esther Honey, great-granddaughter of Benjamin and Patience, her son and grandchildren and their neighbors - Theophilus and Candace Larks and their family born of incest, two sisters who are raising three Penobscot orphans, Civil War veteran Zachary Hand To God Proverbs who lived in a hollow oak tree and elderly Annie Parker who lived alone. Life on the island was not particularly easy but the residents survived in their cocoon of tolerance and community. The arrival of racist missionary/retired schoolteacher Matthew Diamond on the island and his efforts to impart education to the children directs public attention to the island. His intention to “save” an artistically inclined teenager he believes can pass for White triggers a shocking series of events that ultimately leads to the eviction of the residents from the only home they had ever known in 1912. Branded paupers, squatters, imbeciles, and much worse and subject to humiliating treatment and much indignity, they are forced off the island, and several of them are institutionalized while others are left to fend for themselves.

Inspired by the true story of the inhabitants of Malaga Island off the coast of Maine, author Paul Harding packs a lot into This Other Eden. The prose is simple yet elegant and lyrical and the narrative is fluid. With vivid imagery, Harding transports us to Apple Island where we meet each of the residents and get to know their backstories – some in more detail than others. Esther’s story of the hurricane of 1815 that wreaked havoc on the lives of the Honey family is exquisitely penned. The author sheds light on a shameful episode from history, the growing popularity of the study and practice of eugenics, intolerance and racism in that era and much more.

This was the first time I heard of the history of Malaga Island and despite its relatively short length, I found this novel to be an informative, heart-wrenching and emotionally impactful read.

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[Meike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Now Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023
Now Nominated for the National Book Award for Fiction 2023

This is not a bad book, but I don't see how a novel told that conventionally and offering almost no ambiguity can possibly be the best English-language fiction of 2023. The plot is based on the historically true destiny of the inhabitants of Malaga Island (in the text: Apple Island) in Maine: They lived as an integrated interracial community until 1911, when they were forcibly evicted by the state and had to live in a segregated America. Harding introduces us to a whole cast of (fictional) islanders, many of them descendants of the first settlers, a runaway slave named Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife who came in 1792. Then, the state representatives, proponents of eugenics, enter the picture and the tragedy begins...

The strong suit of the text is Harding's ability to gracefully and empathically depict the destitute people on the island who live in a strong community, but far from any comfort, healthcare and with almost no access to information on the outside world. The most interesting character is a former missionary though who came to educate the children and spread Christian morals on Apple Island, and while he tries to save Ethan Honey, a gifted young painter, he largely stands by when the other Islanders are deported from their homes, prompting the question what he should have done, and in how far he was a messenger of white supremacy. The government officials cite scientific reasons (namely eugenics, like, you know, the Nazis) to displace locals and steal their property, as well as to forcefully sterilize, socially ostracize, and generally humiliate them.

It's true that Harding's language is lyrical: This is a prose that ventures into the bombastic image, the adjective-heavy evocation of atmosphere, the visceral appeal to the senses. Perspectives change, time collapses, and all of this is expertly done, alas, experimental or particularly contemporary this is not. It's the kind of prose that could have been written exactly like that 50 or even 100 years ago. It's very controlled and thought out, there is nothing particularly daring or innovative to see here. And again: That's not necessarily bad, but how many "Oprah's Book Club" vibes do you want on a Booker list?

Another aspect that got me thinking were the thoughts of the wonderful Danez Smith, who remarked that the Black/mixed characters are shown as people to whom things happen, who don't have lots of agency. They come up with the explanation that living in an Eden-like place demands a degree of ignorance, but I would argue that Apple Island was never a pure Eden in the first place: Yes, the people live in a (for the time) progressive interracial community, but they also live in dire poverty, and as outcasts - they have paid an unfair, cruel price from the get-go. The nuances are not explored deeply enough in the novel though, the text does, as Danez suggests, sometimes remain a little simplistic (read Danez' piece for the NYT here).

So all in all, this is solid storytelling, but it did not surprise me on the aesthetic level, and it did not challenge me content-wise. It's a conventional historical novel and well done as such, but riveting this is not.

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

He carved more and more slowly, in more and more detail, with more and more expertise, integrating tricks and perplexities, deeper layers of background. He loved, in order, sculpting robes, vegetation, faces, and most of all, hands, through which he took special joy in expressing despair, support, betrayal, supplication, forgiveness, healing, benediction, blessing, revenge, comfort, and murder, hands raised high, hanging limp, clenched, slack, palms out, extended, turned in, retracted, bathing feet, supporting elbows, wiping tears, tightening nooses, drawing swords, jabbing vinegar sops, thrusting spears, caressing sleeping faces.

An apt, albeit long-winded, analogy for the author’s own writing process... maybe?

This time around, I focused on characters some of which stood out a bit more... I don’t hate this, but it’s very hard to find things I like when his overblown prose just blankets everything. You can enumerate things... good for you, you’re simply taking up space on the page. That still doesn’t count as good writing. This is very much Booker’s Time Shelter 2.0. Sorry!

Initial reaction: Maddeningly overwritten! I initially DNFed this, so on my second time picking this one up I was prepared to be once again annoyed with its antiquated prose style and heavy-handed biblical symbolism. All I could think of this time around was that I wish someone else had written this particular story because Harding here only wanted to put forward a showpiece, throwing at these people and their lives his linguistic choices and Old Testament knowledge. It’s almost as if it’s not even about them, but about what the writer can do in a paragraph, about how many adjectives synonyms he can conjure up in a description, about how he can turn a loooong phrase around, which overpowers the plot, eclipses the characters and is, in many ways, ironic. Just another authority here to tell them.

