Club Protocol Release: Cutting for Stone KINDLE MOBI by Abraham Verghese H.A

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (2010)
One might envy Abraham Verghese, who makes the transition from essayist to novelist look easier than it should be. Cutting for Stone will remind readers of the fiction of Salman Rushdie, John Irving (The Cider House Rules), and Ha Jin (A Free Life); it seems likely that the author knows the work of doctor and essayist Richard Selzer (Letters to a Young Doctor) as well. Verghese's first novel is an expansive story well told. If he has a weakness as a novelist, though, as the New York Times Book Review points out, it is a surplus of passion for his characters and an unwillingness to let the smallest detail go unremarked. ("Only the telling can heal the rift that separates my brother and me," Marion writes, and that single sentence justifies Verghese's motivation.) Would that all writers suffered for paying the same attention to their craft.

Lauded for his sensitive memoir (My Own Country) about his time as a doctor in eastern Tennessee at the onset of the AIDS epidemic in the 80s, Verghese turns his formidable talents to fiction, mining his own life and experiences in a magnificent, sweeping novel that moves from India to Ethiopia to an inner-city hospital in New York City over decades and generations. Sister Mary Joseph Praise, a devout young nun, leaves the south Indian state of Kerala in 1947 for a missionary post in Yemen. During the arduous sea voyage, she saves the life of an English doctor bound for Ethiopia, Thomas Stone, who becomes a key player in her destiny when they meet up again at Missing Hospital in Addis Ababa. Seven years later, Sister Praise dies birthing twin boys: Shiva and Marion, the latter narrating his own and his brothers long, dramatic, biblical story set against the backdrop of political turmoil in Ethiopia, the life of the hospital compound in which they grow up and the love story of their adopted parents, both doctors at Missing. The boys become doctors as well and Vergheses weaving of the practice of medicine into the narrative is fascinating even as the story bobs and weaves with the power and coincidences of the best 19th-century novel.

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