I've gone back to 1953 and travelled from a Syrian Nunnery in Kerala Southern India to Madras and then on a typhoid ridden boat to Aden in Yemen. The lovely Indian Nun/nurse now has to decide if she is going to travel on to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia with the rather emaciated English doctor. (GO WITH HIM!!!!) So much has happened in just 25 pages...I think I'm going to get totally absorbed by the remaining 500 pages of high adventure!
25th March .
This morning I finally finished. I couldn't get up until I knew how this book ended. It was all pretty emotional really and this is definitely my book of 2012 (so far!) This book took me longer to read that normal but to be honest I quite enjoyed taking my time because the characters, places and history could just stay with me for longer. I really felt as if i were in Addis Ababa living the tumultous times of the 50s,60s and 70s. As I really want to visit Ethiopia it was a great introduction to what life was like in this country under Haile Sallesie and then the Stalinist dictator, Melinik.
But really this book was about people. The lives of the twin brothers born to the Indian Nun (She tragically dies when they are born) and the distraught Dr. Stone just runs away from his children in shame and grief. So the twins are bought up by another Indian couple who are absolutely superb characters...Verghese sure knows how to create wonderful, well rounded people. I really believed that the people at Missing Hospital in Addis Ababa were real and that I was priviliged to witness the highs and lows of their lives.
Sometimes the details of surgical procedures were a bit too clinical and over long but apart from that this book was excellent and even more so because it was so different. The journey to Aden from Madras was thrilling, the live in Aden was tense, the family lifestyle created within the hospital was amazing , especially so with all the political strife and madness surrounding the country at this time. The adoptive parents were inspirational and the life in a poor Harlem hospital was also incredibly well described. You realised that life for a poor sick immigrant in New York was just as bad ( if not worse ) than Ethiopia. Let alone being accepted within the expensive 'White' run hospitals of the rich if you were a foreign doctor.
This book was so beautiful to read but at times you could not believe the horrors of people lives. Verghese is clever though, because he doesn't wallow and write a lot about people's problems he leaves it up to the reader to imagine what things must have been like and I found this style of writing to be extremely powerful. Like in reality, lots of things are just left unsaid.
A rift is drawn between the twin boys but you never feel that one character is bad and the other good. We all do good and bad things and it's how we choose to deal with this fact which makes the difference.
Ultimately it was a book about living for the moment, forgiving the people who have harmed you, realising what true love means (or doesn't mean) and accepting people for who they are. I'm sad to have finished it and I won't write anything more about the plot because I want anyone who has read this review to get the book and read it too.
Thank you Helen and Rhiannon for posting this to me...you knew I'd love it!
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