Robert Alter on R. Crumb

....Perhaps the most winning aspect of Crumb’s Genesis is its inventive playfulness. He is keenly aware that many bizarre things happen in these stories, first in the primeval history because of its legendary character and then in the patriarchal narrative because of the writers’ deep interest in what is odd, paradoxical, and surprising in human behavior and in divine intervention......

I don't own a copy of Robert Alter's The Five Books of Moses, but his book The Art of Biblical Narrative was required reading for at least two courses which I took in seminary. Alter teaches Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley and it is his translation of Genesis which R. Crumb has used, more or less completely, in his Illustrated Book of Genesis (which should be arriving in my mailbox on Monday in time for me to bring it up to the Edinburgh clergy conference the following week in Pitlochry).

Robert Alter has written a review of Crumb's latest contribution. It appeared in the New Republic last week and can be found HERE.