In Progress: The Red Tent (Completed)

Picador Publishing

I have finished reading The Red Tent by Anita Diamant and, let me simply say, I've found it to be one of the most exceptional novels I've read.  So much of this book appealed to me - Dinah's voice, her history, her life - and spoke to my reader's heart.

The Red Tent is a perfect combination of storytelling and history and, more importantly, memory.  In fact, I wouldn't hesitate to say that's one of the most important aspects of Diamant's novel:  memory.

And love.

Leading up to her journey to Egypt, Dinah's life is painfully tragic.  She's witnessed so much death, so much bloodshed, and she's endured so much pain.  However, despite her terrible losses, Dinah manages to survive and she recovers or, more accurately, discovers herself.  She regains love, which she thought lost with her first husband, which she finds with Benia, and she grows into her calling as a midwife.

Although it may sound contrived, love helps her heal.  Love for her son, love for Benia, brings her back from the brink.  Love for her dear friend, Meryt, and love for human life, her power as midwife to save the lives of mothers and children, gives her a renewed purpose.  And she has so much to tell, so much knowledge to share with those who would listen.
 
Earlier in her story, Dinah proclaims:

"You come hungry for the story that was lost.  You crave words to fill the great silence that swallowed me, and my mothers, and my grandmothers before them.  [...]  I am so grateful that you have come.  I will pour out everything inside me so you may leave this table satisfied and fortified."

Indeed, she pours out her story.  She fills that "great silence" with her memories and her knowledge, what she knows to be true and what she will pass to the next generation.  Her story, as I've mentioned in previous posts, is another link in the chain of mothers and daughters.

There's a longevity in the words of Dinah - the words that Diamant has so carefully grafted - and they linger, they live on.  By the end of the book, Dinah has gained a kind of immortality, like the lotus flower she mentions:

"Egypt loved the lotus because it never dies.  It is the same for people who are loved.  Thus can something insignificant as a name - two syllables, one high, one sweet - summon up the innumerable smiles and tears, sighs and dreams of a human life."

You can find a certain poetry in her words that makes them undeniably, irrevocably true.