The Book of Longings
Sue Monk Kidd’s The Book of Longings (2020) presents a beautiful, and at times raw, look at the life of women in first century Israel and Egypt. Ana, from whose first-person perspective the story unfolds, is the daughter of the local regent’s head scribe. She comes of age in a world of strict social and class roles, rigid along gender lines, in Sepphoris of Galilee in the early years of Common Era. Ana, however, receives a gift from her otherwise traditional father: the gift of literacy. She masterfully reads and writes in multiple languages by her teens (the time at which the novel opens). In foil to Ana’s tradition- and power-loving parents, her Aunt Yaltha, of whom Ana had known nothing prior, appears one day from Egypt and continues to enlarge Ana’s world view. Ana’s voice, her written word, become her prayer and her singular focus as a young woman. But unsurprisingly her family has other plans for her, and Ana’s path takes her to a crowded marketplace to meet her betrothed, a man selected by her father for his wealth and connections. In the fray of the moment, Ana connects with a young man named Jesus; here her path diverges from the life her parents envision and labor towards.
The Book of Longings presents its readers with a very human Jesus in early adulthood. We meet his family and witness his revolutionary, messianic calling. Everything the reader sees of Jesus is through Ana’s gaze, her perspective. Thus, Jesus is a lover, a man, a spouse. Even as the book leads the reader to his inevitable crucifixion and its consequent results, The Book of Longings stays on the margins of the Christian narrative as presented in the Gospels of the New Testament. Sue Monk Kidd conceives of a Jesus, a Judas, a Mary who certainly occupy their traditional roles in the Christian convention, but whose stories are more complicated, more rooted in humanity perhaps, than what the four canonical gospels portray. And, unlike the Christian narratives that focus on Christ and his disciples, The Book of Longings is Ana’s story; and it continues long after Jesus dies on the cross.
The Book of Longings takes its reader from Galilee to Egypt, back and forth, throughout its narrative arc. Sue Monk Kidd describes the library of Alexandria, a temple to Isis, and a community of spiritual believers who live apart from the rest of society. All of these historical institutions weave through Ana’s story. The Book of Longings nods to the discovery of thirteen codices buried in a jar in northern Egypt (discovered in the 1940s and known as the Nag Hammadi collection). This led me to turn to The Essential Gnostic Gospels translated and compiled by poet Alan Jacobs after finishing Monk Kidd’s novel, happily descending a literary rabbit hole as a friend and fellow reviewer calls it. Included in this anthology of gnostic writing is the poem, discovered at Nag Hammadi, called “Thunder” (also known as “The Perfect Mind”) from which Sue Monk Kidd draws one of the epigraphs for The Book of Longings. Even beyond the epigraph, this poem is clearly fundamental to the conception of Ana’s character in The Book of Longings; Jesus’ pet name for Ana in the book is “Little Thunder” and at one point Ana pens an ode to Sophia, “Wisdom,” female consort of God in the gnostic tradition. Even the final scene of the book alludes to these gnostic writings. The paradoxical “I Am” style of the gnostic poem “Thunder,” is at once hypnotic and breathtaking, and I can see why Sue Monk Kidd envisioned a fierce and brave female creator for such a hymn. In my years at University—all those years ago—I read excerpts from some Gnostic Gospels, particularly that of Thomas. But in sitting down with Jacobs’s collection, I found a new vision of Judas and Mary Magdalene (in their self-titled gospels), from those presented in the canonical gospels. Again, I saw evidence that Sue Monk Kidd drew her characters and the fiction she weaves in The Book of Longings from these ancient, typically Greek texts. If you have the bandwidth, interest, and time, I recommend following up a read of this novel with some time spent reading “Thunder” and “The Gospel of Judas” in particular.
Returning to the novel, this is a book that I imagine anyone who enjoys a good historical fiction, rooted in a specific place and time and history will appreciate. Sue Monk Kidd explores the tragedies and inequities born by the female sex, which are exacerbated by the cultural milieu in which she sets her tale. As I read, alongside an Australian “bookstagram” friend, we both were struck by the viciousness with which their families treat the women in this book; sadly, many women living in the middle east two thousand years later still face brutality at the hands of their husbands and fathers, all in the name of honor or tradition. In some ways, little has changed. Yet like some novels about contemporary Middle Eastern women, The Book of Longings investigates the ways strong women resist the patriarchy around them. Just as Judas and Jesus live revolutionary lives as agitator and messiah, so too do the resilient women in this novel; they simply do so in a different form.
Indeed, The Book of Longings overflows with female characters who find ways to hold power even at a time, and in a culture, when women had little access to such things; and even as they face one personal tragedy after another. Ana, her aunt and cousin, Chaya, and her friend Tabitha, all find revolutionary voice in their own ways. It is this optimistic perspective, this determination to survive and thrive, that I most appreciated about this novel. The notion that one must “Let life be life” repeats throughout The Book of Longings. As Ana’s beloved aunt says near the book’s conclusion: “All shall be well [. . .] I don’t mean that life won’t bring you tragedy. I only mean you will be well in spite of it. There’s a place in you that inviolate. You’ll find your way there, when you need to. And you’ll know then what I speak of” (389). This beautiful, life-affirming perspective permeates Sue Monk Kidd’s work: not that we will avoid suffering, but rather that we will come through it by finding our way to that place in which we are pure and unspoiled.
A Few Great Passages:
“’Husbands may be loathsome creatures,’ she was saying, ‘but they’re necessary. Without their protection, women are easily mistreated. Widows can even be cast out. The young ones resort to harlotry; the ones, to beggary’” (114).
“Then, on the roof, as close to the sky as I could get, I danced. My body was a reed pen. It spoke the words I couldn’t writer: I dance not for men to choose me. Nor for God. I dance for Sophia. I dance for myself” (116).
“Pay them no mind and turn the other cheek. Their hearts are boulders and their heads are straw” (151)
“[H]is sufferings didn’t harden him. It’s always a marvel when one’s pain doesn’t settle into bitterness, but brings forth kindness instead” (151).
“I think every pain in this world wants to witnessed” (173).
“No assurance, no platitude, no promise of God’s mercy. Just a stark reminder that death was part of life. She offered me nothing but a way accept whatever came—Let life be life. There was a quiet relinquishment in the words” (180).
“It is a holy of holies,’ I said. And it [the great library of Alexandria] was, but I could feel a tiny lump of anger tucked beneath my awe. A half million scrolls and codices were within these walls, and all but a handful were by men. They had written the known world” (292).
“What most sets you apart is the spirit in you that rebels and persists. It isn’t the largeness in you that matters most, it’s your passion to bring it forth” (353).
“You’ve dared so much with your words. So much that a time will come when men will try to silence them” (405).
Bibliography:
Monk Kidd, Sue. The Book of Longings. Viking: New York, 2020.
The Essential Gnostic Gospels. Translated by Alan Jacobs. Watkins Publishing: London, 2009.
