560 pages; 23 hours, 54 minutes
Read by Sunil Malhotra
Published February 2009 by Knopf
Publisher's Summary:
Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s death in childbirth 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. Yet it will be love, not politics—their passion for the same woman—that will tear them apart and force Marion, fresh out of medical school, to flee his homeland. He makes his way to America, finding refuge in his work as an intern at an underfunded, overcrowded New York City hospital. When the past catches up to him—nearly destroying him—Marion must entrust his life to the two men he thought he trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him.
My Thoughts:
I bought a paperback copy of this book something like ten years (or more) ago but it has long languished on my bookshelves because of its length. It felt intimidating, as so many big books do. But when a friend from work strongly recommended it for perhaps the third or fourth time, I knew it was time to get to it.
I figured a read/listen combination was the best route to go so I requested the audiobook from the library. But at nearly 24 hours long, there was no way I was getting this one listened to in 14 days. It never occurred to me that it would be weeks and weeks before I would be able to check it out a second time to finish it. When that turned out to be the case, I went to pull the paperback off my shelves...only to find it gone. I assumed that I had purged it, in light of the fact that I had requested it in audio format. I resigned myself to waiting for the book. And then, when I randomly decided to reorganize my books one day, I found it, shoved down behind other books. I had something like 200 pages left to read and put it on my bookshelf to read in bed at night. Except I didn't. I either went to bed too late to read or had a library book I needed to finish up and read that instead. So it was weeks before I got back to it, other than to read a few pages at a time. I do not recommend this as a good way to read a book; it's certainly not the way I intended to read/listen to this one when I started.
In breaking the book up, I can't help but feel that my overall impression of the book suffered. What stuck with me when I got back to the book was not the emotional attachment I had formed for Marion, but rather a feeling that there was entirely too much medical detail, not enough connection to Shiva, and the feeling that the reconnection Marion makes late in the book with a woman he'd spent his life in love with was lacking.
The Guardian has this to say about the book:
"This is a book narrated by a surgeon, and structured as a surgeon might structure it: after the body has been cut open and explored everything is returned to its place and carefully sutured up - which is not, in the end, how life actually works."
Which is to say that Verghese chooses to reveal quite a lot about several of the characters well into the book, in time to bring the story to its climax; but, perhaps, too late for the reader to remain connected emotionally. It pulled me out of the story, as did all of the medical detail.
But, again, I will never know how this all might have felt if I had read this one straight through. I never stopped caring what happened to Marion and I was glad that he has some resolution to things that had troubled him all of his life.
I heard Verghese speak earlier in the year about his most recent novel. He is a wise and thoughtful speaker and I felt compelled to buy his book and read it. I did. I liked it, but I didn't love it as much as I had thought I would. Still, he is a brilliant speaker.
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