This is the kind of authorial spectacle I am uninterested in inhabiting!

[Flo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Now shortlisted for Booker Prize 2023

Longlisted for 2023 Booker Prize

Beautiful language, but I don't think the author has enough curiosity about the place he writes about to make it come alive. Maybe that's why, instead of seeing the huge opportunities he can find in a mixed-race community from 100 to 200 years ago, he focuses more on how the outside world reacted to this setting. Meh.

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is 221 pages long, but 600 pages deep. Plot is background, story predominates. Inspired by a true history of events during the early 20th century, Harding’s narrative reimagines an island and its inhabitants off the coast of Maine, which the writer calls Apple Island (based on Malaga Island). As Harding reconceives it (a sort of factional vision based on the threadbare material that Harding possessed), Patience and Benjamin Honey arrived and settled there in the late 1700s. Benjamin was an enslaved runaway and Patience was a white Galwegian. They were poor and hungry, living on what the natural world has to offer, as well as mugwort tea, but over a hundred years later, Apple Island is inhabited by a diverse community, most who are Black or mixed race. The prevailing time period is 1912, the eve of destruction for all who live here.

Esther Honey, the matriarch, is the great granddaughter of Benjamin and Patience, mother of Eha, grandmother to three. Her past trauma is a buttoned-up secret, only truly known by the one witness, Zachary Hand to God Proverbs, who mostly lives in a hollowed-out tree where he inscribes biblical scenes. He’s also an excellent carpenter and kind, gentle presence. The narrative describes the islanders’ day to day lives, although it opens with a hair-raising, bowel-splitting flood worthy of Noah’s. Harding adopts a playful style, whimsical wit, and moments of mystical wonder derived from the natural world. I often read the sentences out loud; the poetry and depth of prose has a teeming cadence that forces the reader to slow down, imbibe the language like notes in a piece of music—every word necessary, and uniquely lyrical.

“As he lowered into sleep the salty pined breeze and cricket songs and schools of stars poured into and birled around his brains so the night became his mind and his mind the night and the mother owl watching over him swooped down from her tree and through his dreams.”

Matthew Diamond, a missionary and retired schoolteacher from the mainland, teaches a range of subjects to the children on Apple Island. He possesses a physical revulsion to the Black adults, which he tries to hide. Matthew hates this about himself, but there he is, passively hurting those he promised to help. He escorts “scientists” who entwine their bigotry with what they mislabel the science of eugenics. These men bring their tools—calipers, metal rulers, measuring tape, and handle the islanders like some other species rather than human. The governor decides he needs to expel and segregate the community from the island for the “safety of health and humanity.” Matthew Diamond’s weak objections were overridden.

Diamond attempts to paper over his racism with his savior plan. One of Esther’s grandchildren is fifteen-year-old Ethan, a gifted, budding artist. “How to get dawn, noon, and dusk all at once. How to get the heat. The forms and light and colors describe themselves to Ethan with perfect clarity and harmony, without explanation or reason, and he copies them down onto the canvas with the paints.” Matthew recognizes the boy’s unusual talent, and schemes to get him to the mainland to study with an old colleague before the big eviction. Ethan could “pass as white,” the missionary observes, and therefore would not be subject to prejudicial concerns. Mr. Diamond’s disgrace is his “incurable aversion to these people he truly believes he has been ordained to help.”

The breezy, ruthless racism, the cruel conduct toward the islanders by depraved authorities is shocking and heartbreaking. However, Harding finesses his story with a singular flair, his language evoking a sweet, divine empathy and perhaps a bit of hope, the hope for us all to be a better version of ourselves, and to recognize the resilience of people who dwelled in the picture of their paradise, of Eden, until the worms and the snakes infiltrated Apple Island to cast them out.

On the night before they send Ethan to the mainland, Matthew provided a sumptuous feast. “The islanders were so used to diets of wind and fog, to meals of slow-roasted sunshine and poached storm clouds, so used to devouring sautéed shadows and broiled echoes; they found themselves stupefied by such an abundance of food and drink. …And it seemed as if by sending him off to paint his beautiful pictures they all might…bankrupt poverty… as if they somehow might even starve hunger itself.”

This is a novel to read again, and again and again. It’s a masterful portrait, like a painting in a gallery that you return to again and again, and get more and more of the picture each time you sit with it. Astonishing.

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I think eugenics was a perfect example of how every idiom and discipline of human thought is equally vulnerable to perversion and degradation, which is to say, utterly.”
Paul Harding

The author was inspired by the true story of Malaga Island, one of the first places to be integrated in the Northeast. This small island was settled in 1792 by a mixed race couple.Their descendants continued there until1912 when they were forced to evacuate, one family being committed to the Maine School for the Feeble Minded.

Harding allows the reader to enter the minds and hearts of the inhabitants of the fictitious Apple Island. Make no mistake. Edens do not last and apples have a definite connection. As a professor of the Old Testament and also Shakespeare, there are many religious allegories and references. The arrival on the island of a well-meaning teacher brings the attention of the mainland authorities and the end of the life these islanders have known. In the name of science, the cruel pseudoscience of eugenics, the authorities harshly judge these simple folks, judge and find them lacking, not up to their standards, much like colonization has been doing for centuries. Intolerance has a long history.

