An accomplished wordsmith (who even puns on the title of his widely beloved first novel, "Cutting for Stone"), he conveys ineffable wonder at the tapestry of all life, as in this passage about a stroll along the sea: "The waves celebrate their long voyage with a final splash on the rocks. Verghese, whose 1994 memoir "My Own Country" recounted his experience as a physician treating AIDS patients in Johnson City, Tennessee, is that rare novelist unencumbered by the petty cynicisms of our age. She thinks of the Condition as a curse, but in fact Verghese has something more complex in mind. After a family tragedy - the first of many - Big Ammachi, as she's known throughout the book, confronts her husband about the mysterious "Condition," in which members of his extended family drown unexpectedly. To her surprise (and ours), the marriage flourishes, a kinship of souls. (The couple will wait years before consummating their union.) She moves to his prosperous acreage near Parambil, a village that straddles the network of waterways. The novel opens in 1900, as a 12-year-old girl is formally married off to a 40-year-old widower with a toddler son. Abraham Verghese mines that history - and larger debates about faith and science - in his sprawling, textured, leisurely second novel, "The Covenant of Water," prismed through native Indians and British expatriates and their descendants, lives braided over generations. Thomas Christians still thrive among the canals and estuaries of tropical Kerala. One legend claims he sailed to the Malabar coast of southern India, seeding a Christian community in present-day Kerala before his eventual martyrdom in Mylapore.
Inspired, Thomas embarked on spreading the Good News abroad. "THE COVENANT OF WATER: A NOVEL" by Abraham Verghese (Grove, 724 pages, $32).Īs with many English idioms, "doubting Thomas" traces its origins to the New Testament: The Gospel of John recounts the Apostle Thomas' skepticism about the Resurrection until Jesus appears in person, prompting the dubious one to reverse his position.
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