Marion Stone is the narrator of Abraham Verghese's epic novel, Cutting for Stone. We meet him in the prologue as a fifty-year-old surgeon, and he tells us the story of himself and his twin brother, Shiva, in an effort to bring final healing to a life of betrayals, injuries, and separations. Medicine was his passion from a young age and throughout the book it serves as a metaphor for his life:
"You don't always know the answers before you operate. One operates in the now. Later, the retrospectoscope, that handy tool of the wags and pundits, the conveners of the farce we call M&M--morbidity and mortality conference--will pronounce your decision right or wrong. Life, too, is lived like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see that corpse caught under your wheel."
Much of the novel is set at Missing Hospital (an accidental mis-use of the name Mission Hospital) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where the twins were born and grew up. Their mother, an Indian missionary nurse, died in childbirth, and Marion tells her story at the beginning of the book. But her story is only one piece of the puzzle: Their father is still a mystery to them. Marion keenly feels this abandonment in his younger years, even though he loves his foster parents and his brother. When the twins are teens, however, Shiva betrays Marion in a way that Marion cannot forgive. Not until the end of the book do we find out more about the twin's father and see the final healing and closure to the rift between the brothers.
Although this book was long and dense, it was beautifully written and hard to put down. I enjoyed how well developed the characters were and the completeness of the story as it was told through the generations of the family. I had a strong sense of Ethiopia after reading this book and was amazed at the dedication of the doctors who stay there, suffering themselves in order to bring healing to that nation. Be warned that there is hardly a chapter that does not include a surgery or a medical procedure. Some squeamish readers might want to flip past a few of those pages. At first I was tempted to skip past a few, but non are gratuitous and they greatly add to the humanity of the characters. Clear your calendar when you sit down with this book--it is not a quick read, but it is an enjoyable one.
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