I loved this book, loved Apple Island, loved these simple, non-materialistic people. Their love of the island and each other, their sense of community and family were portrayed so beautifully. The descriptions of nature were so quintessential Maine. “As he lowered into sleep the salty pined breeze and cricket songs and schools of stars poured into and burled around his brain and his mind the night and the mother owl watching over him swooped from her tree and through his dreams.” Harding’s exquisite writing is for those who love lyrical prose. In few pages, the landscape and the islanders came to life. Unfortunately, the bigotry and hypocrisy of the time did also.

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of the most wrenching novels are based on fact, and so it is here: this novel is inspired by the forced resettlement of a mixed-race population of a small island community in Maine at the start of the 20th century.

Teeming with biblical undertones, such as the story of Noah and the Ark, This Other Eden gives credence to the self-destructive and sinful state of the world that demands intervention. For craven eugenicists – such as (Leonard Darwin, who is the only child of Charles Darwin who had no interest in science – and greedy politicians and developers, Apple Island is a cauldron of sin.

The island consists of those considered perverse: incestuous siblings and their mentally impaired children, a righteous Civil War veteran named Zachary Hand to God Proverbs who lives in a hollowed tree, the formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish-born wife with their children of various hues of skin colors, and so on.

Of course, things are bound to head south when a well-meaning Christian schoolteacher-turned-missionary decides to better the lot of the island’s children – particularly if that missionary holds a visceral repulsion to Blacks. As the island comes to the attention of the politicians, the missionary determines to “rescue” Ethan – a green-eyed boy who can pass as white – and foster his art talents in Massachusetts. The others are headed for institutions so that the island can be developed as a vacation destination.

The Other Eden echoes themes and events that humanity has grappled with to this day. Must those who are different and misunderstood be considered as “less than” and be deprived of dignity and community? Will intolerance always reign?

Gracefully written in magisterial and poetic language, Apple Island itself becomes a fully developed character. Despite its slimness (a bit over 200 pages), the book demands concentration and focus but the rewards are abundant. Thank you to Book Browse and W.W. Norton & Company for enabling me to be an early reader in exchange for an honest review. 4.5 stars.

[Elyse Walters · Rating 4 out of 5]

Audiobook…read by Edoardo
Ballerini
….6 hours and 8 minutes

“Tell us about the flood, Gram”…..
As one of the children was drawing with charcoal — Ethan Honey, a painting prodigy, (descendant of a former slave), wanted to hear about the hurricane reminiscent of Noah’s Arc — an inspired true story of Malaga Island.
His grandmother, Esther Honey tells her grandchildren of the flood in 1918 where not much survived: five or six houses left standing, most trees down — only about thirty people left.
The flood on Apple Island in in the 1800’s was devastating.
Paul Harding introduces us to the few Black families in the community who survived.
Esther Honey tells the children the story that once consumed the isolated fishing island.
In the 1900’s, an Irish missionary and school teacher, Mathew Diamond, came to the island in the summers to teach the children—bringing his racism and white supremacy.

In “This Other Eden”, only a couple hundred pages, Paul Harding explores the tragedies and complexities of eugenics and white Christianity….the violence- the displacement of the families — their characters and relationships between the families.

The prose sings with dazzling visuals of the elements- of injustice- love - loss - history cruelty. The residents were forced to relocate —many to institutions.

Paul Harding won the Pulitzer Price for his small novel “Tinkers” …..(the same year my local friend/author: William C. Pack wrote his first novel and was ‘nominated’ for the Pulitzer Prize also)
Pack’s novel — is still one of my favorites:
I must mention:
“The Bottom of the Sky” ….a gift from William Pack donates ‘all’ profits to women’s shelters. It’s a free Kindle download to all readers. Every friend I’ve recommended it to, who read it, loved it as much as I did.

In “This Other Eden” Harding’s prose is luminous-sensitive to history’s discrimination - injustice - and social intolerance.

[Elaine · Rating 2 out of 5]

Booker Book 9 of 13: 3/10. A tragic and complex moment in American history- the eviction of a small mixed race community from a coastal island in Maine at the beginning of the 20th century - provides the ostensible source material for this novel (although Harding scrupulously ignores the historical record, instead giving way to imagination and unfortunately, it appears , some of the bigoted fantasies that circulated about this community before more research was done). There are flashes of interest- the best episode is probably the off island section detailing the relationship between a young islander and an Irish maid, as it’s freed from the utterly fantastical way that Harding has chosen to imagine the island.

But unfortunately the book is grossly overwritten, preferring flights of embellished prose about the island’s nature to trying to imbue its residents with any humanity. The residents are by turns Caliban grotesques and self-created savants - no ordinary people inhabit this island. The telling rings false and othering - a realer book would have been far more interesting.

Also if I never again read anything as anachronistic and contrived as Hand to God’s “I am queer for queer folk” peroration, I will be a happy person. This is a perfect example of Harding’s wanting it both ways - the islanders are the product of incestuous rape, deformed and living like beasts in some cases (one albino girl is depicted as eating puddle slime and live snakes, children sleep in piles with dogs) but they are also imbued with 21st century lofty sensibilities. Neither seems to do justice to the source material.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

An irksome journey through a fascinating but painful time in Maine's history. For every instance of moving lyricism, there are several more of overeffusive prose. Touching descriptions of a character's inner feelings lead to prolonged, tortured sentences which obliterate the very fine and effective moment just created.

