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Cutting for Stone: A novel Hardcover – Deckle Edge, February 3, 2009

by Abraham Verghese (Author)

4,051 customer reviews

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A sweeping, emotionally riveting first novel—an enthralling family saga of Africa and America, doctors and patients, exile and home.

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.

An unforgettable journey into one man’s remarkable life, and an epic story about the power, intimacy, and curious beauty of the work of healing others.

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Exclusive: John Irving Reviews Cutting for Stone

John Irving has been nominated for a National Book Award three times--winning once, in 1980, for the novel The World According to Garp. In 1992, Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. In 2000, he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules--a film with seven Academy Award nominations. Read his exclusive Amazon guest review of Cutting for Stone:

That Abraham Verghese is a doctor and a writer is already established; the miracle of this novel is how organically the two are entwined. I’ve not read a novel wherein medicine, the practice of it, is made as germane to the storytelling process, to the overall narrative, as the author manages to make it happen here. The medical detail is stunning, but it never overwhelms the humane and narrative aspects of this moving and ambitious novel. This is a first-person narration where the first-person voice appears to disappear, but never entirely; only in the beginning are we aware that the voice addressing us is speaking from the womb! And what terrific characters--even the most minor players are given a full history. There is also a sense of great foreboding; by the midpoint of the story, one dreads what will further befall these characters. The foreshadowing is present in the chapter titles, too--‘The School of Suffering’ not least among them! Cutting for Stone is a remarkable achievement.--John Irving

(Photo © Maki Galimberti)

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Lauded for his sensitive memoir (My Own Country) about his time as a doctor in eastern Tennessee at the onset of the AIDS epidemic in the 80s, Verghese turns his formidable talents to fiction, mining his own life and experiences in a magnificent, sweeping novel that moves from India to Ethiopia to an inner-city hospital in New York City over decades and generations. Sister Mary Joseph Praise, a devout young nun, leaves the south Indian state of Kerala in 1947 for a missionary post in Yemen. During the arduous sea voyage, she saves the life of an English doctor bound for Ethiopia, Thomas Stone, who becomes a key player in her destiny when they meet up again at Missing Hospital in Addis Ababa. Seven years later, Sister Praise dies birthing twin boys: Shiva and Marion, the latter narrating his own and his brothers long, dramatic, biblical story set against the backdrop of political turmoil in Ethiopia, the life of the hospital compound in which they grow up and the love story of their adopted parents, both doctors at Missing. The boys become doctors as well and Vergheses weaving of the practice of medicine into the narrative is fascinating even as the story bobs and weaves with the power and coincidences of the best 19th-century novel. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product details

Hardcover: 560 pages
Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (February 3, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0375414495
ISBN-13: 978-0375414497
Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 1.8 x 9.6 inches
Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 4,051 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #203,980 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #427 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Medical
- #3426 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Family Saga
- #4692 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Family Life

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Sprawling Dickensian novel: some terrific writing, lots of coincidence and calamity...

March 30, 2013

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Cutting for Stone is Abraham Verghese's big, bloated panorama of 20th century Ethiopia, where medicine and religion meet, and surgeons and Carmelite nuns procreate. The book is a roller coaster ride of agonies and ecstasies that too often relies heavily on coincidence to move the plot along. Add to the end result a rather annoying voice of an omniscient narrator (vividly detailing his breach birth, for example), a marvelous ability to evoke atmosphere and some interesting detail about medicine, and the result is a bouillabaisse of a book, with a few questionable ingredients.

After Thomas Stone and Sister Mary Joseph Praise create their twin progeny Shiva/Marion, CFS slows down for a few hundred pages, exploring the mystic cords (umbilical and otherwise) that bind. Not that it is bad, just too much of a bland thing at times. The second third off the book sets a languorous pace too that takes 150 pages to get the boys to puberty. It would be unfair to say the book bogs down, but it definitely would have benefited from a quicker pace or editing.

The last third is the exact opposite--a series of frenetic coincidences and crises that occasionally seem contrived or created solely to wring every last tear from the reader. Some of it works, other times I found myself rolling my eyes. It was during one of these more implausible instances that it occurred to me the author--for better and for worse--reminds me of Charles Dickens, whom I quite like. Warts and all.

