“Since we are all mortal, none of us will experience love without also experiencing loss. This book has done what no other has for me in recent years: it has renewed my faith in the redemptive power of love, the need to give and get it unstintingly, to hold nothing back, settle for nothing less, because when flesh and being and even life fall away, love endures. This book is proof.”
The book being reviewed was Diane Ackerman’s One Hundred Names for Love. The reviewer: Abraham Verghese. Verghese’s novel Cutting for Stone has been on the print paperback bestseller list for 64 weeks and the e-bestseller list for 12. The latter number probably corresponds to the number of weeks the Times has had an e-bestseller list. At least one person kept urging me to read Cutting for Stone. I had enjoyed his nonfiction pieces in the New Yorker some time back, so I had no particular resistance to the idea of reading his novel, but every time I read the little squib about it—“Twin brothers, conjoined at birth and then separated, grow up amid the political turmoil of Ethiopia”—I just wasn’t moved to seek out a copy. Its bestsellerhood gave me a bit of pause as well. Not infrequently is there a book that the rest of civilization appears to have bought and loved that I and a few friends are simply unable to appreciate (Reading Lolita in Tehran comes to mind). Thankfully, my resistance eventually melted away, and I am here to say that Cutting for Stone is one of the best books I have read in quite a while. Saying it is about “two brothers…” is, as the cliché goes, like saying Moby Dick is about a whale. The quote I began with gives you an idea of the depth of feeling Verghese is capable of. Yes, the book is about two brothers, but actually quite a bit of the action takes place before they are born. The story takes in the entire community of people who work at a charity hospital in Ethiopia. The vividly drawn characters are of different nationalities and temperaments. Their common goal is to give medical help to the poor, but the intensity of their setting leads, inevitably, to intense emotions and relationships. Which have consequences, like the aforementioned twin boys. Enough said without spoilers. Just read it. This is one of those times that the masses are right in terms of the book they have bought and keep buying.
I’ve got hold of Verghese’s two memoirs and am savoring the thought of curling up with them. A friend says that they give insight into some of the background for the novel.