See what you make of this:

When her sister, whose name Esther sometimes forgot as she got older, or more, whose name she remembered less and less, passed her the mug it was all she could do not to laugh out loud for joy and wake her father at the prospect of that milk, so cool she didn't know how her mother kept it, so sumptuous and thick and fresh it was blue in the tin mug and her joy at the sweet rich grassy taste tempered a little but not after all too, too much by having to sip it into her mouth quietly and not smack and gulp it down the way she'd have liked but which, after all, too, upon reflection years later rocking in her chair on the bluff watching the women and girls return from gathering, would have ruined much of the nearly unbearable bliss of anticipation and the relish of the milk's creamy weight, its musky sweetness, so wonderful she could have sighed out loud, especially when she thought of the savorless lumps they got by on the rest of the time with that sweet taste still in her mouth.

I love words. I love reading. I love creative expression and atypical construction in writing. This novel, however, I found to be a torment from time to time. It didn't help that some of the descriptions of Apple Island and the neighboring mainland bore only a superficial resemblance to the territory I know so well.

With a pull quote from Esi Edugyan on the back of the book, I expect this to be shortlisted for this year's Booker even so.

3.5 stars

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5, rounded down.

#7 of the 2023 Booker longlist for me.

Not sure quite what I expected, but I was surprised by how much I really enjoyed reading this. Perhaps after wading through some of the more mediocre offerings in this year's Booker list, I was just enchanted by a novel with a remarkable story told simply, but well. Some of the set pieces were quite exciting, and the characters were all unique and sharply defined (although I was surprised that at one point Iris and Violet McDermott were misidentified as the Prophet sisters - although the islanders were all so inbred, they did have Prophet blood in them also!). Not much more to say really - would be delighted it this makes the shortlist, but it doesn't really resonate for me as the best of the batch.

[Krista · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s Apple Island! It is Apple Island!

Benjamin Honey looked at his wife crying to him — fierce and true. But she was wrong. His orchard, so fair in appearance, was a folly; his half-remembered Eden no sooner restored than carried off by a little wind and rain.

This Other Eden opens with an epigraph that states: Malaga Island was home to a mixed-race fishing community from the mid 1800s to 1912, when the state of Maine evicted 47 residents from their homes and exhumed and relocated their buried dead. Inspired by this historic tragedy, author Paul Harding imagines his own such mixed-race community — the first settlers, a runaway enslaved man and his Irish wife, having arrived on the fictional “Apple Island” in 1792 — and although, by design, the reader knows where the plot must lead, Harding seems to be using the storyline merely as a scaffolding from which to hang his incredibly pretty words. On the one hand: I am a sucker for just this kind of rhythmic and lyrical wordcraft; and on the other: knowing that this was based on true events, I don’t know if Harding did right by the memories of those whose lives he mined for inspiration. I savoured the reading experience, but it left a sour taste in my mouth; my heart wanted to round up to four stars, but my brain says three.

Terrible, she thought, making her way home as Charlotte and Tabitha and the Sockalexis children criss-crossed in front of and between the line of adults walking away from the schoolhouse along the path. Terrible how terribly good intentions turn out almost every time.

As the novel opens in the early twentieth century, there’s something like sixteen residents living on Apple Island: all of mixed race and a range of colours; many the result of inbreeding, consensual and otherwise. In the first scene, we see the Honey family (the direct descendents of the island’s first settlers) as they tell stories and try to keep warm in their crude cabin; cold, hungry, threadbare, but loving. We eventually meet Matthew Diamond: a retired minister who comes to the island every summer in order to teach its children, and although he appears to be a charitable and Christ-like man, he will eventually reveal a hidden ugliness. If Apple Island is Eden, Diamond is the serpent; his proffered fruit of the knowledge of good and evil necessarily leads to the Fall. Yet: if Diamond is the villain for eventually bringing government inspectors (and their new excitement for eugenics) to the island, Harding doesn’t exactly portray the pre-contact society as a paradise. The inbreeding has had an effect on some of the residents (one little girl seems little more than animal), they are living hand to mouth in unhygienic conditions, and summer school doesn’t seem sufficient for the handful of students that, somehow, include a maths genius, a Latin scholar, and an artistic savant. The fact that intervention (as per other information in the epigraph) leads to bad outcomes for some residents doesn’t actually seem to argue against the need for some kind of intervention. This would have been more tragic if Harding had made the islanders seem more like ordinary people who simply chose to live apart from society — if their mistreatment had been more clearly linked to racism or paternalism or eugenics — instead of peopling this outpost with the old man with a religious mania for carving Biblical scenes on the inner walls of the tree he lives inside, or the man who wears his dead mother’s dress and dead father’s clerk apron and obsessively acts out what he remembers of their roles in life, or the little girl who won’t eat people food but bites the heads off snakes and vermin. I guess what I’m saying is that there’s nothing philosophically interesting about the plot — because of the way that Harding used his source material — and ultimately, that didn’t feel respectful to those who actually lived this.

