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This news made me happy for the woman even though I'd never heard of her til now. I hope to find the book soon. I like her attitude, thinking and imagination. - Perdita 
Up the Garden path - Elsie Aidinoff has shocked middle America with her radical reworking of the Genesis story. She talks to Michelle Pauli about the sense of injustice that triggered her retelling, and the nuclear scientists who inspired her portrayal of God as a punch-drunk genius. - Michelle Pauli, Guardian Unlimited, Feb. 3, 2006
To become a published author for the first time at the age of 74 is a remarkable feat, but that's not the only thing that makes Elsie Aidinoff extraordinary. Her debut novel, which is aimed at young adults, tackles religion and sex head-on in a way that has already raised hackles across the bible belt of her native America. For Aidinoff has rewritten the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden - and this time it is told from Eve's perspective.
In The Garden, Aidinoff's version of the familiar tale, God is a cantankerous, petulant, ego-maniac, while the serpent is Eve's wise and loving mentor. What's more, God, in his anxiety to see that "all the parts work" in the first humans he has created, forces Adam to mate with Eve. There is another - and, without giving too much of the plot away, extremely unusual - love scene later in the story, in which Eve learns that sex performed with love can be an act of beauty. No wonder the book is dividing opinions even within its publishing company, Random House.
Aidinoff herself strikes me as an unlikely figure to stir up such controversy. We meet in the garden room of a London hotel and she looks every inch the retired schoolteacher she is, in a suit and silk scarf, silver hair neatly cropped. But, she explains, her reworking of the story of the fall arose out of a profound sense of injustice at the way in which Eve has been regarded historically.
"I wrote it out of outrage," she tells me. "I was in St Paul's Cathedral and the lesson for the day was the third chapter of Genesis. Adam was accused by God of having eaten the apple; his answer was 'yes, but the woman gave it to me'. I was outraged by that response - it seemed like such a cop-out on the part of Adam. I got the idea for the book then and launched into it."
Although the idea came to Aidinoff in a flash, the book itself took rather longer to appear. She spent 10 years writing it, during which time she developed the main themes she was seeking to address - namely, free will and responsibility. In Aidinoff's version of the story, Eve's curiosity about the world outside the Garden is nurtured by the serpent, who helps her to make her own decisions, and to take responsibility for her actions. Eve is vibrant and artistic, and outshines the less sophisticated Adam - Aidinoff describes her with a laugh as "the girl I would like to have been but never was because I was horrifyingly shy and physically scared of everything!" - but Adam also develops the capacity for independent, rational thought as the tale progresses.
"In a way the fact that Adam puts the responsibility on Eve is just as bad for him as it is for her - because accepting responsibility for one's own actions is, one would hope, a part of being an adult," Aidinoff says. "God should have said 'don't blame it on Eve'. Adam himself had to choose whether to eat the apple or not. Just because Eve gave it to him wasn't an excuse for him to eat it. She didn't hold a gun to his head."
For God himself, Aidinoff drew on a visit she made to Santa Fe, where she became interested in the development of the atom bomb in Los Alamos. She saw the atomic scientists as brilliant thinkers too lost in the intellectual excitement of their work to consider its moral implications, and she paints God as a similarly punch-drunk genius, oblivious to the feelings of the humans he has created and impatient with their questions.
"So many religions don't want people to ask questions, yet it seems to me so clear that curiosity is the most important element," Aidinoff muses. As a teacher who spent the last 25 years of her career in an elementary school in Harlem, she is clearly dismayed by the current efforts of the religious right to impose their views in the classrooms of her native country. "How can you not teach Darwinism in schools in 2006?" she asks, despairingly, "I'm appalled at what is happening in my country today." Nonetheless, she jokingly suggests that she wishes the state of Texas would ban her book, for the publicity benefits it would bring.
As to her own faith, she treads carefully. "I was brought up as an Episcopalian and I've always been very interested in religion of all kinds. I like churches and I go to the synagogue with my husband twice a year, " she begins. "But for myself, I have no faith, certainly not in a Christian God. In the process of writing this book, in fact, Christianity has come to seem more and more unlikely ...
"One of the classic problems with religious faith is that it seems to me to be impossible to believe in both an omnipotent and a benevolent God," she continues. "Unless he also happens to be deaf and blind!"
There is always a danger with reworkings of religious themes of this type that the story cannot withstand the weight of the author's good intentions. But, while The Garden is undeniably intense at times, Aidinoff has successfully leavened her tale with refreshing doses of humour. These comes mainly in the form of the wonderful, shape-shifting serpent who, in addition to being what Aidinoff describes as "the mentor all of us wish we had at some point", has a fine line in dry wit.
The book is also lightened through the sensual quality of the prose, which revels in the lush fertility of the Garden of Eden and its landscape, flora and fauna. Although she now lives in New York, and made her home in cities throughout the world during her long first marriage to an international lawyer, Aidinoff grew up on a farm "at the end of a dirt road" in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and drew on her love of the countryside for the poetic depiction of the natural world in the Garden.
It doesn't sound as if there will be much time for country rambles in the near future, however. Having come to writing late in life, Aidinoff has no intention of stopping, now she's started. She has just completed her second book, a 750-page novel about the afterworld, which has taken her the past year to write. Aimed at adults, it describes a woman's journey through an afterworld populated by every god, goddess and mythological creature that humans have ever believed in. "My bookshelf is full of books on death, hell, purgatory, and I'm sitting there writing and laughing away!" Aidinoff tells me, with undisguised glee. America's Christian fundamentalists - hold on to your hats.
