Jeannette Cooperman at The Common Reader:
After our entire book club, with unprecedented unanimity, pronounced Cutting for Stone the best book we had read yet, we waited twelve long years. Every few months, one of us would ask, “Hey, has Verghese written his next book yet?” Finally, The Covenant of Water came out.
The man is a consummate storyteller. This hardly seems fair to the rest of us, when he is a physician whose specialties are supposed to be infectious disease and pulmonary medicine. A distinguished professor at Stanford’s medical school, he only went to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop—showing up in his doctorly tweeds and feeling utterly out of place—after caring for AIDS patients wrung him dry. He needed a way to tell their stories.
He found that and more. Few contemporary writers offer such rich sensory details, memorable characters, and compassionate depth. Did he learn all that in Iowa, I wondered last week, en route to his sold-out Q&A at the St. Louis County Library headquarters. Or is it because he is a physician? Could any trained observer who sees people at their most vulnerable turn into a modern-day griot?
I wanted Verghese to spill the techniques, tell us his tricks.
More here.
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