As for the wordcrafting, many, many scenes play out like the following; odd phrasing and syncopation that worked for me (but could wear on another reader, for sure):

Put the haystacks in the sky, bristling and sharp, rasping across the lowering blue. Stack the clouds in piled rows across the meadow, simmering, hovering, combed fog stitched by the bottom to the short shorn grass, vegetal, green, drying in the day, dehydrating in the sun, sweet and wet then dry and sweet and perfuming the meadow, the deep gray purple morning clouds with the shorn dark green morning grass waving like tide grass in salt creeks then leaching white and straw as light sheers to high white noon and hangs from the pinnacle of the day, suspended in the heat and high white and white hay, suffocating, asphyxiating in breathless angelic light. How to get dawn, noon, and dusk all at once. How to get the heat. The forms and light and colors describe themselves to Ethan with perfect clarity and harmony, without explanation or reason, and he copies them down onto the canvas with the paints.

There is a nice bit in the middle that sees this self-taught painter — Ethan, who can pass for white — sent away for instruction by the meddlesome Matthew Diamond. But as much as I was enjoying the change of scenery, we are eventually brought back to Apple Island and the eviction of its residents, and I don’t know if at all hangs together. But again: This really isn’t about the plot; it’s about words and rhythm and mood and I felt like Harding succeeded in what he was aiming for. But again: Knowing that this was based on the lives of real people, it leaves a sour aftertaste. Art, but problematic.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This Other Eden casts a spell over the reader with its lush descriptions, melodic prose, the languorous unraveling of time. And yet a sense of dread etches down the spine like a thin needle, leaving blood to seep, unseen but keenly felt. The foreshadowing of history tells us the residents of Apple Island, the Eden of the novel's title, will become a footnote of this nation's shameful embrace of eugenics, and yet it's impossible to read without the hope that somehow a benevolent hand will intervene and these souls will not be cast out from their home.

Apple Island, a tiny rock a stone's throw from the Maine's hard coastline, is based on Malaga Island, a settlement of the descendants of escaped and freed slaves, native Abenaki, and poor whites from the mainland who intermarried and created a fishing community that numbered less than 50 by 1912, when they were forced from their homes. Several of the residents were committed to a mental institution. It's a tragic history for a state that has long prided itself on its progressivism, including as a refuge from slavery.

Paul Harding humanizes the names that history captured by fleshing out the small band of families who inhabit Apple Island, some descendants of its founder, Benjamin Honey, a former slave, and his Ireland-born wife, Patience. One of these ancestors, young Ethan Honey, a teen who can pass as white, is hurried off the island before the others are banished. Both his looks and his prodigious artistic talent become a means to save him from the fate his family and neighbors are subject to.

Ethan's grandmother, Esther, is the story's anchor. Her sorrow and wisdom are grounded in a terrible secret she bears alone, tamed only by love for her son and grandchildren. It's heart is held by Zachary Hand To God Proverbs, a Civil War veteran who lives in a hollowed-out tree trunk. And in its strange blood are the husband-wife/brother-sister pairing of Theophilus and Candace Lark, whose four children suffer from a disease that makes them fatally sensitive to the sun, a pair of Irish sisters who foster three Penobscot orphans, and the Honey's ancestors. Their foil is Matthew Diamond, a white teacher who spends his summers providing a traditional education to the islanders, even though the very sight of Black people sickens him. It is he who eventually causes the state to intervene on Apple Island, destroying the lives of those he condescendingly feels are in need of saving.

This Other Eden is a less a rendition of historical fact than a hymn, a lament, to what history wrought. There is a fable-like tone to Harding's prose, a sense that you are reading an allegory. It's hypnotic and intense, a fever dream that you wake from at the end, heartbroken to know it is real.

Highly recommended.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrible how terribly good intentions turn out almost every time.

from This Other Eden by Paul Harding
“Malaga Island was home to a mixed-race fishing community from the mid-1800s to 1912, when the state of Maine evicted 47 residents from their homes and exhumed and relocated their buried dead. Eight islanders were committed to the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded.” from Maine Coast Heritage Trust, quoted in This Other Eden

The novel opens with the riveting story of a terrible storm washing over a small island off the coast of Maine, with a family clinging to the branches of a large tree and watching houses and people caught in the angry waters in the flood below. The Eden that Benjamin Honey had built was destroyed in 1815. His wife Esther tells the tale to her grandchildren, the history of their Ark island.

The Honey family had lived there for six generations, since an African ex-slave Civil War veteran and his Irish wife settled there. Their neighbors included the Larks with their colorless children, and the McDermott sisters who took in three orphaned Native American children, and the spinster Annie Parker, and Civil War veteran Zachary Hand who preferred his hollow tree to his cabin. The mixed races of the families had produced individuals of every type, the pale and the dark, green eyes and red hair, straight hair and tightly curled.

It’s a harsh life but they have survived. Theirs is a tolerant society where brother and sister raise their children, and a man can don his mother’s dress to keep house while his wife cuts her hair and goes fishing on the ocean.

The state sent a pastor to open a school. The community is Christian, the Bible and Shakespeare among the few, tattered books in the community. The teacher discovered a girl who is a mathematical prodigy, a boy who masters Latin, and another who is a gifted, untrained artist.

The Eugenics movement was at its height. The islanders were disturbing. They were measured and assessed, labeled and judged to be degenerate by the “plain white” of the mainland. The mixing of races, the intermixing of blood, could not produce anything but imbeciles, morons, and degenerates.

The entire population of Apple Island was relocated, many to institutions.

The early book takes us into these people’s lives and personalities. Yes, there are relationships that we may judge to be perverse. There are people whose sanity we may doubt. A girl who only eats wild things she finds, starfish and snakes. One woman was abused by her father, and intended to murder the resultant child. She was prevented, and her child and his children became the center of her old age. Zachary Hand carves images in his hollow tree where he finds peace. But we have sympathy for these people. They are removed from the world and a society that could not have accepted them, eking out a subsistence life, doing the best they could with what they had.