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Elements of my childhood woven into this wonderful story

September 12, 2016

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I was born in Ethiopia in 1950 to missionaries with the American Mission. Much of this story took place in Addis Ababa. I could see the sights and smell the food. I wept at parts, shook my head in dismay at parts. I thought Haile Selassie was my grandfather when I was a little girl, so I have a hard time with negative views of him. When he came to the states to visit Jack & Jackie, he flew into the Philadelphia airport, then boarded a Train to arrive in DC with all the fanfare appropriate for royalty. My dad took us down onto the tarmack at the airport to greet the Emperor when he got off the plane and into his limo! The protocol officer was annoyed, but my mother was able to have words with the Emperor's Aide.

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Rockstar

Well Written

January 28, 2016

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It took me about 1/3 the way through this book to get into it. I was seriously at the point of giving up. I stayed with it and was very moved. Similar emotional invocation as the Kite Runner, except not as good. I could do without the life lessons through surgical procedure. Although I related and empathized with Marion and life, I could have done without the details of surgery. Half clinical and really tedious.

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Harish Nair

Gripping till the end

December 28, 2014

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A very touching story of two brothers- twins- who lose their mother as they are born and a story of a country – Ethyo-pia. The twins who were conjoine when they were born, surgically separate but remained conjoined at soul .The book become very enjoyable because of the style of writing. Dr. Verghese.

The book brings out various facets of the country and gives a good perspective of the society for readers to understand and appreciate the ways of life. The turbulence therein has been interwoven so well with the lives of the characters of the story to make a gripping reading. Even though it is not a thriller and given that it is loaded with high technical stuff on medicine and surgery, still I found it difficult to stop my reading at any point. And there were so many details interspersed into the writing, which made it very difficult for me to rush through the pages. So, it was like a strong cup of coffee, the bitterness kept me from finishing it fast, but the taste kept me wanting for more.

It also threw some philosophical angle for what one carries through the life and how the unspoken torments. How the slipper just refuses to leave your feet, unless you look down and acknowledge it in the first place. And also that it’s the noble end which matters, noble means does not.

I would highly recommend this book for all my friends

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Veering Toward Melodrama

November 11, 2012

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This is an ambitious project. And like many ambitious novels, Cutting For Stone walks a tightrope between admission to the literary canon and the agony of reaching too high. Perhaps only history itself is the best judge of such books, but for me the book leans toward the latter.

It's the story of two boys - Marion and Shiva, who take on the surname of the doctor who delivered them, Thomas Stone. The two boys are twins, extracted from the womb of a nun, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, and joined at the head by a tubal tissue that possibly threatens the lives of the boys until it's severed. And this birth condition sets the book's surest but most underdeveloped metaphor. The sister dies, and the presumed father, Thomas Stone, abruptly makes tracks, wanting nothing to do with the boys. They are then adopted by Ghosh, an ad hoc surgeon, and Ghosh's heartthrob an Indian nun, Hema.
Shiva is matter-of-fact smart, expending little effort to achieve his goal of becoming a doctor, while Marion has to work at it. And then there's Genet, a female waif who grows up with the two boys and is eager, as they become aware of their sexuality, to have one or the other deflower her, as she puts it.
The story takes place largely in Ethiopia during the last days of Haile Selassie's reign. The author places these characters within that bit of history, the unrest that follows Selassie's demise as ruler and the ensuing urge to revolution in Africa's horn. It's this aspect of the story that I enjoyed the most - the crumbling of that nation's ancient foundation, the blending of Christian, Hindu, and Islamic cultures there.

Historic epics are the grander end of literature, and Verghese clearly had this in mind when writing the book. But there are technical aspects of the story that simply don't work. The author allows Marion to narrate the story - including the weeks prior to his and Shiva's birth, their infancy, and much later during Marion's surgery. The manner is which this is accomplished has the effect of forcing Marion into an awkwardly unrealistic omniscient point of view little suited to first person narration. Too, the characters, by Western standards, have altogether too many stilted conversations. This may be the manner of Ethiopian language and conversing, but these scenes seem more like TV dialogue than revealing literary dynamics.
Thomas Stone and Genet show up again at story's end, but the purpose of both seems wasted, other than trying to tie up as many loose ends as possible. Still, there are many alleys and streets in this novel that lead nowhere, story-wise, or metaphorically, and I couldn't help imagining Charles Scribner slicing and dicing the manuscript to half its length, as he did with those of Hemingway near the end of that fabled writer's career. Altogether, then, these technical aspects of the book give it a rather melodramatic tone, something I'm sure the author didn't intend. Clearly the author's vision for the book was ambitious, but it's the manner in which this was carried out that forces me to lean to the nay-saying side of Verghese's literary tightrope.

My rating 12 of 20 stars

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