The Covenant Of Water: An Oprah's Book Club Selection

The Covenant of Water.Book Review:Reading Abraham Verghese's novel The Covenant of Water, the million-copy bestseller included in Oprah’s Book Club 2023 and published by Grove Press in the UK, has been an astounding experience for me for the last twelve days. The author took twelve years to write his magnum opus. The book explores the themes of love, compassion, empathy, human relationships, and commitment to a cause encircled by superstitions, fear, ignorance, slavery, detachment, spirituality, suffering, secrecy, and profound silence.While reading, the novel transported me to an unknown and known world: Kerala, which flows like the totality of all its thirty-six rivers, the serene plentiful lagoons, numerous backwaters and thousands of ponds adjacent to old houses, carrying its diverse smells, sounds, tastes, sights, touch, history, the struggle for equality, freedom, women’s liberation, literacy advancement, the health revolution, communist movement, Christianity’s involvement in education and social upliftment, the majesty of the temples, the culture, arts, and enlightenment through science and atheism. The novel is enriched with everlasting greenery, Malayali splendour, the humanness of the public, and equity visible everywhere.The book weaves the story of three generations of a family, the St Thomas Christians, from 1900 to 1977, in Travancore, Kerala. It starts with a twelve-year-old girl going to wed a forty-year-old widower whom she would meet for the first time in church during the wedding. The girl’s father, a priest, died years before, and her mother struggled to provide a life for her loving daughter. The groom was rich, having five hundred acres of land as the solace. The girl travelled alone with the broker to an unknown place by boat. The groom walked out of the church, seeing his would-be wife as she was still a child, slightly older than his motherless son. The priest, the wedding celebrant, had a hard time convincing the groom to accept the girl as his wife by tying the tiny thali around her neck, as St Thomas Christians continued to follow the traditions of the Brahmins.In her affectionate yet introverted, kind and wise husband's home, the twelve-year-old girl transformed into a compassionate, caring, lively, and wise matriarch whom others called Big Ammachi. She witnessed and brought far-reaching changes around her throughout her astonishing life span, which was compressed with happiness, hardships, deaths, pain, and sublimation.It is an absorbing, engrossing, spectacular novel full of humane touch, soft feelings and empathy. The starting is one of the best:“She was twelve years old, and she will be married in the morning. Mother and daughter lie on the mat, their wet cheeks glued together.”“The saddest day of a girl’s life is the day of her wedding,” her mother says. “After that, God willing, it gets better.”The universal truth stuns the reader and leads them to read further without interruption until the last page of this 715-page saga, witnessing the gradual transformation of the characters, the evolution of the story and the metamorphosis of the enriching philosophy beneath the theme.The characterisation of the main characters, Big Ammachi and her husband, their manager Shamuel, their son and daughter JoJo, Baby Mol, and Philipose, their son Ninan, Shamuel’s son Joppan, Rune, Digby, and Mariamma, is well developed, consistent, contrasting, and profound in terms of the themes of the novel. It vibrates with spontaneity and inner strength.More than anything, the novel is a perceptive and rigorous analysis of the complexities of the social system. A significant narrative is a struggle to interpret social customs, traditions, faith, religion, political affiliation, and a categorical value system, such as treating the Dalits as untouchables, in fact, slaves. “Because you loved my father, this is harder for you to grasp…You see yourself as being kind and generous to him. The “kind” slave owners in India, or anywhere, were always the ones who had the greatest difficulty seeing the injustice of slavery. Their kindness, their generosity, compared to cruel slave owners, made them blend to the unfairness of a system of slavery that they created, they maintained, and that favoured them.”The language is simple yet powerful, appropriate but timely, situational, elegant, and mesmerising, such as: “Below him, the tea bushes run in neat, parallel rows as though a giant comb has been dragged across the hillside.”Some of the ethereal and magical scenes in verisimilitude contexts suggest the serendipity and meaninglessness of life and, at the same time, its profound purpose, even the merging of contradictions. The deaths of JoJo and Ninan bring such a notion. Mariamma meeting her biological father and juxtaposing her palms against her mother, who she thought dead, is the most poignant scene in the story.The Covenant of Water is one of the greatest novels I have ever read. I cherished reading each word and each sentence on every page of this magnificent work. The joy I derived from it is unparalleled. It is a stupendous tribute to Kerala, its people and culture, language and courage, openness, vitality and diversity, soul-satiating greenery, gorgeousness, stillness, and enlightened living, respecting the right of the other person to cherish their rights.As a literary landmark, an epic tribute to the living and dead in God’s Own Country, The Covenant of Water shines like a bright star on the syzygy of English literature. I compare The Covenant of Watter with One Hundred Years of Solitude, Things Fall Apart, Brothers Karamazov, For Whom The Bell Tolls, The Remains of the Day and Valli, Sheela Tomy’s Malayalam novel, beautifully and elegantly translated into English by Jayasree Kalathil.Dr Abraham Verghese is the Vice Chair of the Department of Medicine at Standford University School of Medicine and the New York Times-bestselling author of Cutting for Stone, which has sold more than one and a half million copies.Varghese V DevasiaKozhikode27 January 2025.