Up the Garden path - Elsie Aidinoff has shocked middle America with her radical reworking of the Genesis story. She talks to Michelle Pauli about the sense of injustice that triggered her retelling, and the nuclear scientists who inspired her portrayal of God as a punch-drunk genius. - Michelle Pauli, Guardian Unlimited, Feb. 3, 2006
To become a published author for the first time at the age of 74 is a remarkable feat, but that's not the only thing that makes Elsie Aidinoff extraordinary. Her debut novel, which is aimed at young adults, tackles religion and sex head-on in a way that has already raised hackles across the bible belt of her native America. For Aidinoff has rewritten the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden - and this time it is told from Eve's perspective.
In The Garden, Aidinoff's version of the familiar tale, God is a cantankerous, petulant, ego-maniac, while the serpent is Eve's wise and loving mentor. What's more, God, in his anxiety to see that "all the parts work" in the first humans he has created, forces Adam to mate with Eve. There is another - and, without giving too much of the plot away, extremely unusual - love scene later in the story, in which Eve learns that sex performed with love can be an act of beauty. No wonder the book is dividing opinions even within its publishing company, Random House.
Aidinoff herself strikes me as an unlikely figure to stir up such controversy. We meet in the garden room of a London hotel and she looks every inch the retired schoolteacher she is, in a suit and silk scarf, silver hair neatly cropped. But, she explains, her reworking of the story of the fall arose out of a profound sense of injustice at the way in which Eve has been regarded historically.
"I wrote it out of outrage," she tells me. "I was in St Paul's Cathedral and the lesson for the day was the third chapter of Genesis. Adam was accused by God of having eaten the apple; his answer was 'yes, but the woman gave it to me'. I was outraged by that response - it seemed like such a cop-out on the part of Adam. I got the idea for the book then and launched into it."
Although the idea came to Aidinoff in a flash, the book itself took rather longer to appear. She spent 10 years writing it, during which time she developed the main themes she was seeking to address - namely, free will and responsibility. In Aidinoff's version of the story, Eve's curiosity about the world outside the Garden is nurtured by the serpent, who helps her to make her own decisions, and to take responsibility for her actions. Eve is vibrant and artistic, and outshines the less sophisticated Adam - Aidinoff describes her with a laugh as "the girl I would like to have been but never was because I was horrifyingly shy and physically scared of everything!" - but Adam also develops the capacity for independent, rational thought as the tale progresses.
"In a way the fact that Adam puts the responsibility on Eve is just as bad for him as it is for her - because accepting responsibility for one's own actions is, one would hope, a part of being an adult," Aidinoff says. "God should have said 'don't blame it on Eve'. Adam himself had to choose whether to eat the apple or not. Just because Eve gave it to him wasn't an excuse for him to eat it. She didn't hold a gun to his head."
For God himself, Aidinoff drew on a visit she made to Santa Fe, where she became interested in the development of the atom bomb in Los Alamos. She saw the atomic scientists as brilliant thinkers too lost in the intellectual excitement of their work to consider its moral implications, and she paints God as a similarly punch-drunk genius, oblivious to the feelings of the humans he has created and impatient with their questions.
"So many religions don't want people to ask questions, yet it seems to me so clear that curiosity is the most important element," Aidinoff muses. As a teacher who spent the last 25 years of her career in an elementary school in Harlem, she is clearly dismayed by the current efforts of the religious right to impose their views in the classrooms of her native country. "How can you not teach Darwinism in schools in 2006?" she asks, despairingly, "I'm appalled at what is happening in my country today." Nonetheless, she jokingly suggests that she wishes the state of Texas would ban her book, for the publicity benefits it would bring.
As to her own faith, she treads carefully. "I was brought up as an Episcopalian and I've always been very interested in religion of all kinds. I like churches and I go to the synagogue with my husband twice a year, " she begins. "But for myself, I have no faith, certainly not in a Christian God. In the process of writing this book, in fact, Christianity has come to seem more and more unlikely ...
"One of the classic problems with religious faith is that it seems to me to be impossible to believe in both an omnipotent and a benevolent God," she continues. "Unless he also happens to be deaf and blind!"
There is always a danger with reworkings of religious themes of this type that the story cannot withstand the weight of the author's good intentions. But, while The Garden is undeniably intense at times, Aidinoff has successfully leavened her tale with refreshing doses of humour. These comes mainly in the form of the wonderful, shape-shifting serpent who, in addition to being what Aidinoff describes as "the mentor all of us wish we had at some point", has a fine line in dry wit.
The book is also lightened through the sensual quality of the prose, which revels in the lush fertility of the Garden of Eden and its landscape, flora and fauna. Although she now lives in New York, and made her home in cities throughout the world during her long first marriage to an international lawyer, Aidinoff grew up on a farm "at the end of a dirt road" in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and drew on her love of the countryside for the poetic depiction of the natural world in the Garden.
It doesn't sound as if there will be much time for country rambles in the near future, however. Having come to writing late in life, Aidinoff has no intention of stopping, now she's started. She has just completed her second book, a 750-page novel about the afterworld, which has taken her the past year to write. Aimed at adults, it describes a woman's journey through an afterworld populated by every god, goddess and mythological creature that humans have ever believed in. "My bookshelf is full of books on death, hell, purgatory, and I'm sitting there writing and laughing away!" Aidinoff tells me, with undisguised glee. America's Christian fundamentalists - hold on to your hats.
So the idea of the serpant (which i read as "devil") teaching good stuff just doesn't sit right with me (emphasising the "me" in that sentance) but I do like this line:
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