The plot of this big, dense book is fairly straightforward. This effort is both the making and the unmaking of “Cutting for Stone.” But why mention qualifications? What do qualifications matter where fine writing is concerned? Not at all, is the correct answer, and yet qualifications like Verghese’s are tribute, at the very least, to his stalwart effort. His commitment to both his professions is admirable: currently a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine, he also holds an M.F.A. His two nonfiction books, “My Own Country,” about AIDS in rural Tennessee, and “The Tennis Partner,” a moving and honest memoir of a difficult, intimate friendship, are justly celebrated. Verghese is a physician and an already accomplished author.
If he doesn’t quite manage either, he is to be admired for his ambition. Still, Verghese strives for the empathy of Anne Tyler and the scope of Dickens. It neither suggests the book’s action - as, say, “Digging to America” does - nor evokes its mood, as “Bleak House” does. Yet until the reader comes across the oath, well into the novel, the title may seem pleasing to the ear but puzzling to the mind: it tries to do too many jobs at once. Absent in body only: in spirit, Thomas’s disappearance after their birth haunts and drives this book. Those words provide an epigraph partway through Abraham Verghese’s first novel, “Cutting for Stone,” and also explain the surname of its narrator, Marion Stone, along with his twin brother, Shiva, and their father, the almost entirely absent surgeon Thomas Stone. “I will not cut for stone,” runs the text of the Hippocratic oath, “even for patients in whom the disease is manifest I will leave this operation to be performed by practitioners, specialists in this art.” Reviewed by ERICA WAGNER | The New York Times Jocelyn McClurg | USA Today ‘Cutting for Stone’ by Abraham Verghese Filled with mystical scenes and deeply felt characters - and opening a fascinating window onto the Third World -Cutting for Stone, while not perfect, is an underdog and a winner. The likely father, a British surgeon, flees upon the mother’s death, and the (now separated) baby boys are adopted by a loving Indian couple who run the hospital.
This sprawling, 50-year epic begins with a touch of alchemy: the birth of conjoined twins to an Indian nun in an Ethiopian hospital in 1954.
‘Cutting for Stone’ By Abraham Verghese (Knopf, 560 pp., $26.95)Ībraham Verghese is a doctor, an accomplished memoirist (My Own Country) and, as he proves in Cutting for Stone, something of a magician as a novelist. Fiction that takes us from Ethiopia to the suburbs
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