Dr. Verghese will discuss his new novel, which is set in the south Indian state of Kerala, with Aimee Liu on May 3 at Live Talks Los Angeles event.
When asked to describe the south Indian state of Kerala, the word that springs to mind for Dr. Abraham Verghese is this: “Water – 44 rivers, countless streams and lagoons and hundreds of miles of waterways.” More than a decade after the publication of his previous novel, “Cutting for Stone,” these waterways are where Dr. Verghese, author and professor of medicine at Stanford University, has set his latest book “The Covenant of Water,” out May 2 from Grove Atlantic.
A vast and epic telling of the generations who face the curse known as “The Condition,” Dr. Verghese’s latest work weaves history and medicine together to welcome readers to the home of his ancestors.Q. Was there a specific motivating factor for setting the book in Kerala? The rest of it was a lot of research and a lot of conversations with my parents. My mother passed away in her 90s, and my dad’s still alive, and vibrant, at 96. I also had access to uncles, aunts – not that they were alive in that period, but they certainly have vivid memories of being alive in the time of British rule. India gaining independence is a very recent thing for them, it happened after they were in college. So I was tapping into that.
Yes, something like “The Condition” is so, so bizarre in a place where everybody learns to swim. It’s an example of something people could only describe as a family curse and never know what it was. As time goes on, it becomes clearer what “The Condition” is because you have medical advancements – better imaging and more refined autopsies and so on.
I think readers have an inherent interest in things medical to some degree, because what is medicine but life lived at its most extreme? It’s in the very fact that we were Christians and so devout, and yet no one thought to convert the people working for us to Christianity. We left it to the Anglicans to come and do that. And even when they were converted, it didn’t erase any of the barriers. I always thought that was intriguing. I truly wanted to put myself in the shoes of people on both sides of that divide.The funny thing is I look around America, and in some ways, it’s the same.
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