cutting for stone abraham verghese summary

(As, apparently, did whoever designed the cover: it's the worst kind of laziness to depict an 'African coastline' as if everything on that continent were interchangeable - never mind that it's a book set in cities.

And there is too unquestioning a reliance on Ryszard Kapuscinski's The Emperor Kapuscinski was himself an observer from another land, and he had his own agenda. Surely there were other procedures to choose from? It is a little strange to move major revolutions by a year or two, just to suit your plot. In fact, when I worried about anything it was for the opposite reason: when one twin becomes famous abroad for his fistula operations, it felt rather too much of an appropriation of the achievements of Reginald and Catherine Hamlin, the latter of whom was nominated for a Nobel peace prize.

Only occasionally is there a wrong note or mis-transcription from Amharic.

While I don't know Verghese personally, I know the streets and shops he evokes, the hospitals I know that his setting, seemingly so rich and strange, is real. About three-quarters of the way through, the book moves to the US - as many Ethiopians did, after the revolution that replaced the emperor with a Marxist/military regime. Verghese carefully (and sometimes rather unbelievably - he is unapologetic about coincidences) interweaves their story with that of Ethiopia's past half-century. Their father, a British surgeon called Thomas Stone, cannot bear the loss and flees, so Marion and Shiva are raised by two Indian doctors in the hospital where their parents worked both become surgeons. Their mother, a nun from Madras, does not survive the birth. Some of the best passages in all three books are those in which he reads the language of the body - its colours and betraying odours, its telltale pulses - and the emotions that obscure and interrupt that language.Ĭutting for Stone - the phrase is from the Hippocratic oath - is about twins born joined at the head, in a mission hospital in Addis Ababa half a century ago. This first novel was preceded by two non-fiction books: The Tennis Partner, about his distressing friendship with a drug addict and fellow doctor, and My Own Country, a memoir of working with Aids patients in a conservative southern US town. A braham Verghese, an Indian, grew up in Addis Ababa, has lived in Madras and various cities in America, and thus, regardless of temperament, would always have felt something of a watchful outsider.

Cutting for stone abraham verghese summary