Cutting for Stone: A novel
by Abraham Verghese
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Book Reviews of Cutting for Stone: A novel
Book Review: Taken prisoner by this book
Summary: 5 Stars
This book kept me captive in my own home for a weekend.
It was impossible not to become emotionally engaged with the characters, both major and minor. While reading Cutting for Stone, there were times I laughed out loud, sucked in my breath in shock (and then sometimes in guilty laughter), teared up in sadness or sentimentality, or smiled. The connection to Ghosh, especially, feels palpable even now.
A Ghoshism: Travel expands the mind and loosens the bowels.
Sometimes I had tears because of the choreography of Verghese's language, whether, depending on the passage and the context, it was due to its elegance or simplicity or picture-making.
Verghese devoted 3/4 of a page to Almaz' breast from the perspective of the toddler heroes. A short story in itself!
Just the page before, he described Almaz' cooking, which I excerpt here: "... Mustard seeds explode in the hot oil. She holds a lid over the pan to fend off the missiles. Rat-a-tat! like hail on a tin roof. She adds the cumin seeds, which sizzle, darken, and crackle. A dry, fragrant smoke chases out the mustard scent. Only then are the onions added, handfuls of them, and now the sound is that of life being spawned in a primordial fire."
A story from Ghosh, while he taught another doctor how to do a vasectomy: "Ghosh had learned the technique of vasectomy as an intern, and he learned directly from Jhaver in India, whom he spoke of as 'the maestro of male nut clipping who is personally responsible for millions of people not being here.' "
Verghese uses a song, Tizita (Memory), to frame the experience of Ethiopian immigrants to other countries, especially the U.S. When he leaves Ethiopia for the U.S., he takes an old cassette tape of this song with him (along with Aqualung). He knows that when his tape wears out, he "will easily find other recordings of Tizita. They [Ethiopian immigrants to the U.S.] are eager to share, to thrust that song in my hands ... it explains how they were brilliant at home... Getachew Kassa's slow version of Tizita, ... Mahmoud Ahmed, Aster Aweke, Teddy Afro ... every Ethiopian artist records a Tizita. They record it in Addis Ababa, but also in Khartoum ... and of course in Rome, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Dallas, Boston, and New York. Tizita is the heart's anthem, the lament of the diaspora, reverberating up and down Eighteenth Street in the Adams Morgan section of Washington, D.C. where it pours out from Fasika's, Addis Ababa, Meskerem, Red Sea, and other Ethiopian eateries ... There is a fast Tizita, a slow Tizita, an instrumental Tizita, a short and a long Tizita,... ."
Ghosh on his milk and honey enema recipe: "Does it work? Let me put it this way: if the patient happens to be drinking a whiskey and soda, it'll suck the glass right out of his hand."
Oh, what else can I say about this book? Many themes - of mothers and fathers; of the good and the evil in each of us; of destiny; of class; of ethnicity/nationality; and of love, of course.
B.C. Ghandi on New York City: "Mumbai Lite."
Rosina on her lover's wife: "You call that harlot his wife? That woman's legs swing open when a breeze comes through the door."
If I had to compare Verghese's writing with other authors, I'd say it had notes of John Irving and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Of the latter, Cutting for Stone has the aura of magical realism, but without the actual magic, although certainly prayer and faith play roles here. Of the former, Cutting for Stone touches on themes of mothering and fathering in ways not unlike Irving does in his books, most fully in Prayer for Owen Meany. A favorite excerpt from Marquez' 100 Years of Solitude that came to my mind while reading Cutting for Stone: "The Italian, whose patent leather curls aroused in girls an irrepressible need to sigh ... "
There are some shocking things in this book, some of which I'm still thinking on. The author's take on how hospitals in the urban core provide a profitable source of young, healthy organs for transplants to the "mecca hospitals" - for patients with insurance, for one.
This is a book I'm sure I will re-read.
Book Review: Truly THE book of Winter 2009
Summary: 5 Stars
I've been telling everybody to read this superb novel from Abraham Verghese. It is refreshing on every level --- from the setting (Ethiopia) to its characters (Indian medical workers, twin boys borne of a nun) to a complex web of storylines that covers every emotional base. This is one of those books you don't want to see end and that will leave you hungry for more.
