The Covenant of Water (Oprah’s Book Club)

I love his work and words. It was exciting to learn another masterpiece existed. Having had the pleasure of literally running into him at Thomason Regional Medical Center I expound on his genius to present the world. What a great writer, physician and man!!! So thrilled to learn of his successful completion of another aspect of the human condition with all the twists and turns life takes.

I read voraciously. I’ve been reading since I was 4. I read instead of watching TV or movies. Suffice it to say, I have read a lot of books. And this is definitely in the top 5. Verghese is as much an artist as a physician. As a fellow physician I recognize the accuracy and detail as he describes anatomy and procedures. As an amateur writer I am in awe of his use of words. Absolutely an amazing book.

As one reviewer already said, I too would say this is one of the best novels I have ever read. I even started reading it a second time. The story is fascinating, the writing is superb, and for me has spiritual tones that have stayed with me. Verghese is a masterful writer and this to me was his best. I read on Kindle and highlighted and reread the fascinating ways Verghese phrased or described what he was trying to convey. I was there in my mind though I have never been to India. Thank you, sir, for this really, really wonderful story.

This is a great saga, with all of the pluses and minuses of the doorstop novel. It surrounds the lives of rural residents of Kerala, in India’s Southwest, with occasional forays into Tamil Nadu. The protagonists are attractive, smart, good people who suffer the many afflictions we attribute to the deep past: leprosy, typhoid, diptheria, as well as some that are still among us, including neurofibromatosis. Verghese is an accomplished writer and also a physician at Stanford. So, get ready for a lot of diagnostic stuff, as well as surgical procedures that will interest some more than others. Except for the occasional lecher and selfish relatives, no villains haunt the story. At times, the prose is pretty didactic, but I don’t know how one gets around it when speaking of Hindu divinities, informal names, caste categories and other contextual challenges. I thought the romances were a little too good to be true, and despite the title, water is more allegorical than real, considering how powerful the monsoon and the watersheds of the Western Ghats are to the region. And the novel barely glances at the structuring forces of WWI and WWII, the partition that followed independence in 1947, and the stresses of Indian modernization of rural life. In a sense, the book hovers just underneath all these great tectonic changes, staying at the level of village, plantation, and individual actors. Not a complaint, really, as I can’t feature including the macro without adding another 700 pages or so, but still….Having spent time in Southern India, I enjoyed the sights and sounds and manners that I remember. I especially recognized the uniqueness of train travel: stepping off into the station in Madras (or Delhi) or careening across trestles, or sharing compartments with the most memorable companions. I always enjoy reading Verghese’s fiction. Such a talent deserves praise.

Phew. I made it. Finished. Complete. Fin.At 776 pages, The Covenant of Water is a commitment. It’s long, it’s dense, it’s heartbreaking more often than it’s not, and with every new character introduced, I found myself wondering where it was going and how it might end. But it’s also beautifully rendered, meticulously researched, and a tour de force. Given that, I have no idea how I should rate it against everything else I’ve read this year.The novel spans almost 80 years and takes place primarily in southern India. The story opens in 1900 with the arranged wedding of a 12-year-old girl to a much older man. Following their strained and awkward nuptials, he brings her to his home called Parambil, around which a community has developed. As she begins to learn how to be a wife to her husband, and the awkwardness between them begins to thaw as she grows older, she also comes to learn of her husband’s genealogy, and the repeated tragedy that afflicted many of his ancestors. The girl — who by now has become a young woman and is known as “Big Ammachi” — comes to refer to it as The Condition, whereby an unnatural number of ancestors in her husband’s lineage have had an aversion to water and several have died in what would typically be avoidable circumstances involving water.While The Condition crops up as a through line over the course the novel, the book is less about that mysterious affliction than it is a multi-generational character study of a family and the people who move in their circles. The novel flows like a river, with detailed scenes and character development intertwining. The reader, meanwhile, is left to be carried along like an oarless boat upon that river. I will admit that I got frustrated at times with the book. Even by the halfway point, it felt like plenty of story had been told and it was time to wrap things up, yet nearly 400 additional pages still awaited me. What more needs to be told? How will this end? When will it end?There is a passage in the book in which Verghese writes the following:”And now (she) is here, standing in the water that connects them all in time and space and always has. The water she first stepped in minutes ago is long gone and yet it is here, past and present and future inexorably coupled, like time made incarnate. This is the covenant of water: that they’re all linked by their acts of commission and omission, and no one stands alone.”Shame on me for doubting Verghese or his intentions, and for presuming these seemingly disconnected pieces wouldn’t eventually find one another to complete the puzzle. While I was being carried along the river, Verghese was weaving a complex tapestry around me. Every character and story in the meandering novel has a purpose, and all of that intention is pulled together and made clear In the final 150 (or so) pages. Verghese honors the passage above, and like the water he references, he beautifully ties together the strands of his story.It’s been more than a decade since I read Cutting For Stone, and I remember it fondly although the details are admittedly hazy. Acknowledging the hazy memory could be off a bit, I still feel that The Covenant of Water represents Verghese taking his skills to another level. There is plenty of medicine in the book, like in Cutting For Stone, but more broadly than in that work, with Verghese tackling several diseases that have since been mostly eradicated (with leprosy leading the way). Verghese also uses almost 80 years of Indian history and the birth of the nation as a backdrop, starting with the British occupation and class (and caste) systems that evolved around that, through Indian independence and the battle between socialism and a more market-driven economy that followed. The role of women in Indian society is a consistently and critically examined theme. As such, in many ways The Covenant of Water is an ode to the strength and contributions of women, particularly in a more male-dominated society and culture.So how do I rate this beast of a work, which was undeniably brilliant and complex but also struggled to retain my interest at times? For starters, it is the book for which I have the most respect among those I’ve read this year. I didn’t enjoy it the most, and I wouldn’t universally recommend it (as I said at the top, it’s a commitment). But when I consider the amount of time, and research, and intricate plotting, and effort that went into this, and then compare that to some of the more enjoyable (but less expansive) books among this year’s favorites, I have to acknowledge the author’s accomplishment. While I didn’t love every moment reading the book, and I found myself breaking it up and reading other things in between, I did really enjoy it if I look back on it in its entirety. If it had fizzled to a conclusion, that wouldn’t be the case, but I think the final two sections of the book pull everything together in a wonderful way that made me appreciate the purposeful intention of all that came before.For those of us that read regularly, I’m sure we’ve all thought to ourselves at some point, “I bet I could write a pretty good novel.” I have certainly read books, good books, and come away still believing (or even being inspired) that I might be able to create something comparable. The Covenant of Water is in a different league, and for anyone harboring aspirations of authorship, it will humble you and remind you that there are many levels to writing, and there are certain levels that are simply unobtainable for all but a few. It’s the type of book that illustrates an author operating at the apex of his craft, where all of his skills around writing, planning, dialogue, structure, and research come together to create something beautiful. Go in with eyes wide open — this will probably dominate your nightstand for several weeks — but trust that the payoff at the end is worth the journey to get there.