A first novel unfolds in visceral splendour in an Addis Ababa hospital
Not everyone can look into an operating theatre and write visceral poetry. Sylvia Plath did. Her surgeon, at 2 am, up to elbows in blood, sees a garden: “This is the lung-tree./ These orchids are splendid./ They spot and coil like snakes./ The heart is a red bell-bloom, in distress./ I am so small/ In comparison to these organs!/ I worm and hack in a purple wilderness.” Without warranting a comparison with Plath, Abraham Verghese does it in prose — write about blood and not make you flinch, cut through tissues and tendons and reveal the drama which takes place in this other theatre, which stretches beyond its sterilised air.
Verghese, born to Malayali parents in Ethiopia, is a professor of internal medicine at Stanford University, and Cutting for Stone is his first novel. He has written two non-fiction books, The Tennis Partner and My Own Country.

In Cutting for Stone, Verghese’s garden, so to speak, is Operating Theatre 3 of Missing Hospital, Addis Ababa. It is a “landscape of disease and poverty” even though it gleams deceptively in the orange Meskel flowers that bloom after the rains. This is the Ethiopia of Haile Selassie, the diminutive emperor who travels in his green Rolls-Royce with the Chihuahua Lulu on the lap. And here a nun, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, has given birth to twins conjoined at the head. A miracle, almost in the manner of immaculate conception — at the hospital they half-think it is stigmata rather than “secular bleeding” — for no one expects a nun to expect, even one who keeps an image of the Ecstasy of St Theresa in the autoclave room.

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