Cutting for Stone
by Kris Pikaart
I am usually a read-at-night-after-the-kids-are-in-bed sort of person. But this book was so good that it had me saying things like, “Why don’t you go pour yourself a bowl of cereal for supper so that I can just read one more chapter.” I don’t suppose that poor parenting is a typical barometer of a book’s quality, but it sure does speak to its power to captivate. Riveting and large, Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese, would be a fantastic summer read. Warning: you might find yourself forgetting to eat or sleep while reading it.
I was set up to like this book, because I had already admired the writing of Abraham Verghese. A physician and now instructor at Stanford Medical School, Verghese has written two other books over the past decade. His first book, My Own Country, is a heart-wrenching biographical account of treating patients at the very beginning of the AIDS epidemic. His second, The Tennis Partner, chronicles Verghese’s own dying marriage and his subsequent friendship with a medical student struggling with addiction.
Cutting for Stone is Verghese’s first novel. It is a hefty book spanning many decades and several continents. The story begins is Addis Ababa, Ethiopia at a little mission hospital called “Missing” (called this because the locals couldn’t pronounce Mission). The story centers around a set of twins born to a young nun, who works at the hospital as a nurse, and a mysterious surgeon who disappears immediately after the birth. She dies in childbirth, but the twins – Siamese twins, in fact, who are separated soon after birth – survive. They are called Marion and Shiva Stone by the young Indian doctors who raise and love the boys. Their childhood at Missing is filled with love and lots of sneak peeks into the world of medicine, with which they both become enamored. Their childhood also becomes complicated by the politics of Ethiopia at the time.
Although there are so many subplots – love affairs, surgeries, flashbacks, politics, wars, educations, family – the real story of this book is the relationship between these two brothers. Marion – from whose point of view the tale is told – is bright but sort of plodding in nature. Marion loves surgery and makes his way through school and med school and residencies. Shiva, graceful, silent, and brilliant in an almost Asperger-ish way, cannot abide school and takes to following his mother around in her OB clinic instead of going. Though totally unschooled in any formal way, he learns the art of performing surgeries on women with fistulas and becomes famous for it. The two brothers – who can think each other’s thoughts and spend each night sleeping with their heads touching – have a major falling out. Marion goes to the US to escape his brother’s betrayal, a dangerous political climate, and to do his surgical residency.
A tragedy brings the brothers back together after years of silence in a stunning, dramatic way. During this time, the otherwise absent and mythical Dr. Stone – the boys’ biological father – also comes back into the boys’ lives. Revealing any more would spoil the reading for you.
Verghese is clearly a fine surgeon – one does not teach at Stanford, if not. The book is steeped in the world of medicine with its precise descriptions of a surgery and landscapes of the anatomy. While that is interesting, what is most powerful is watching two people fall deeply in love with the art and passion of medicine.
Verghese himself grew up in Addis Ababa and is intimately familiar and at home in the culture, terrain, and political history of Ethiopia. If, like me, you know several local kids adopted from there, you will find the apt descriptions of the culture and people of this region especially interesting.
These two reasons, in addition to having a plot that just bristles with interest, would make this a pretty good book. But it is truly great for another reason. A bit inconceivably, given what I just said about Verghese as a surgeon and historian, the story is written in the dreamy, mystical style of many Latin American writers, a la Gabriel García Márquez. A deep mysticism roots this book, underpinning the facts and precision of the medicine. The humans in the story are tied and connected so deeply that time and countries and even death don’t really interrupt their connectedness. Coincidental meetings between lovers and brothers and fathers don’t seem like an author’s parlor trick. Rather, they become part of the majestic trajectory of a human’s life story – free, but all of the time tied and bound by the places and family and loves surrounding it.
A word about the title. Cutting for Stone is a multivalent title – it tickles the brain the entire time you read the book. Of course, Stone is the last name of the twins – coming from the absent and mythical Dr. Stone. It also alludes to something of the action of these two boys toward each other. Abraham Verghese clarified his rationale for the title in an interview:
“There is a line in the Hippocratic Oath that says: ‘I will not cut for stone, even for patients in whom the disease is manifest.’ It stems from the days when bladder stones were epidemic, a cause of great suffering, probably from bad water and who knows what else. […] There were itinerant stonecutters – lithologists – who could cut either into the bladder or the perineum and get the stone out, but because they cleaned the knife by wiping it on their blood-stiffened surgical aprons, patients usually died of infection the next day. Hence the proscription ‘Thou shall not cut for stone.’ […] It isn’t just that the main characters have the surname Stone; I was hoping the phrase would resonate for the reader just as it does for me, and that it would have several levels of meaning in the context of the narrative.”
Give yourself the gift of a book to get lost in this summer and pick up Cutting for Stone. You might have to stick through some sections – it is so mammoth in scope that you sometimes feel like you are reading a Russian novel. Even if you are home all summer, you will love the travel through India, Ethiopia, and Brooklyn. Happy reading!
For the Kiddos
A Quiet Place
By Douglas Wood, Illustrated by Dan Andreasen
Reviewed by Daya Choudhrie, Age 8
This book is about the times when your ears get tired of hearing the same noises of where you live. It names some places that are nice and quiet where you can just relax – for example a pond or the woods. The pictures are bright and pretty paintings. The pictures go with the words. For example, if the words say, “You can go to a lake and there will be fish there,” there is a picture of fish in the lake. I like this book because it calms me down and gives me good advice, for example, that you can go to your room and cool off when you need to. From reading this book I learned that if you are tired of something, you should just go away from it and calm down and then go back and see if you can fix the problem.
