Review: The Covenant Of Water by Abraham Verghese

The Covenant Of Water
Abraham Verghese
Grove Press
2023, 724p
Read via my local library

Blurb {from the publisher/Goodreads.com}: Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala’s Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl—and future matriarch, Big Ammachi—will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.

A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. Imbued with humor, deep emotion, and the essence of life, it is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.

I really have no idea where to start in reviewing this book.

I heard about this book from a bookish podcast that I listen to every week, where they were a bit kind of bemused about the fact that Oprah spent months and months promoting it as one of her book club choices last summer. It is a chunky book, coming in over 700p so it’s possible she was just giving everyone a lot of time to read it but apparently it was a very long amount of time.

There’s kind of an interesting backstory to the book too. Abraham Verghese wrote Cutting For Stone which was critically acclaimed, spent over 2 years on the NYT bestseller’s list and landed him a big contract for his next book. After over a decade I think that contract was mutually dissolved or terminated, or the publisher didn’t want this book, I’m not exactly sure. All I could find was that the “editorial vision” didn’t match. Either way, this was published by a different publishing house, not the one that paid $5m.

This is a sweeping saga of a novel, beginning not long after the turn of the 20th Century in Kerala, India with a twelve year old girl going to marry the man the broker her uncle had consulted chose as her ideal match. Her father having died, it seem’s the girl’s uncle is basically wanting to be rid of her. The groom is almost 40 years old, a widower with a young son. Although he’s quite well off, with significant land holdings and can provide well for his new wife, to a far better standard than what she’s used to, there’s no denying that it makes for an uncomfortable beginning. The groom himself didn’t realise his future bride was so young either and for a long time, the girl sleeps first with his sister, who teaches her the ways of running a household and then with her new young stepson, who she takes under her wing to raise as her own, despite an age gap that doesn’t really suggest mother and son. More like brother and sister. Despite the match feeling a bit unlikely, the two have a long marriage with both of them respecting the other.

From there, it follows generations of this family, beginning with that young girl and her husband and various other figures that will somehow prove influential or important on their family, for one reason of another. The lives of the family the girl marries into (we don’t learn her name until like the last third of the novel? She is referred to as “Big Ammachi” which is the name her young stepson gives her) is marred by what they call ‘the Condition’ – a fear of water, a tendency for members of the family to drown, poor hearing and often, a recklessness that cannot be explained. Big Ammachi’s life is shaped by this and the members of her new family that she loses because of it. But it will take several generations before the reasoning behind it is discovered.

This book is encompasses so much – it’s a snapshot of history in time as well, with the impacts of India’s colonisation by the British and struggle for independence as well as the infiltration of communism forming a backdrop for the family saga throughout the years. Despite it’s length and sweeping scope, it’s an easy read, an engaging read, one that I feel is skilled at drawing the reader in pretty much immediately and holding them there as we move forward throughout time and with different character focus towards the ultimate goal of solving the mystery of ‘the Condition’. I read this pretty slowly, over about 8 days, whilst also reading other things but despite putting it down often and sometimes going 2-3 days before picking it up again, it never felt like I lost the threads of the story or what was happening. Each generation has its ups and downs, its wins and tragedies. For a long time, Big Ammachi is the centre of everything.

Did it need to be this long? I’m not sure, I think you could lose 100-150p from it and not lose the impact of the story. But in reading it as it is, I don’t think that it dragged unnecessarily or got too bogged down in minute details. I appreciated the time took to construct Kerala (the birthplace of Verghese’s parents) in this time period and to show the changes that came to it over the course of the novel. I’ve never been out of Australia and I’m only vaguely familiar with parts of India’s history so that for me meant that I felt like I could picture it vividly. There’s also quite a bit about leprosy in this book as several characters are doctors, including some who choose to work with people impacted by the disease. India was significantly impacted by leprosy (and still accounts for about 60% of new cases). A social stigma definitely surrounded the disease and many sufferers found themselves cast out and shunned by their families and communities, forced to live in colonies with others similarly afflicted, often in extreme poverty. Some doctors and sometimes those from religious organisations (nuns, missionaries) gave their lives to researching and caring for those impacted.

I really enjoyed this. I found it so interesting and intricate and a great blend of showcasing history of a family within a small are and applying it to a bigger picture and a problem that continued to crop up in each generation but in different ways. It was always invested on if they would ever find out more about ‘the Condition’.

I really will need to go and read Cutting For Stone now.

8/10

Book #7 of 2024

This is book #1 of my participation in the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2024 hosted by Marg @ The Intrepid Reader.

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