The teacher determines to ‘save’ one child of the island, a fifteen-year-old boy with straight hair and and greenish eyes. He writes an acquaintance, hoping he would take the boy in until he could enter art school. It seemed a mercy to separate Ethan Honey from his family’s fate, to allow him access to white society.

For all his good intentions, the teacher creates a series of disastrous events. Years in the future, historians will explore the buried history of the deserted island, and write about the paintings and drawings of the mysterious Ethan Honey.

Beautifully written, with stunning descriptive passages and a mounting urgency, this is a novel of history and a vision of what society could have become, a condemnation and a warning.

I received a free galley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

[Paula Mota · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dublin Literary Award Longlist 2024 - 2/70 :D
The Booker Prize 2023 #2

Lawyers are filing documents. Judges are signing orders. Scientist and doctors are collating data. Pharaoh’s heart is as hard as ever.

Se o primeiro livro que li desta lista de nomeados, “Pearl”, me deixou triste por ver uma família a debater-se com a perda da mãe, “This Other Eden” deixou-me revoltada, mas sabendo que se tratava de uma história verídica sobre injustiça, prepotência e preconceito, não era nada que não previsse.
Paul Harding baseou-se num facto histórico ocorrido em 1911, a expulsão da ilha de Malaga, ao largo do Maine, Estados Unidos, da pequena comunidade que lá vivia há mais de um século, descendente, entre outros, de um antigo escravo, de uma irlandesa e de nativos norte-americanos.

There were nearly thirty people living there, in five or six houses, including the first Proverbs and Lark folks, the ones from Angola and Cape Verde, the others from Edinburgh—Patience herself from Galway, Ireland, originally, before she met Benjamin on his way through Nova Scotia and went with him—and three Penobscot women, sisters who’d lost their parents when they were little girls.

O título desta obra é relevante e explica-se a si mesmo, visto que Apple Island, o local onde vive esta comunidade praticamente autossuficiente mas miserável e com um flagrante problema de consanguinidade, é o outro paraíso onde são múltiplas as referências bíblicas: a maçã, o casal original, a partição das águas, a arca de Noé. Todo esse simbolismo religioso, juntamente com um estilo por vezes demasiado lírico, deixou-me um tanto impaciente, mas é difícil não empatizarmos com esta gente inofensiva e impotente e não nos indignarmos com a intervenção de um Estado paternalista e eugenista cujas pretensas medidas de auxílio se revelaram calamitosas. Ironicamente, não saindo da esfera religiosa, o que inicia todo o processo de despejo é a chegada de um ex-professor missionário cheio de boas intenções, aquelas de que está o inferno cheio.

There would still be matters of hygiene, physical and mental, there would still be the polluted blood, there would still be depravity and imbecility and mixed races, nothing could change those hard facts. Best for everyone, the islanders most of all, to vacate the settlement as a matter of public health, tear everything down, tear the shacks and garbage, put the dogs down, let the land revert.

[Gregory Duke · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5

Wonderful concept. Overwrought prose. Faulty plotting.

When Zachary proclaims his "queer" monologue ("I’m queer for all the little queer creatures in the tide pools. I’m queer for the light when it breaks the horizon and queer for it when it sinks behind the trees..." etc. etc.), I have to laugh. An anachronism played out into maudlin superficiality.

Harding even attempts a child's perspective, and it becomes something of a poorly done Faulkner pastiche: "Wish chalk tasted like white snaps when I bit white sticks or unhappy man clicks white sticks on black wall and makes white bugs and white chalk clicks."

So many sentences make my eyes roll. Oh well. Post-Pulitzer flop. I will remember nothing but the overarching concept of what this is.

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023

This is my favourite of the five books I have read so far from this year's longlist, at least as an enjoyable reading experience, though there is nothing especially innovative or original about the storytelling. The premise is striking, and is loosely based on a true story of an isolated island community that failed to survive contact with the modern (early 20th century) world and its very different values.

[Fabian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading "This Other Eden" is like eating a lukewarm soup with too many ingredients that - inexplicably - is still tasteless.

The novel tells the historically verified story of the inhabitants of Apple Island, a small island in the American state of Maine. They were all descendants of slaves and refugees of all skin colours and established their own small society over several decades. The story is told from the perspective of various islanders, but you don't really get close to any of them. Where the interpersonal dramas take place and you are startled out of your half-sleep, you are quickly interrupted in favour of the description of the waves and the building of huts.

Sometimes the biblical-bizarre scenarios - like for example the hurricane and the flood - are impressive, but mostly the spasmodically artistic evocations of the archaic situations are not very captivating.

The stylised close-ups seem reluctant to be squeezed into a poem - despite the self-indulgent onomatopoeias and accumulations and polysyndetones - and hang a little lost in the air. The obligatory artist character, Ethan Honey - the secret protagonist within the island genealogy - remains also strangely pale and his drawings are more interesting than he is - although they are mainly still lifes of dead animals, shells and plants. And then there's a love story that leaves you completely cold.

Esther, the most interesting character, mostly sits in her rocking chair and rocks.

It's a bit of a shame, as the material would have had so much potential and what has emerged from it is far too rarely fascinating. Perhaps it would have been more honest with the islanders to dispense with the finger exercises of the literature lecturer and tell the story in a less ambitious way. 

