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#Post#: 4053--------------------------------------------------
Lancet review of Abraham Verghese's novel, THE COVENANT OF WATER
By: agate Date: June 11, 2023, 1:15 am
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From The Lancet (June 10, 2023), "A great new novel that teaches
how to be a good doctor" (a review of the novel The Covenant of
Water by Abraham Verghese, MD):
HTML https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(23)01137-6/fulltext?dgcid=raven_jbs_etoc_email
I haven't yet read this book but intend to.
#Post#: 4676--------------------------------------------------
Abraham Verghese, CUTTING FOR STONE (2009)
By: agate Date: January 12, 2025, 1:15 am
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I haven't yet read THE COVENANT OF WATER but have finished
CUTTING FOR STONE by the same author. This is a modified
version of my blogpost about it:
This rather long novel may contain more medically explicit
details than necessary for telling its story, but it is an
absorbing narrative. There are twin brothers, joined at birth,
who go through life intensely interacting with each other.
Identical twins, they have difficulty differentiating
themselves. The circumstances of their birth add to the
complexity: A nun who concealed her pregnancy until the onset of
labor gave birth to them but died in childbirth, and the
presumptive father of the child, a physician at the
establishment where the nun had been his assistant, promptly
vanished from the scene, never to reappear in his sons' lives
until one of them finds him.
Marion, the son who tells the story, comes across as
intelligent, altruistic, and compassionate until near the end
of the story, and then we see a darker side to him: he announces
his presence to the long-lost father by gaining entrance
illegally to the father's residence and then rummaging through
everything in it, leaving the vandalism for the father to
discover on his return. He also renews his acquaintance with a
woman with whom he had grown up in a near-brother-sister
relationship--and for some inexplicable reason violates her
sexually. It isn't stated very explicitly but the description
makes it clear that it was a violation.
There could have been reasons: he was justifiably very angry at
her, but does anger at any level ever justify a sexual
violation? And does it really matter that, in effect, he "pays"
for this by nearly dying of the hepatitis he contracts from the
encounter?
Things get very suspenseful and dramatic towards the end, but I
couldn't help wondering how Marion could have fooled me for so
long. Or maybe the reader is expected to assume that men just
can't control themselves sometimes, and that poor Marion was one
such man. Another instance of a man out of control in the novel
is the encounter between Marion's father and the nun where he
impregnated her, apparently, though not much information is
provided about that encounter.
Much of the story takes place in Ethiopia during the reign of
Haile Selassie, and there is considerable detail about
conditions there at the time. Clearly the author, who is a
doctor, knows whereof he speaks, although he has altered some
historical facts for the purposes of his novel--a questionable
practice in the opinion of some reviewers.
The book was well worth reading.
Edited to add: This post has been slightly modified to change a
censored word to a more acceptable term. There are ways around
the censorship here but there might be a wait of days before
that change could be made.
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