Cutting for Stone
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I’m going to actively campaign against this book. People act like it hung the moon; meanwhile, I was 200 pages in before I could tell you half of the character’s names. I simply will not stand for this. This book is cosplaying as good literature. It uses flowery metaphors and focuses on a subject so foreign to the average American that it *seems* like it’s highbrow when it’s not.
The book centers around orphaned twins who are adopted by physicians working at a poor, struggling hospital in Ethiopia during a political revolution. Many reviews refer to it as ambitious, but IMO, It tried to do wayyyy too much and it spread itself too thin. It tried to cover: history, race relations, religion, medicine, child-rearing, trauma, and romance. I couldn’t get a foothold. I was slipping every which way, never getting a grasp on the setting or the people. It actually took me the longest time to even understand what century we were working with. I didn’t want to look it up because I became defiant– I felt that a good writer would clearly root me in time and place. If the goal was for me to understand Ethiopian culture, it did not do the trick. I still couldn’t tell you what the revolution was about.
On top of that, its schtick of interweaving medicine into the plot felt contrived. It simultaneously dived too deep into the medicinal weeds but also not deep enough to be informative. It seemed like Abraham Verghese, the author, wanted to show off his medical knowledge to someone in the know rather than genuinely explain the process to a layperson. His interspersed facts were more distracting than enlightening; so, just like I absorbed nothing about Ethiopian politics and culture, I didn’t actually learn anything about medicine. Fun!
I feel like I need to defend myself because people are such diehard lovers of this book. So, here’s an excerpt from one of many overly detailed procedures: “At once, the colon bullied its way out like a zeppelin escaping its hangar. He covered the sides of the wound with wet packs, inserted a large Balfour retractor to hold the edges open, and delivered the twisted loop completely out of the wound onto the packs…He felt through the bowel wall for the rectal tube that Nurse Asqual had inserted. When the tube reached the distended bowel, they were rewarded with a loud sigh and the rattle of fluid and gas hitting the bucket below. ‘And down the coil contracts and you will see the parts arranged more as they ought to be,’ Gosh said.”
Am I taking crazy pills? It’s not that I shy away from books about medicine. I learned many things from books like The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures and Complications. But Cutting for Stone reads like skimmable jargon.
Ok, two more quick complaints while I have you here. I enjoyed the book more as Marion, one of the twins who narrates the book, grew older because coming of age drama can be nice and juicy. However, as he matured and his experiences expanded, Verghese started to declare huge plot points in unrealistic ways. For example, without giving away too much, one of the characters is able to smell a difference in odor in another character and then correctly surmise that that person has cancer. Maybe that’s supposed to be quirky and precocious but I rolled my eyes. I also have a poor olfactory system so I find this especially unrelatable.
Lastly, I didn’t feel for any of the characters because they all remained shrouded to me. When someone suffered, it felt abstract, even when it was described in painstaking (and painful) detail. This is executed well in storytelling sometimes, like when a character is confused about their own identity so they are unknowable to the reader, but there were too many confounding variables in this case. Idk shit about the history of the region, idk shit about medicine, and idk shit about these people. Got nothing to hold on to after 658 pages, so I’m out. Cutting for Stone receives 1 out of 5 flames.
