LINKS ABOUT BOOK, EPISODES, AND SUBJECTS

Anna Freud at Yale and Adam and Eve

 

“Philosophy and fiction usually wed only when some outside pressure forces them into a shotgun marriage,” wrote Benjamin Moser in the New York Times Magazine.  What might be that pressure today?  The Eden Revelation says extinction, the unexpressed fear of it, bullied by anxieties of climate change, global endangerment of species, and leadership psychosis.  This novel is panicked yet inspired by our moment of evolving viruses, driving its writers to express the human condition in a philosophy of evolutionary time.

 

A search for Archibald Shechner, an archaeologist who seems to have disappeared, takes the novel’s characters through the literal field of a natural ecosystem as well as intellectual fields that include biblical scholarship and the psychology of loss.  Yet all the characters are spellbound by the nature of disappearance itself—what the Tree of Knowledge confers on us as “death”—but death without a trace.

 

The cast of characters includes: A psychiatrist and her grad student daughter, with a philologist lover in tow.  A Texas biologist and Swiss scientist.  A renowned Yale professor of ancient scrolls.  A literary agent and his daughter assistant.  A fired editor.  Anna Freud at Yale.  Novelist Aharon Appelfeld.  The philologist’s Japanese “Aunt Mariko” and her boyfriend Morty.  An unnamed psychoanalyst.  Adam and Eve.  Lilith.  The Trees of Knowledge and Life.  A red-cockaded woodpecker and a pitcher plant, each an endangered species.  An ancient ecosystem unearthed with a buried message. And a crucial character, the Shechinah, based on Judaic biblical commentary for the feminine aspect of God.

 

 

 

 

 

“This sweepingly vast and courageous new novel tells of a lost archeologist in ways that radiate out into the great losses of our time. Ten years in the making, The Eden Revelation is a book of epic dimensions, brimming with ideas as it deepens with characters and action.  From David and Rhonda Rosenberg, a writer and a research scientist, respectively, in their Eden of the Florida Everglades”.

     —Grace Schulman, Strange Paradise