The Covenant of Water (Oprah’s Book Club) (English Edition)

OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • SUBJECT OF A SIX-PART SUPER SOUL PODCAST SERIES HOSTED BY OPRAH WINFREY

From the New York Times-bestselling author of Cutting for Stone comes a stunning and magisterial epic of love, faith, and medicine, set in Kerala, South India, following three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret

“One of the best books I’ve read in my entire life. It’s epic. It’s transportive . . . It was unputdownable!”—Oprah Winfrey, OprahDaily.com

The Covenant of Water is the long-awaited new novel by Abraham Verghese, the author of the major word-of-mouth bestseller Cutting for Stone, which has sold over 1.5 million copies in the United States alone and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for over two years.

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South 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 long-existing 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, known as 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 difficulties undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. It is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.

Avaliações:

Reviewer: Teresa
Rating: 5,0 de 5 estrelas
Title: Sobre amor, bondade, desafios, etc.
Review: Um livro lindamente escrito sobre uma famÃlia indiana, desde a Ã©poca da ocupaÃ§Ã£o inglesa atÃ© a dÃ©cada de 70. Trata dos grandes acontecimentos da vida: nascimentos, perdas, amores, mortes.

Reviewer: Amazon Customer
Rating: 5,0 de 5 estrelas
Title: FÃ¡cil de ler
Review: Estou no comeÃ§o ainda (1/3 mais ou menos), mas achando muito fÃ¡cil e gostoso de ler.

Reviewer: Juliabulia
Rating: 5,0 de 5 estrelas
Title:
Review: Beautifully written story that follows three generations of a close-knit and haunted family in southwestern India. Compelling story rich with well developed characters and settings. Serious content with no humour or traditional romance. Worth reading!

Reviewer: yairis
Rating: 5,0 de 5 estrelas
Title:
Review: Maravilloso libro

Reviewer: Greg Barlin
Rating: 5,0 de 5 estrelas
Title:
Review: Phew. I made it. Finished. Complete. Fin.At 776 pages, The Covenant of Water is a commitment. It’s long, it’s dense, it’s heartbreaking more often than it’s not, and with every new character introduced, I found myself wondering where it was going and how it might end. But it’s also beautifully rendered, meticulously researched, and a tour de force. Given that, I have no idea how I should rate it against everything else I’ve read this year.The novel spans almost 80 years and takes place primarily in southern India. The story opens in 1900 with the arranged wedding of a 12-year-old girl to a much older man. Following their strained and awkward nuptials, he brings her to his home called Parambil, around which a community has developed. As she begins to learn how to be a wife to her husband, and the awkwardness between them begins to thaw as she grows older, she also comes to learn of her husband’s genealogy, and the repeated tragedy that afflicted many of his ancestors. The girl — who by now has become a young woman and is known as “Big Ammachi” — comes to refer to it as The Condition, whereby an unnatural number of ancestors in her husband’s lineage have had an aversion to water and several have died in what would typically be avoidable circumstances involving water.While The Condition crops up as a through line over the course the novel, the book is less about that mysterious affliction than it is a multi-generational character study of a family and the people who move in their circles. The novel flows like a river, with detailed scenes and character development intertwining. The reader, meanwhile, is left to be carried along like an oarless boat upon that river. I will admit that I got frustrated at times with the book. Even by the halfway point, it felt like plenty of story had been told and it was time to wrap things up, yet nearly 400 additional pages still awaited me. What more needs to be told? How will this end? When will it end?There is a passage in the book in which Verghese writes the following:”And now (she) is here, standing in the water that connects them all in time and space and always has. The water she first stepped in minutes ago is long gone and yet it is here, past and present and future inexorably coupled, like time made incarnate. This is the covenant of water: that they’re all linked by their acts of commission and omission, and no one stands alone.”Shame on me for doubting Verghese or his intentions, and for presuming these seemingly disconnected pieces wouldn’t eventually find one another to complete the puzzle. While I was being carried along the river, Verghese was weaving a complex tapestry around me. Every character and story in the meandering novel has a purpose, and all of that intention is pulled together and made clear In the final 150 (or so) pages. Verghese honors the passage above, and like the water he references, he beautifully ties together the strands of his story.It’s been more than a decade since I read Cutting For Stone, and I remember it fondly although the details are admittedly hazy. Acknowledging the hazy memory could be off a bit, I still feel that The Covenant of Water represents Verghese taking his skills to another level. There is plenty of medicine in the book, like in Cutting For Stone, but more broadly than in that work, with Verghese tackling several diseases that have since been mostly eradicated (with leprosy leading the way). Verghese also uses almost 80 years of Indian history and the birth of the nation as a backdrop, starting with the British occupation and class (and caste) systems that evolved around that, through Indian independence and the battle between socialism and a more market-driven economy that followed. The role of women in Indian society is a consistently and critically examined theme. As such, in many ways The Covenant of Water is an ode to the strength and contributions of women, particularly in a more male-dominated society and culture.So how do I rate this beast of a work, which was undeniably brilliant and complex but also struggled to retain my interest at times? For starters, it is the book for which I have the most respect among those I’ve read this year. I didn’t enjoy it the most, and I wouldn’t universally recommend it (as I said at the top, it’s a commitment). But when I consider the amount of time, and research, and intricate plotting, and effort that went into this, and then compare that to some of the more enjoyable (but less expansive) books among this year’s favorites, I have to acknowledge the author’s accomplishment. While I didn’t love every moment reading the book, and I found myself breaking it up and reading other things in between, I did really enjoy it if I look back on it in its entirety. If it had fizzled to a conclusion, that wouldn’t be the case, but I think the final two sections of the book pull everything together in a wonderful way that made me appreciate the purposeful intention of all that came before.For those of us that read regularly, I’m sure we’ve all thought to ourselves at some point, “I bet I could write a pretty good novel.” I have certainly read books, good books, and come away still believing (or even being inspired) that I might be able to create something comparable. The Covenant of Water is in a different league, and for anyone harboring aspirations of authorship, it will humble you and remind you that there are many levels to writing, and there are certain levels that are simply unobtainable for all but a few. It’s the type of book that illustrates an author operating at the apex of his craft, where all of his skills around writing, planning, dialogue, structure, and research come together to create something beautiful. Go in with eyes wide open — this will probably dominate your nightstand for several weeks — but trust that the payoff at the end is worth the journey to get there.

Reviewer: Grouville
Rating: 5,0 de 5 estrelas
Title:
Review: Wonderful family drama based in Kerala! Over 3 Generations! extremely readable and informative and warming!

Reviewer: Eline Rootsaert
Rating: 4,0 de 5 estrelas
Title:
Review: The novel is grand, spectacular, sweeping and utterly absorbing. Verghese has a gift for suspense, and his easy relationship to language draws you through the narrative so effortlessly that you hardly realize you are plowing through decade upon decade and page upon page. [New York Times].The extraordinary literary genius of doktor blew my socks off more than once. However, I found the religious themes unnecessarily long, even boring and important: I missed an appendix or footnotes explaining the Malayalam vocabulary.

The Covenant of Water (Oprah’s Book Club) (English Edition)

The Covenant of Water (Oprah’s Book Club) (English Edition)

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