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laurieb755 's review for:
The Covenant of Water
by Abraham Verghese
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
If there was such a style as 'geographic fiction' as opposed to 'historical fiction' then that's where I'd place Abraham Verghese's riveting story of interconnected families. This tale unfolds in Kerala along the southern tip of India and northward on the Arabian coast. 'Place' is what this tale is about, the place of water, the place of birth, the place of geography, the place of resources – both natural and manmade (such as schools and hospitals).
For me it's not so much that the story started slow, it's that it is contained in 715 pages. Divided into Parts One through Ten, spanning from 1900 to 1967, I began by reading a few chapters at a time. Suffice it to say, that made for slow going. One friend mimicked the size of the book and said don't bother reading it, while another friend said stick with it as the story is well worth the time. With just a week to go till the book was due (I had used my allotment of renewals) I divided the remaining pages by the number of days and plowed ahead reading a little over 100 pages a day.
How did I do that, you might wonder. Well, I could have easily read more if my back didn't complain about all the sitting! Drawn in by the characters I was an invisible observer witnessing their loves, their joys, their tragedies – of which there were many. In retrospect I would have drawn a character map, not unlike the family tree that Big Ammachi shares with Mariamma. Like the water that connects the lives of families so the lives of families are connected by the flow of life and chance encounters.
Abraham Verghese (https://www.abrahamverghese.org/biography/#intro) is a story teller, and perhaps that is what makes him such a humane doctor. From his biography and other links on his site I learned that he believes in and practices making human connections with people, for they are people first and patients second. This honoring of humanity permeates his writing, this being the second book (Cutting for Stone was the first) of his that I read.
I could write about the characters but you can find a full character list at https://www.bookcompanion.com/qe_the_covenant_of_water_character_list (plus I don't have the energy as where would I start and on whom would I focus!) Instead it has been enough for me to be immersed in the flow of the lives of the characters with Verghese as my guide.
For me it's not so much that the story started slow, it's that it is contained in 715 pages. Divided into Parts One through Ten, spanning from 1900 to 1967, I began by reading a few chapters at a time. Suffice it to say, that made for slow going. One friend mimicked the size of the book and said don't bother reading it, while another friend said stick with it as the story is well worth the time. With just a week to go till the book was due (I had used my allotment of renewals) I divided the remaining pages by the number of days and plowed ahead reading a little over 100 pages a day.
How did I do that, you might wonder. Well, I could have easily read more if my back didn't complain about all the sitting! Drawn in by the characters I was an invisible observer witnessing their loves, their joys, their tragedies – of which there were many. In retrospect I would have drawn a character map, not unlike the family tree that Big Ammachi shares with Mariamma. Like the water that connects the lives of families so the lives of families are connected by the flow of life and chance encounters.
Abraham Verghese (https://www.abrahamverghese.org/biography/#intro) is a story teller, and perhaps that is what makes him such a humane doctor. From his biography and other links on his site I learned that he believes in and practices making human connections with people, for they are people first and patients second. This honoring of humanity permeates his writing, this being the second book (Cutting for Stone was the first) of his that I read.
I could write about the characters but you can find a full character list at https://www.bookcompanion.com/qe_the_covenant_of_water_character_list (plus I don't have the energy as where would I start and on whom would I focus!) Instead it has been enough for me to be immersed in the flow of the lives of the characters with Verghese as my guide.