The use of the present tense to talk about the past gives the writing an immersive and universal quality, invoking the oral storytelling tradition of India. Some set pieces, such as when the special child, Baby Mol, dances to announce the onset of the monsoons, or Big Ammachi’s last night as she moves seamlessly through her home, are moving and memorable. The plot turns on climate catastrophes, diseases and accidents, punctuating the novel’s 10 sections, each calamity tragic, riveting and pivotal to the story. The Covenant of Water, published 14 years later, has the aspirations of an epic a saga of births, deaths and everything in between happening in cycles. Verghese’s debut novel, Cutting for Stone, was widely praised and stayed on the New York Times bestseller charts for more than two years. The sweeping intergenerational scope that makes this novel such a feat is also its greatest risk He writes in meticulous detail about the bountiful nature (“a child’s fantasy of rivulets and canals, a latticework of lakes and lagoons, a maze of backwaters and bottle-green lotus ponds’”), the intricate rituals of everyday life (“ seeds the leftover milk with a fleck of that day’s yoghurt, covers it with a cloth, and moves it to a cool spot”), and the rigours of medical study (“six essays to judge everything I learned over 13,000 hours”). Verghese was born in Ethiopia to Indian parents from Kerala, going on to practise as a physician and a professor of medicine in America. The primary allegiance of the novel is to the land and the lives it sustains (“he falls into a peaceful slumber… that can only happen… on Parambil soil and in God’s Own Country”). Threaded through the novel are historic events – Indian soldiers fight for the British in the world wars India gains independence the newspaper then the radio then a post office arrives the state of Kerala is formed the communists win elections the Naxalite revolution runs rampant. The two stories dovetail only towards the end, “like a river linking people upstream with those below”. In parallel, there is another story, of Digby Kilgour, a young Scottish doctor who travels from Glasgow to Madras to join the Indian medical service during colonial times.
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