Language Arts

In the beginning, God created man, and from a part of him, woman, and they lived in the garden of Eden. The man’s name, for our purposes, is Oliver. The woman was not given a name, and Eden is the house of a missing woman named Edith. This isn’t Genesis, it’s the world of Elaine Kraf’s nearly lost 1977 novel Find Him! Our narrator, an amnesiac, wakes up one day in the house Edith and Oliver once shared, fully grown but childlike, with no past and no language. Her first memory is of Oliver teaching her to eat; he teaches her, too, to use the bathroom, and to have sex (“It is possible,” she says, “to have sexual relations with someone without knowing what it is.”) Edith herself is nowhere to be found, though she’s left things behind.