6/22/2023 0 Comments Cutting for stone authorVerghese carefully (and sometimes rather unbelievably - he is unapologetic about coincidences) interweaves their story with that of Ethiopia's past half-century. Their father, a British surgeon called Thomas Stone, cannot bear the loss and flees, so Marion and Shiva are raised by two Indian doctors in the hospital where their parents worked both become surgeons. Their mother, a nun from Madras, does not survive the birth. Some of the best passages in all three books are those in which he reads the language of the body - its colours and betraying odours, its telltale pulses - and the emotions that obscure and interrupt that language.Ĭutting for Stone - the phrase is from the Hippocratic oath - is about twins born joined at the head, in a mission hospital in Addis Ababa half a century ago. This first novel was preceded by two non-fiction books: The Tennis Partner, about his distressing friendship with a drug addict and fellow doctor, and My Own Country, a memoir of working with Aids patients in a conservative southern US town. A braham Verghese, an Indian, grew up in Addis Ababa, has lived in Madras and various cities in America, and thus, regardless of temperament, would always have felt something of a watchful outsider.
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