May 02, 2023

Verghese's long-awaited second novel is impossible not to love

 

Abraham Verghese’s new novel, “The Covenant of Water,” is epic and engrossing. This is the book that fans of “Cutting for Stone” have been waiting 14 years for.

Like “Cutting for Stone,” religion, history, disease, and doctors are prominent in “Covenant.” However, the new novel is much more expansive, following three generations of a family across nearly a century and bringing in secondary plots that converge with the main story.

The book opens in 1900 in southwest India on the Malabar Coast among a religious minority known as St. Thomas Christians. Mariamma, age 12, is to be married to a 40-year-old widower whom she has never met. She travels hours from her home to be wed to him. She is scared and homesick. Her new sister-in-law stays with the new couple and teaches her to cook and care for her stepson, Jojo.

Both Jojo and his father have a strange aversion to water. After Jojo drowns in a few inches of water in a ditch, Mariamma’s husband confides his family’s secret. In every generation at least one person dies by drowning. Grief-stricken, Mariamma begs God that if He can’t cure the affliction, at least send someone who can.

Mariamma, now called Big Ammachi (mother), has two of her own children, a daughter who is born with what was then called “cretinism,” and a son, Philipose, who has the same “condition” as his father. The story follows the family through Philipose’s generation and that of his daughter, who becomes a gifted physician.

Two characters whose lives intersect with Big Ammachi’s family are also doctors. A Swede in Cochin, who has a religious revelation, converts an abandoned lazaretto into a leprosarium to treat the region’s many lepers. Another is a Scottish transplant, Digby, who first practices in Madras and later meets and joins the Swedish doctor at the leprosarium. The author’s unflinching detail of the diseases and their treatments is both fascinating and, at times, repulsive.

Despite hardship and grief, Big Ammachi’s faith never waivers. Her water covenant with God remains strong throughout her life, in spite of water being the source of much of her grief. Big Ammachi witnesses social upheaval—the end of the British Raj, the secularization of Indian society— and technological changes of the twentieth century that alter her world in ways she never imagined as a child.

“The Covenant of Water” is the story of a family’s resilience and devotion to God and each other. It is a sweeping narrative that incorporates science, superstition, and magic. It reveals the power of both faith and science. It is a masterpiece of love, grief, and triumph. Verghese’s lyrical style and endearing characters make this novel impossible not to love.

March 27, 2023

Suspense, action fill genre-buster


In the opening line, author Victor LaValle writes that “there are two kinds of people in this world: those who live with shame, and those who die from it.” Ironically, the heroine of his newest novel, “Lone Women,” attempts to escape her shame.

Adelaide Henry flees her family’s California farm in 1915 after setting fire to the house with her parents’ corpses inside. She takes with her an impossibly heavy steamer trunk that she does not like to let out of her sight.

She heads to Montana, one of the few states that allow lone women to homestead. What she finds there is an unforgiving climate, seemingly friendly neighbors—until Adelaide angers them—and only one other Black person for hundreds of miles.

Adelaide is almost completely unprepared to survive the winter and has to rely on some of those neighbors. In addition, a widow and her four sons make an unwelcome visit to her cabin, where Adelaide has just discovered her steamer trunk open and empty. That’s when people start to die.

LaValle’s genre-busting novel is equal parts western, historical, mystery, and horror. There is plenty of action and blood, but there is plenty to think about also. Adelaide contends with loneliness, isolation, allowing herself to trust others, and of course, “her shame.”

Despite some bothersome plot holes and a decidedly weird climax, “Lone Women” will entertain readers with a well-told story, complex and interesting characters, and page-turning suspense.

February 07, 2023

Loneliness pervades tale of gruesome murder

After living with a pandemic for nearly three years, and almost two years after the first vaccines arrived, most people have returned to normal life, even if it is a different normal than before covid. I don’t worry about going to stores or restaurants unmasked, I hug people I love, and we enjoy large family dinners. However, the worry is always in the back of my mind, manifesting as anxiety in very crowded spaces. It is not difficult to recall the loneliness—for some, isolation—that the pandemic brought.

