The recently-read books are piling up and inducing guilt, so I'm just going to post a quick couple of thoughts about Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. We read this for our book club, suggested by one of our members whose family is peppered with medical professionals. Verghese is himself a doctor, and shares a similar background as his main character, Marion Stone, a child of Indian and British descent who is born and raised in Ethiopia and immigrates to the United States to complete his medical training. The other details of Marion's life are, one hopes, a little more fantastical than Verghese's.
Marion and his twin brother, Shiva, are born to an Indian nun at Missing Hospital, where she and their supposed father, the surgeon Thomas Stone, both worked. The twins are connected at the head, and their traumatic labor causes the death of their mother. Stone, unable to cope, flees Ethiopia. And yes, I just spent a whole post complaining about bildungsromane, but this book is going to have to make me hedge a little. While a large portion of the novel is concerned with Marion's coming-of-age, Marion always seems to be looking back on his childhood in a believable way, and Verghese does not particularly attempt to make Marion's voice the voice of a child. Additionally, Verghese establishes the other, adult, characters in such a compelling and warm way that Marion's voice never really grates. Hema, the twin's adoptive mother, and Ghosh, their stand-in father, carry a large portion of the first half of the book with their combination of strength and limitations. Hema and Ghosh are both also doctors, and somewhat reluctant surgeons, so the whole book is infused with the air of the hospital.
We discussed in our book club the many "coincidences" and fantastic plot twists, but decided that in some way the book makes you buy into the possibility of such happenings. Perhaps the emphasis on science and medicine actually helps this buyability--Marion is not an irrational man, so his retelling of the story, filled though it might be with improbabilities, seems trustworthy and reasonable.
Though I had a hard time getting away from the prejudice that Verghese writes well "for a doctor," I think it would be more just to say that Verghese writes well, period. His descriptions of Ethiopia and the life of the hospitals both at Missing and in New York are revealing and often beautiful, and most of his characters are finely drawn. The exception to this, I would say, is the character of Genet, Marion's love obsession throughout the book. Verghese never really seems to fully access insight into her motivations or Marion's attraction to her.
These thoughts are getting longer than originally intended, but, hey, this is a long book. More reviews to come soon!
