49 pages • 1 hour read
Sue Monk KiddThe Book of Longings
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Pages 397-407Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Pages 397-407 Summary
Yaltha welcomes Tabitha and Ana back to the commune. In the time Ana has been gone, Yaltha and her daughter have bonded. Yaltha reassures Ana that her brother is no longer interested in hounding her, that she is free now to live in the commune. Yaltha tells Ana that she and her daughter have taken the vows of the commune and that they will remain there for the rest of their days. Tabitha and Ana both promise to take the vows in the proper time. Two years pass. Ana never stops grieving for Jesus. “For nearly two years, I’d worn my grief for Jesus like a second skin” (401).
She and Tabitha thrive in the commune’s life of dedicated prayer, rigorous study, and meditation. Ana works diligently on what becomes a slender volume of original prayers, proverbs, and complex reflections she titles Thunder: Perfect Mind. In the closing reflection, she identifies herself as the wife of Jesus. When she finishes the binding, Ana, exhausted, falls into a deep sleep. She wakes and see Jesus standing across from her. She runs to him and grips his warm and callused hands. Before he disappears, he promises Ana he will always be with her. Ana, deciding it was a trick of her mind, feels nevertheless free. Jesus is no longer lost to her.
Days later, accompanied by Tabitha and Diodora, Ana carries her writings, including the codex of Thunder: Perfect Mind, all packed in large, heavy sealed jars up to the hills outside the commune. Perplexed over hearing that the zealous apostles responsible now for spreading the gospel message of her husband deny Jesus ever married, Ana has decided to bury her writings in the hopes that someone might hear her voice at a future date. As the three lower the jars into the ground and then cast dirt on top of them, the sun eases into night, and Ana understands her voice, like the thunder, like the sun, may pass. But that it lived at all, she decides, “is enough” (407). As she heads back to the commune, Ana sings quietly, “I am Ana. I was the wife of Jesus of Nazareth. I am a voice” (407).
Pages 397-407 Analysis
Ana, in the end, buries her poetry. It would seem a pessimistic close. In this spare closing section, however, the novel draws on the familiar motif of Christian resurrection. However, it applies the concept of immortality and overcoming the limitations of the immediate world not through the agency of Jesus as God but rather through Ana’s act of burying her finest work against the hope that someday the world might be better able to appreciate the voice of a strong, honest, and compelling woman. The work itself, which Ana quotes, is a work launched against the simplifications of her Jewish culture. The long poem demands that people see the world as a duality, that no one was is easy to define, that each person, man and woman, is a complex vessel of contradictory energies and impulses and that complexity alone makes every person divine. The most difficult thing for Ana to hear are the reports from her husband’s followers, all men, that deny her existence. This denial once again threatens her voice, and compels her to bury her finest work in sorrow and hope. She departs the novel, fittingly a shadow set against a dark gold sunset, singing quietly, “I am a voice” (407).
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By Sue Monk Kidd