I may have finished the soup, but I wouldn't recommend it.

[mel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Format: audiobook ~ Narrator: Edoardo Ballerini
Content: 3.5 stars ~ Narration: 4 stars
Complete audiobook review

Now Shorlisted for the Booker Prize 2023

In the late 18th century, a former slave, Benjamin Honey, and his Irish wife, Patience, found an isolated island where they could live. They planted an apple orchard there. This novel takes place more than a century later, in 1912, and tells the story of their descendants and some neighbors that found a home on the island through the years. Esther is the great-granddaughter of Benjamin and Patience. Now she is the oldest of the Honey family and watches over her son and grandchildren. Biblical references contribute to the atmosphere of this novel. This other Eden is based on true events on Malaga Island.

I didn’t read the Tinkers, Paul Harding’s novel that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2010, but I was interested in this novel because of the author.

This other Eden is a beautifully written novel about a heartbreaking subject. But unfortunately, it didn’t grab my attention as much as it should have. I often found it pretty slow, and the sentences, even though magnificent, were very long. Because of the above, I am glad I had an audiobook. Edoardo Ballerini is a very good narrator, although his reading was a little faster than usual.

Thanks to Recorded Books for the advance copy and this opportunity! This is a voluntary review and all opinions are my own.

[NILTON TEIXEIRA · Rating 3 out of 5]

A terrific concept that, unfortunately, failed to entertain me.
The storytelling could have been better.
The writing was a bit pretentious, and I did not connect with anything, perhaps because there was no depth in the characters’ development.
I was completely bored.
I did finish it because it’s a small book, just about 67k words.

This book was shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize.

[Laura Rogers · Rating 4 out of 5]

This Other Eden is a work of historical fiction which takes place on a small island off of the coast of Maine. In 1792, Benjamin Honey, a freed slave, and his wife decided to make their home on the island. The story begins with them and grows to include a lively assortment of their descendants and other "different" characters. They are exceedingly poor but largely self sufficient, managing to avoid most contact with the mainland (white) folks.

Things shift with the coming (intrusion) of a retired schoolteacher/missionary. Though his intentions are good (setting up a school on the island) the results are disastrous. No longer invisible, the islanders become victims of the social intolerances and injustices carried out under the guise of the pseudo science of the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century.

This Other Eden shines a light on a gut wrenching part of American history. It also serves as a cautionary tale. Poignant and well written, This Other Eden will appeal to lovers of historical fiction with substance. It would be a good book club selection.

I received a drc from the publisher via NetGalley.

[Glenda · Rating 4 out of 5]

So, this book. I finished it, loved it and it thoroughly broke my heart. My heart ached for the displaced people of Apple Island. I will think about it for a long while. I'm in the process of reading all the books that landed on The Booker Prize shortlist. The have all been excellent.

However, I needed a break. So last evening I picked up a doorstopper book from Stephen King. King is my guilty pleasure and Fairy Tale is promising to be one of his that I have a hard time putting down. Stay tuned.

[Maxwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

[Longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize]

Drawing inspiration from the the true history of Malaga Island, Paul Harding's third novel, This Other Eden examines what happens when societal standards, driven by the rise of eugenics, phrenology, and social Darwinism, are forced on a rural post-Civil War integrated community.

Apple Island off the coast of Maine is inhabited by a lively and diverse mix of people. Esther Honey, the matriarch, and her son Eha seem to lead the community. His son, Ethan, a talented artist and daughters, Charlotte and Tabitha, also reside on the island along with Zachary 'Hand to God' Proverbs, an elderly man who lives in a hollowed out tree trunk. There's Theophilus and Candace Lark, brother and sister who happen to also be husband and wife, raising their children alongside the McDermott sisters, Violet and Iris, and the three Penobscot children they've adopted.

The story starts in the early 1800s when a vicious flood devastates the island inhabited by the founder, Benjamin Honey, a freed Black man, and his Irish immigrant wife, Patience. Esther and Eha are descendants of the founding family, and over the decades between them the island has become populated with the above mentioned mix of families.

Harding's writing is lyrical and flowing. It seems to stream from the land itself and the character's inner thoughts. Listening to the story via audiobook made this a very immersive and interesting, if not at times a bit confusing, experience. I did have to rewind occasionally to keep track of the sentence and where it was headed.

I found the social concepts and themes as well as the religious/biblical allusions fascinating. Harding draws a lot of parallels between Esther and Moses, the island's inhabitants and the Hebrews in the wilderness, the great flood and Noah's ark to the floods and the island itself, etc. Beyond that, though, I felt the story lacked a bit. Thankfully the book itself is quite short, just over 200 pages, so the plotlessness never dragged it down too much.

I can see from the writing itself which is very masterful and the ideas this book explores why this book was selected by the Booker committee. I think this is one perhaps that would be rewarded with a re-read, and I'm eager to discuss it with book club. Perhaps, like Hernan Diaz's Trust last year, I will walk away from that discussion with even more appreciation for the text.

[Sandra The Old Woman in a Van · Rating 1 out of 5]

Just put me out of my misery. I carefully read the first 50%, then skimmed the rest of this overwritten novel. Two quotes will give you an idea of what to expect:

“Wish chalk tasted like white snaps when I bite white sticks or unhappy man clicks white sticks on black wall and makes bugs and white chalk clicks like a white click bug in a click white bush. Honey is better to the wicked, acid sweet.”