Shiva and Marion Stone are identical twins. In the womb, they were joined by a small "stalk" at the head, but during a rather traumatic birth this physical tie is severed, leaving behind an intimate relationship unique to such siblings. In fact, for many years, when sharing a crib or bed, they sleep with their heads just touching, perhaps in the place where the long-gone bond once existed. Their mother, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, is a surgical nurse whose skills in the theatre are mythic. The surgeon (and presumed father of the boys) with whom she worked as closely as though their four hands moved with one thought is Dr. Thomas Stone. The Sister and the Doctor's first encounter is as shipmates bound for medical service in Ethiopia, a meeting filled with portent as Sister Mary Joseph singlehandedly saves Stone's life on the voyage.
By different routes, both Sister Mary Joseph and Stone end up at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa, locally known as the Missing Hospital --- a mispronunciation of mission. Throughout the book, the political unrest and upheaval of Ethiopia is a constant backdrop. At times, the violence outside their gates even intrudes upon the grounds of the hospital disrupting its humanitarian objectives.
Shiva and Marion are raised by Hema and Ghosh, two of the hospital's other doctors, both of whom come into their own throughout the course of the book. The rest of the hospital's community --- the Matron, various nurses and household workers --- also play a role in their upbringing, helping to fill the void left by both their departed and deceased parents. Living within this environment and under the long shadows of their legendary parents, both boys discover great yet completely diverse strengths in the world of medicine in which they reside.
As the years pass, Marion follows his father's footsteps into surgery and eventually to America, where we learn a lot about the life of foreign medical students brought to this country to finish their studies and to serve as affordable health care providers for our nation's many lower-income medical facilities. Shiva remains in Ethiopia where he assists Hema in both national and world-wide campaigns to better women's reproductive health. While both boys have much experience with life and death decisions --- from their birth, to living in a war zone, to tending third world patients for whom every day can be just such a battle --- the book's climax is reached when one more life or death situation is placed before them.
It is impossible to fully explore the incredible depth of CUTTING FOR STONE within a few paragraphs. Each character is so fully developed from start to finish that the reader becomes deeply involved with each and every one. Verghese's skill at intertwining so many stories is awesome and prohibits simple description of the novel as a whole. Suffice it to say that it is deserving of every rave review, every critic's recommendation and my feeling that it is truly THE book of Winter 2009. This is the book you need to put at the top of your reading list right now.
--- Reviewed by Jamie Layton
Book Review: Medical Humanity
Summary: 5 Stars
Cutting for Stone: A novel
I must confess at the begining of this critique that I have much in common with the author, I am a physician and I was trained in India and later in the United States as he was.I can thus identify with many of the experiences of his characters.
Abhi Ghosh the adoptive father of the main character Marion Praise Stone epitomises physicians trained the "British Way" where empathy and observation serve well in times of cost constraint and benefit the patients more than expensive diagnostic devices.
Verghese through this fictional character details the wonders of clinical medicine where the touching of and listening to the patient is painted as a verbal portrait that is so real that the reader is a silent spectator in an examining room.
For the reader without a medical background some of these portrayals will be difficult to understand but for physicians they are brilliant literary pictures that consummate the art and science of medicine and should be required reading for every doctor in the making.
Marion Stone is the narrator of the novel,his life experiences together with those of his identical twin Shiva expose the conflicts that middle class Indian adolescents face. I refer to these characters as Indian despite the locale of the early chapters of the novel, Ethiopia as their experiences were those of many young Indians. The novel by describing these experiences details the conflicts that young Indians face while trying to balance their adolescent sexuality with demands that they climb to intellectual heights that few of their Western peers would reach. Marion cloaks his animal lusts with a blanket of learning while Shiva lets them loose and in so doing captures his creative instincts, instincts that Marion represses.
While describing the formative years of his characters Verghese creates as a back ground Ethiopia and Addis Ababa,a background so vivid that the reader can almost smell the coal fires and taste the injera over which they are cooked while visuallising the beauty of the mountains framing this locale.
The experiences of the fledgling physician Marion Stone once he reaches America are those all "foreign" physicians who travelled the "Cowpath to America" (Verghese's description in an opinion piece in the New Yorker of such experiences).He collects the tears shed by their grieving parents as they parted with their children, his novel keeps warm the tears of his mother Hema and for me evoke memories of similar tears shed by my parents that fuelled my passage to this country.
The indignites heaped on these foreign physicians is alluded to in passing but in the end Verghese also lights the pyre that cremates these slights in his description of their successes and their contributions to American medicine. I wonder if this funeral pyre was fuelled by the cowdung that they trod?
My only criticism of the novel is the portrayal of his birth father Thomas Stone and the woman Genet that Marion Stone loved but was not loved in return. Early portrayals of these charachters were brilliant but their later appearances were a little exagerrated.
