The Red Tent: Thoughts and Impressions

My friend S loaned me Anita Diamant's The Red Tent the other week, and I just finished it last night, reading the 2nd half in about three hours.

I will be honest and say that I loved it.  It's not a rational feeling, but a gut-deep appreciation for the way love, birth, death and beauty is expressed in the book.  The book wounds and it rends and it grates and it sighs and shouts joyfully under the sun and the moon of all things human and female.  It's fiction, and it would be inappropriate for me to pass any judgment at all upon it's so-called "authenticity" (which so many offended, super-Christian readers complained about in their reviews).  It makes me laugh when people get so up-in-arms when a book is labeled "religious fiction" and they pick it up, believing that "religious" has to mean "Christian" or else.

People complained that it drags on and on.  One witty reviewer snidely commented that it flies, "when tossed across a room."  I usually understand the reasoning for comments like these for many books, but in the case of The Red Tent, I'm completely baffled.  I couldn't put it down, maybe because I'm a woman and strongly drawn to goddess traditions, but I'm not usually so receptive to so-called "female literature," usually rejecting it as hokey or too New Age.  I have become very masculine in my values.

I asked myself so many weird questions as I read this book, questions I've never pondered or ones I've scoffed at as barbaric and base.  What does it mean to be a parent?  A mother?  A girl?  A weaker subgroup among the strong?  Female?  Male?  My whole life, I was socialized to despise, feel dirtied by or at least be inconvenienced by my monthly cycles.  My husband, Caspian, was the one who really introduced me to the concept that it's good and natural and part of being female and should be appreciated, and this book helped to drive the power of real femininity (not masculine expressions of power by females, which are acceptable and valued by society) home to me.

When it comes to book reviews, I'm horrible at analyzing plot and literary devices and stuff like that, simply because I am such an instinctive reader and don't even pay attention to these things the first time through a book.  However, Diamant's descriptive skills entranced me.  I was enamored of Dinah's mothers, her lovers, the gritty, often barbaric, yet beautiful world she inhabited.

People nowadays fear the earth.  They separate themselves from it and entwine themselves in a glittering, false net of pop culture and fleeting, banal, unhealthy values and die in this state.  The book reminded me, once again, that the earth and time and the cycles that govern my body and the universe should not be ignored.