Cutting for Stone (Vintage) Review
In my rather long life I have read scores of "medical" novels and stories -- creative fiction by doctors, about doctors. One or two helped to reinforce my schoolboy decision 75 years ago to become a doctor myself. Several deserve to be called Literature. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese is literature. Even before I finished reading it, I elevated it to the highest pinnacle among literary works by and about doctors and matters medical. It's an intricately plotted work set mainly in Addis Ababa then in New York about complex, believable characters, doctors who were well trained in Madras or Edinburgh, and found their way to Addis Ababa, where the next generation -- offspring of two characters who disappear early from the scene, one of them dead, but leaving indelible imprints on the narrator and his twin brother - grow up. There are graphic but not stomach-churning accounts of surgical and obstetric procedures, and vivid descriptions of everyday life in the exotic setting of Addis Ababa. It's colourful, gripping, realistic with a hint of magic realism, wise, and beautifully written. Verghese has written short stories and articles for New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and other magazines, and two previous books, one of which I've read, about his experience with HIV/AIDS in a small Tennesee city when he was young doctor, and saw how this disease exposed the local people's weaknesses and strengths. He is a professor of medicine and medical humanities at Stanford University school of medicine where he teaches students (I envy those students!) and is able to pursue his career as a writer. This is a book to read, to own and reread.
It isn't often that a book and its characters continue to haunt my consciousness after I've finished the final chapter. Of course it's the reason some books become classics, the people who inhabit the book really seem to exist. They are multifaceted. Think of Leopold Bloom, Anna and Vronsky, Elizabeth Bennet, Billy Prior, Shakespeare's vividly realized Rosiland, Lear, and a host of others; Charles Dickens's crowded city of all kinds of folk with oddly apt names like Scrooge and Pickwick, recall Huckleberry Finn, and many others who come to life on the page. It's one reason these works are classics. This is another to add to the list. Long after I finished reading it, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, Marion Stone, his twin brother Shiva, Ghosh the dedicated internal medicine specialist turned surgeon, Hema, Genet, and others who inhabit Cutting for Stone, live on in my head. The book ends in high drama close to melodrama and a surgical feat that strains credibility but is nonetheless possible, maybe has even been performed by now; by the time you get to the end you can believe it really happened, feel for the twin who lived and the enigmatic one who did not. That's why I think this book will become a classic; and I hope Abraham Verghese will write more like this one.
John M Last, MD, Ottawa, Canada
Cutting for Stone (Vintage) Feature
- ISBN13: 9780375714368
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Cutting for Stone (Vintage) Overview
Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother’s death and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution.
Moving from Addis Ababa to New York City and back again, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles—and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined.
Cutting for Stone (Vintage) Specifications
Amazon Exclusive: John Irving Reviews Cutting for Stone
John Irving has been nominated for a National Book Award three times--winning once, in 1980, for the novel The World According to Garp. In 1992, Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. In 2000, he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules--a film with seven Academy Award nominations. Read his exclusive Amazon guest review of Cutting for Stone:
That Abraham Verghese is a doctor and a writer is already established; the miracle of this novel is how organically the two are entwined. I’ve not read a novel wherein medicine, the practice of it, is made as germane to the storytelling process, to the overall narrative, as the author manages to make it happen here. The medical detail is stunning, but it never overwhelms the humane and narrative aspects of this moving and ambitious novel. This is a first-person narration where the first-person voice appears to disappear, but never entirely; only in the beginning are we aware that the voice addressing us is speaking from the womb! And what terrific characters--even the most minor players are given a full history. There is also a sense of great foreboding; by the midpoint of the story, one dreads what will further befall these characters. The foreshadowing is present in the chapter titles, too--‘The School of Suffering’ not least among them! Cutting for Stone is a remarkable achievement.--John Irving
(Photo © Maki Galimberti)
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