And

“Earth is the surface. Earth is the hole or hiding place of burrowing animals. Earth is the soil suitable for cultivation. Earth is the medium by which a circuit is completed. Earth is the ground. Earth is a place for burial. Earth is the present abode of humankind. Earth is wordless and patient and suffered the grave robbers’ spades in silence.”

If this style of prose rocks your boat, then dive in. It made my brain hurt, so I’m glad this reading experience is behind me.

[Alan (on December semi-hiatus) Teder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lost Island Home
Review of the Recorded Books audiobook edition (January 24, 2023) narrated by Edoardo Ballerini of the W.W. Norton & Company hardcover original (January 24, 2023).

Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, with the winner to be announced Sunday November 26, 2023.

Malaga Island was home to a mixed-race fishing community from the mid-1800s to 1912, when the state of Maine evicted 47 residents from their homes and exhumed and relocated their buried dead. Eight islanders were committed to the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded. “I think the best plan would be to burn down the shacks with all of their filth,” then Governor Frederick Plaisted told a reporter at the time. - Epigraph.

Author Paul Harding took his inspiration for his fictional Apple Island from the real-life story of the community evicted from Maine's Malaga Island in 1912. The island's inhabitants in the novel are completely fictionalized however, with even the founding of the settlement thrown back to 1792 instead of the actual 1860. This was still a moving and dramatic story of the outside forces of greed and discrimination acting to destroy those they did not understand or appreciate. That message is a timeless one regardless of the fiction.


Entertaining the missionary - Sunday on Malaga Island 1909. Image sourced from DownEast Magazine (see links below).

I didn't think I would be able to get through too many more of the 2023 Booker Shortlist in the time remaining, but an Audible Sale on November 8, 2023 offered this reading by the always excellent Edoardo Ballerini and I snapped it up immediately. This might a 4-star rating, but for me the narration kicks it up to a solid 5-star.

Soundtrack
The Story of Benjamin Darling Pt 1 by State Radio, a song about original Malaga Island inhabitant Benjamin Darling. Note: see in the YouTube comments for the lyrics which someone has transcribed.

Other Reviews
Paradise Lost by Rachel Seiffert, The Guardian, February 16, 2023.

Amid Literary Praise for This Other Eden, Critics Fear the Novel Could Undo Work to Dispel Myths About Malaga Island by Megan Gray, Portland Press Herald, November 12, 2023.

Trivia and Links
Read the magazine story which was the original source of inspiration for author Paul Harding's fiction at The Shameful Story of Malaga Island by William David Barry, Downeast Magazine, November 1980.

Read a follow-up story about how Malaga Island has gone from Dark Secret to Source Material by Jaed Coffin, Downeast Magazine, January 2023.

Listen to an audio documentary about Malaga Island at Malaga Island: A Story Best Left Untold at Maine Memory.

Read the 2023 Booker Prize Reading Guide for This Other Eden here.

[Sue · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley and WW Norton and Company for this advance reader copy of The Other Eden in exchange for a fair review.

Heartbreaking and maddening, this Historical Fiction work brings to life the unknown (to most of the country) tale of a small island off the coast of Maine that was settled by a couple (he Black, and she Irish) and was occupied for more than a century. During the time of Eugenics, the powers that be in Maine decided that these people, now generations later and having survived the harshness of the coast of Maine with little help from the outside, must be insane or feeble minded and are evicted from their home. Harding imagines a school teacher who saves one boy, a white skinned artist, as the most likely one to thrive in the mostly white Northeast. This is a true story in the eviction of these people, but fiction in the individuals themselves as their stories have faded.

I struggled with this one. I was captivated by the story and characters that had drawn me in from the beginning. The writing style was difficult for me, as I was trying to read it not for myself, but for the average book reader who likes historical fiction. This book is one chapter. Many of the sentences are a paragraph long. The voice of the book is like a storyteller who might embellish the story mid sentence or follow a twig of the story but loops it all back in the end. I've heard these story tellers speak, and my husband will accuse me of doing the same, as they weave intricate stories and using their entire bodies to enthrall an audience. The down side of the writing is that you can't really put the book down anywhere without losing your place. I got lost a few times, shaking my head but carrying on. This style of writing was difficult for me.

3* for the story itself, the imagery, and the characters themselves. I'll leave the rest for you to decide.

[Matthew Ted · Rating 3 out of 5]

98th book of 2023.

3.5. A seductive little book. I was chatting to Alan the other day about Harding (he's read the Pulitzer Prize winning Tinkers) and we both agreed that there is something enchanting about his prose though it isn't anything we could actually put our fingers on. I kept reading, sort of swept along by it, like the floods alluded to in the text.

This Other Eden is about Apple Island (Malaga Island in reality) and steeped in historic fact, none of which I knew. In 1792 a freed slave and his wife make their home on the island, and we read, for the rest of the book, about the interracial inhabitants who still lived on the island at the beginning of the 20th century. A man comes as a schoolteacher to bring education and 'modernity' to the island, but gradually, prejudices begin to twist his original intentions. The story focuses a little on the single boy who is 'saved' from the island and sent away to learn painting. The schoolmaster remains and, like the snake in the original Garden of Eden, changes it forever.

I can't say why I haven't given it 4-stars. As seductive as it was, there was something missing, though I'm not sure what. A powerful and beautiful little book that holds a piece of American history to the light and scrutinises it.