The Book of Longings

The brief time Ana spends in Alexandria, just over two years, centers on two contrasting spaces, the magnificent library in the city, recognized now as the most significant repository of documents in Antiquity, and the humble commune just outside the city where the Therapeutae live.

The two sites could not be more opposite. The library, where Ana visits and then works for a time, is a monument to centuries of male domination; Ana concedes this point during her first visit as she wanders about the shelves stacked with a treasury of collected scrolls and notes that the record of human history contained in the scrolls is from almost entirely male writers: “A half million scrolls and codices were within these walls, and all but a handful were by men” (292). Even the library grounds, studded with towering obelisks, are monuments to the penis, Yaltha tells Ana. Yaltha’s brother further underscores the patriarchal environment of Alexandria. He is meanspirited, cold hearted, and duplicitous. Fearing his own actions from the past will come to light once Ana begins her diligent search into the city’s records, he threatens Yaltha with arrest. If Ana departs Nazareth in the hopes of finding herself and finding the freedom Yaltha long extolled about Egypt, the oppression she witnesses in Alexandria suggest otherwise. Much like her husband heading into the dangerous world of Jerusalem, Ana finds herself in a shadowy world where few can be relied on, where everyone lies, where trust is for sale, and where grudges simmer for decades. It is exactly the world of men, the world that Jesus’s message of compassion and love would upend. The city’s magnificence initially transfixes Ana, including its opulence and its stunning vistas. An aspiring writer, she admires the vaulted rooms of the library. Only gradually however does the city reveal its darker side. Ana cannot find her voice in the city.

The reunion between Yaltha and her estranged daughter provides the novel its tipping point, a moment of raw human relationship, specifically the role of mothers. Mary, Jesus’s mother, is difficult to gauge as a mother because so much about her character exists in her role in the Incarnation. Ana’s own mother is a festering presence unwilling and unable to accord her daughter the freedom she was herself denied. For Ana, motherhood is a lost moment, a tender grief that still disturbs her heart. This changes when Yaltha works up the courage to reunite with her daughter Diodora. The novel denies the reunion any unearned, easy happy ending. The two women will now begin to work on defining their relationship, beginning the work of building trust and earning love through honesty and communication. In a novel centered on the emerging definition of Ana as a writer rather than as a mother, in the story of Yaltha the novel depicts the struggle of women within a patriarchal culture to maintain the dignity and integrity of motherhood itself.

Under threat from Yaltha’s brother, Ana and Yaltha leave the city with its claustrophobic sense of male oppression and relocate to the commune outside the city run by the Therapeutae. But the women, dedicated to the study of the God Sophia, don’t offer the two a simple escape. Skepsis, the wizened director of the commune with “piercing gold-brown eyes” (320), cautions the two the day they arrive that the commune isn’t meant to provide sanctuary. The women are not running from but working toward. Those women who commit to the lifestyle do so because of a profound sense of the importance of the contemplative life. “Those who dwell here,” she says, “do so out of love of a quiet, contemplative life” (321). Ana responds favorably to the life: the prayer services, the singing, the long periods of study and composition. Here at last Ana is free to find her voice. She begins to draft the work that “was burning a hole in [her] heart” (334). It is the work that will become “The Thunder.”

Ana progresses into that complicated work. She explores the duality of human nature and suggests that insight and clear sight are not the same thing. She argues that the world is a complicated paradox, even as she labors lovingly over each line of her hymn, the world will not stay away. The letter from Judas ends her solitude and reminds Ana that contemplation is a moment’s stay against the real world. She knows she must return to Jerusalem. Judas’s letter tells her of her husband’s growing threat to the Roman government and his increasing vulnerable position as he refuses to calm his message of the immanent restoration of God’s kingdom and his role as the self-proclaimed son of God. She departs the commune with Yaltha echoing the words of her husband when three years earlier she departed Nazareth, “[I knew] that there was a largeness in you. I knew you possessed a generosity of abilities that comes rarely into the world” (353). That she secures her passage by stowing away in a coffin suggests that she is ready now for her own resurrection even as she heads into the turbulent world of Jerusalem.