A great read! A beautifully written tale spanning generations of a family in Kerala during British rule in India. The storytelling is rich, and the characters are deeply moving. Abraham Verghese weaves history, love, and resilience into a mesmerizing novel. Highly recommend, Thank you!

To start with, I thoroughly enjoyed reading The covenant of water, didn't find it boring, difficult to read, or ever wish it would get over, for whatever reason. Many a time when I holiday or travel with a book, I find that my reading experience gets affected. But with this one, I travelled, met long lost cousins, old friends, hordes of relatives and finally spent a week with my mum, all while inhabiting the world of 'Parambil', in parallel. It held me in its warm embrace right through its 720 pages. This is not usual. So I believe it's a great book. Dr. Verghese is a wonderful storyteller and he's managed to come out with this piece that has an almost meditative quality to it. Digging into what may have brought on that quality, two things strike me. One is his compassion with his characters. There's not a single despicable character in there. The other is a distinct thread of hope that runs right through the book. Even while life takes unexpected and harsh turns, somewhere deep down, one knows that they will be fine. There's an underlying stoic acceptance of every situation there, that seems to give us this comfort. I could see the author as a person who had come to terms with life, who had understood the human condition for what it is. This is one of the things that stood out for me about this book.The reason I think it's an important book is that, for those who haven't lived in Kerala, and who are unfamiliar with the Syrian Christian ethos, it's a wonderful world that he creates. And when he narrates it in the background of that period in the history of Kerala with the events that shaped the state into what it is today, it takes on a different proportion altogether. The fact that he doesn't hurry the reader through it, makes it that much more effective. One has the luxury of taking it all in slowly. It's also an extremely accessible book with its simple prose.To summarise, a couple of points I found negative about the book: It does not challenge the reader in any way. It feels more like a fable rather than a realistic portrayal of life. It's not to say that a realistic portrayal of life is somehow superior to a fable. But I get the impression that the author didn't mean it to be a fable. It's perhaps not fair to compare books, esp in different languages, but I'm tempted to do that because not only do these two belong to the same genre, they are both set in the Kerala of more or less the same period although they tell different stories. When I reflected on why the contemporary Malayalam author Subhash Chandran's "Manushyanu oru aamukham" that came out a couple of years ago made a more lasting impact on me, I realise that it was more nuanced, more raw and realistic, and the characters truer to their identities. The book itself was much more layered, with rich insights into human psychology. But again, for the world at large, access to that book is limited. Even though there is a translation (A preface to man) for which the translator even won an award, it is not a particularly translatable book. That's what I gathered from someone who read the translation. From that perspective, I can see "The Covenant of water" going places, and rightly so.

What an excellent novel! Eye opening, enlightening and staggeringly intimate in it's narrative. A true work of art & science.