I read this novel on my Kindle I will never expunge it from the memort of this device.
Verghese little realizes that in this brilliant literary he achieved what few other writers have a sharing of himself with his reader.
Book Review: A journey of life well worth the ticket!
Summary: 5 Stars
Dr.Verghese gets the 'cut' just right and into the heart of his reader in this poignant family saga of life, loss, dreams, hope, trust, and deceit.
And when the novel ends and the anesthesia wears off...the reader is left far richer and in awe of the profound density of the characters in this novel... then grieves to be with them again.
Narrating the story is Marion, a conjoined twin with Shiva, his complicated and intricately linked other half. They are successfully separated at birth and both eventually grow strong and healthy....but they are at their very core much different.
There is Marion, well-adjusted, polite, intelligent and loyal...Shiva is mostly withdrawn, sensitive, genius-like... perhaps a sufferer of Asperger's Syndrome or victim of the trauma he suffered to his head during the agonizing ordeal of his stressful birth. Then there is Marion-Shiva...which Marion calls them often as they appear to intuit each other's thoughts and actions frequently.
"According to Shiva, life is in the end about fixing holes. Shiva didn't speak in metaphors. fixing holes is precisely what he did. Still, it's an apt metaphor for our profession. But there's another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family. Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation."
And from Marion..."I chose the specialty of surgery because of Matron, that steady presence during my boyhood and adolescence. 'What is the hardest thing you can possibly do?' she said when I went to her for advice on the darkest day of the first half of my life.
I squirmed. How easily Matron probed the gap between ambition and expediency. 'Why must I do what is hardest?'
'Because, Marion, you are an instrument of God. Don't leave the instrument sitting in its case my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why settle for 'Three Blind Mice' when you can play the 'Gloria'?
'But, Matron, I can't dream of playing Bach...I couldn't read music.
'No, Marion,' she said her gaze soft...'No, not Bach's 'Gloria'. Yours! Your 'Gloria' lives within you.
The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you."
If you enjoy powerful prose enriched with medical descriptions so lucid that you feel like an attending physician in the room, this novel will transport you into the beautiful lush gardens and incredible hardships of Ethiopia and on to America in the arms of a highly skilled author and doctor. You will learn things you may have never imagined!
"Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that see the corpse caught under your wheel."
Book Review: Cutting to the quick
Summary: 5 Stars
I have to start by clearing up the confusion I had with Abraham Verghese's title, "Cutting for Stone." As the book mentions several times but never precisely explains, the reference is to the Hippocratic Oath, "I will not cut for stone." However I had to look it up in Wikipedia to find the meaning, which is probably apparent to medical professionals. It was a prohibition from operating on stones, or calcified deposits, in the kidney or bladder. The ancient Greeks apparently thought surgeons should leave this menial procedure to barbers. The modern meaning seems to be that doctors should recognize they can't specialize in all areas. But I'd say closer to the original intent, and perhaps more relevant to today's medicine, would be: "I won't perform treatments just for the sake of making money."
Okay, I got that off my chest!
The title has at least a double meaning. The story flows from the unlikely and surprising conception of a pair of twins by an English surgeon, Thomas Stone, and an Indian-born nun, Sister Mary Praise, in Ethiopia in the mid-twentieth century. The story is narrated by one of the twins, Marion, who eventually becomes a surgeon himself.
Verghese is likewise a practicing surgeon, now living in the U.S., who grew up in Ethiopia. His account seems autobiographical, but much of it is invented, as he explains in detail in his Acknowledgments.
If I say too much about this book, I'll have to throw in a lot of spoilers, and suspense has its delicious rewards in this leisurely paced plot. So I won't. Suffice it to say, I believe your patience with Verghese will be rewarded.
I heard him speak at a book signing at an Ethiopian restaurant in Los Angeles, and he mentioned that he admired W. Somerset Maugham. This book does remind me of "Cakes and Ale," in more ways than one, including the crafting of its sentences. (Maugham also studied medicine.) It's not the page-turning, plain-vanilla, cliffhanger prose of Tom Clancy or Dan Brown. It's thoughtful, colorful, and literary. Slow down and enjoy it.
This novel is about family, community, betrayal, parental love and estrangement, sibling bonding and rivalry, personal bravery, not-so-uncommon acts of kindness, the heroic practice of medicine, suffering and compassion--and irony.
Lots of irony.
Cutting for Stone is selling well, so lots of other people must think it's worthwhile. The story doesn't read like a movie plot, but neither does The English Patient. Yes, this book is that big--in its scope and its ambitions, and in the magnitude of its achievement.