Katrine Engberg’s new installment of her Korner and Werner series, “The Sanctuary,” written during covid, deftly captures the pain of loneliness, not from pandemic lockdown, but from the usual trials of life.

After Copenhagen police find a suitcase with half of a body in it—the left half—detective Anette Werner travels to the tiny Danish island of Bornholm following clues to try to determine the victim’s identity and find his killer. While working on the case, she has to contend with missing her husband and toddler daughter, and her three troublesome border collies.

Anette’s partner, Jeppe Korner, has been on a leave of absence for months after a painful breakup. He’s on Bornholm working as a lumberjack, living alone, and socializing only with his shut-in neighbor. Since he’s already on Bornholm and acquainted with many locals, Anette asks Jeppe to find out what he can as she sets up her investigation out of the local police station. This is Anette’s first time to head up a homicide investigation on her own, and she is both anxious and missing her partner.

Jeppe’s friend Esther also arrives on Bornholm, grieving the recent death of her roommate, Gregers. She’s there working on a biography of a famous anthropologist—Margrethe Dybris—now deceased. She was invited to stay in the woman’s home by the woman’s daughter, who is also staying there. Meanwhile, Anette learns that the suitcases that the two half-corpses (the second one being found a few days after the first) once belonged to the famed scientist. Anette and her team begin to suspect that the scientist’s missing son is the victim.

The story alternates between the present investigation and Dybris’s life, which we learn about through Esther reading her correspondence. Dybris eschewed marriage, electing to adopt two children, live modestly, and pursue her work. While her daughter attended college, married, had a career, her son struggled in school and got into trouble—pranks and mischief mostly. However, at his eighteenth birthday party, his pregnant girlfriend died from a mysterious fall. Suspicion fell on the son, and his life began to spin out of control, leading to drugs and petty crime.

The plot is intriguing as Anette and her team meticulously and methodical investigate the gruesome murder. There are plenty of suspects, and readers are treated to some action and suspense at the climax.

I am very much a fan of Nordic Noir, which can be quite dark and somewhat disturbing—even disturbed. Readers who may not be comfortable with the gloomy, unsettling stories in most of the genre will enjoy this series. Despite their loneliness, grief, and pain, the characters find connection or reconnection with others by the end of the book—happy endings for all but the killer.

January 03, 2023

How, not who, is question in tense thriller

Ana Reyes’s debut novel, “The House in the Pines” is a tense thriller that keeps the reader turning pages and trying, as the protagonist does, to figure out just what happened.

Twenty-something Maya, trying to kick her addiction to tranquilizers, sees a Youtube video of a woman seeming to drop dead while sitting in a diner. Maya recognizes the man with the young woman as Frank, whom she had known seven years ago when Maya’s friend Aubrey also dropped dead in Frank’s presence. Convinced that this second death is no coincidence, Maya returns to her home town to try and find out what happened and prove that Frank is responsible for both deaths.

The story is told in two chronologies. The present chronology of Maya’s attempt to regain lost memories, fight her addiction, and prove Frank a killer is told in the past tense, so that readers share Maya’s guarded, emotional distance from the frightening events of finding the video and hunting a killer.

The second chronology, the summer after Maya finishes high school, plans for college, and meets Frank, is told in the present tense, drawing the reader into Maya’s fragmented memories and the tragedy of Aubrey’s death and Maya’s inability to escape or move on from that summer.

Readers, and Maya, know all along who the killer is. Since the only question is how he did it, there is little suspense until the end when Maya gets close to the truth. However, the book’s interesting structure keep the reader’s attention. It’s a rewarding read that moves quickly, especially good for a day locked in the house by bad weather.

Verghese's long-awaited second novel is impossible not to love

  Abraham Verghese’s new novel, “The Covenant of Water,” is epic and engrossing. This is the book that fans of “Cutting for Stone” have been...