Reading Genesis
A writer’s book, not a scholar’s; it has no footnotes. Its power lies in the particular reading it gives us of one of the world’s foundational texts ... There are some arguable points. Robinson’s depiction of law as a framework of instruction that is up to us to keep or break is extremely modern and individualistic, and doesn’t square with the enforced tribal behavior of the Mosaic code ... These are the idiosyncratic incidentals of a genuinely idiosyncratic reading. Against them, there is the tough-minded continual splendor of Robinson’s attention to Genesis’ figures in the landscape.
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Complete with narrative arc and flawed characters who are ever worthy of redemption ... The author counters a literal, religionized view of the chapter. Never forceful or pedantic, she leads readers to draw conclusions of their own, as she points to truths beyond the events depicted.
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This is the stuff of sermons—the kind I’d willingly sit through. But Robinson is also up to something that should interest her secular readers. She’s working out a poetics. In her deft hands, Genesis becomes a precursor to the novel—the domestic novel, as it happens, which is the kind she writes. Perhaps I’m making her sound self-glorifying. She’s not ... The genius of Reading Genesis lies in its collapse of the space between the holy and the mundane, the metaphysical and the physical.
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