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Author Quotes: “The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don't. If you keep saying your slippers aren't yours, then you'll die searching, you'll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone |
is reading Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese for June 28.
Abraham Verghese was born in Ethiopia of Indian parents in 1955. He began his medical training near Addis Ababa. He moved to the U.S. to train as a physician and is currently a Professor for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Senior Associate Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine.
The book is the tale of two twins boy, Marion and Shiva, born to a young nun, Sister Mary Joseph Praise and a British surgeon, Thomas Stone. The boys are conjoined at the head then separated at birth. When their mother dies in childbirth, Stone flees leaving the twins to be raised by Hema and Gosh, two Indian physicians at the hospital. Marion and Shiva grow up without their mother and father, and carry a deep resentment toward their father for his cowardliness. Bernini's magnificent sculpture of St. Teresa of Avila is a prominent symbol in the book. St. Teresa's recurrent vision of the angel was called the transverberation, which meant the soul was "inflamed" by the love of God, and the heart "pierced" by divine love. St. Teresa was Marion's image of his mother. In Aida Edemariam article for The Guardian in 2009, writes "Verghese's achievement is to make the reader feel there is something at stake-- birth, love, death, war, loyalty...You conserve pages because you don't want [the book] to end. Please comment on the BExtraordinaire Blog. Together we can better understand this novel through a shared conversation. Abraham Verghese talks about fiction, the title of the book and nuns. |
