Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Book #15: The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

Okay, so I read this for my book club (knowing that I won't be going for a little while after the baby comes, so I wanted to go now). I really liked it, and I really didn't like it. This book is a novelization of the story of Dinah from the Bible--the one daughter of Jacob who is named in the book of Genesis. In the Bible, we learn that she was taken and raped by a prince, and Simeon and Levi go and kill an entire city of men and kidnap her back. That's basically all you know about her. But this book covers her whole life, and the lives of her mothers before her, and gives voice to this woman who doesn't say a word in the Bible. She tells her story and that of her family, and tells what "really" happened to her as she was growing up and then what happened to her after that one small (and traumatic) episode that is described in the Bible. I'm going to get somewhat specific (spoiler alert!) so I remember stuff for our book club discussion next week.

The thing that I really liked in this book was the sense of community and closeness among the women in the story. The best part, I thought, was the beginning chapters, describing the four wives of Jacob (Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah), and how they became his wives and how they interacted with each other. The book is called The Red Tent because that was the women's tent where they all spent their periods together--and Dinah makes it seem like this immeasurable time of bonding and caring for one another. It seemed almost magical, the way that she talked about it--all the women in there together, taking a break from their usual labors, resting and gossiping and worshipping their (pagan) gods together. I really liked that image and I thought Diamant did a wonderful job of creating that world for me. (Interesting to note: this menstrual tent idea for these women in the Bible is not actually historically accurate... there's no evidence that they did that. But Diamant says that other cultures had it so she thought it could have applied here with these women too.) I also liked the strength and power that the women depicted in their birthing scenes--I am NOT a birth story person (they usually gross me out and hit too close to home) but since Dinah grew up around so many births, and grew up to be a midwife, it was a natural theme and it really made me feel like women are powerful and strong. I also feel like the ending was somewhat satisfying to return for a short while to her father's family and see how her story lived on; it fit with the strong themes of the women keeping their own stories alive and the oral histories that played a huge role in their lives.

I didn't love some things about the book too. I didn't love her depictions of Jacob or Joseph. Jacob was a totally inattentive father (except to his beloved eldest sons) who couldn't even picture what his daughter looked like after she was taken away. Joseph grew up to be an insufferable arrogant jerk who Diamant projects as being gay and actually sleeping with Potiphar's wife instead of the story we all know and love from the Bible. And also, her depiction of Rebecca as this psycho, stonewalling crazy grandma-prophetess just struck me as wrong. (But I mean, maybe there's something mentioned in the Bible that makes sense of that?) I was pretty bored of the story after she cursed her father and brothers and left after the bloodbath. She goes to Egypt, bears a son of her husband who was killed, and basically sits around for years, eventually becoming a midwife and gets married again. I felt like she displayed pretty much no emotions about being taken away from her home that she'd lived in for her whole life and leaving her mothers who she adored. She literally knew her husband for like one week when she was 15 years old, and they basically just had sex the whole time, and she spent the rest of her life pining for him and not missing her family who she'd been with for forever. I mean, come on. I hated how her son drifts away from her and she becomes nothing more than a servant who happened to bear him in her womb (which, I get may be realistic to the times, but I still hated). I also hated how she accidentally runs into Joseph again as the grand vizier in Egypt. I mean, come on. That's super likely.

Overall, I thought the book was worth reading. I felt like I read the whole beginning with a sense of foreboding, waiting for things to get really bad, and it kind of ruined my enjoyment of the beginning (which was definitely the strongest part of the story, with the themes of feminine strength and connection). I liked how it fleshed out (fictionally) this story from a woman's perspective, which helps to give new ideas about how things may or may not have been for these people, who really did live one day a long time ago, even if I don't personally agree that they would have been that way.

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