The Covenant of Water
The Covenant of Water (2023) by Abraham Verghese well-deserves the title of (my personal) most anticipated book of the year. As soon as I heard that Verghese, author of the beautiful, difficult book Cutting for Stone (2009), had a new book coming out, this one set predominantly in India, I got a little giddy. Verghese’s career as a surgeon (he is faculty at Stanford’s School of Medicine, after all) contributes fascinating layers to his incredibly artful prose and makes for captivating reading. Even after many months of anticipation, The Covenant of Water wowed me, moved me, and left me feeling connected to something bigger and more beautiful than any single life.
This is a multi-generational story that spans cultures and continents. Most of the action is set in 20th-century Kerala, India along the Malabar Coast on the western side of southern India. The story begins in 1900 with a twelve-year-old girl on the way to her wedding within her community of St. Thomas Christians. It is not until many years later, upon the birth of her granddaughter who is, we learn in the first few pages (even when the girl bride is still a child herself) to be her namesake, that we learn Big Ammachi (as everyone will call her from her teens onward) is Miriamma. This interweaving of generation, storytelling, and time repeats time and again in this hefty literary masterpiece.
Verghese’s book is, indeed, a chunker at 724 pages. He makes it manageable by separating the story into sections (of which there are 10), each accompanied with a beautiful sketch (created by Verghese’s cousin, readers learn in the acknowledgement section at the book’s end). The first section concludes as tragedy tears at Big Ammachi’s life in Southern India (in 1908). Verghese leaves that narrative thread to twist a new vein in Glasgow, Scotland with a fatherless child named Digby Kilgour. Readers meet Digby as a boy and follow his life as he matriculates school. By 1933, life takes him to Madras, India. Time marches on and India experiences major change. Characters age and the reader meets new faces too. If readers feel lost in terms of keeping all the characters straight, Verghese’s website includes location-specific lists of characters to help. One section weaves into the next and readers return to the lives of characters years later as they experience life in all its unexpected complication: love, tragedy, success, addiction, and heartbreak.
The narrative sections of the book continue to feed into one another, all the tributaries promising, through subtle foreshadowing and a reader’s hope, to dump into one another and form a mighty river by the book’s conclusion. Years pass and the young bride of the first section becomes a mother and then a grandmother. Digby’s life leads him down paths he never anticipated. All the characters experience profound loss, grief, and pain. There is also a great deal of love, faith, joy, connection, and levity in the stories though too. Ultimately the story becomes that of Big Ammachi’s son, Philipose (the writer) and his beloved Elsie (the artist), then moves on to her namesake granddaughter and the life course she finds herself sailing.
The Covenant of Water held me to the final line, when with a tear in my eye, Verghese’s characters provide the reader a beautifully moving final image of love and connection. This is a book I urge any fans of literary fiction to invest in; readers will come away feeling the heaviness of loss they’ve witnessed, but also uplifted by the faith and love too. Certain lines about family and the secrets they keep repeat throughout The Covenant of Water; through the characters of Big Ammachi’s family and their unique saga, the reader will bear witness to truth about all families. As Verghese writes at one point in the novel: “Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives” (235). Suffice it to say, this is not a book that will disappoint.
Bibliography:
Verghese, Abraham. The Covenant of Water. Grove Press, 2023.
A Few Great Passages:
“’Happened is happened,’ our young bride will say when she becomes a grandmother, and when her granddaughter—her namesake—begs for a story about their ancestors. [ . . .] ‘Child, the past is past, and furthermore its different every time I remember it. I’ll tell you about the future, the one you will make.’” (15).
“The grandmother is certain of a few things: A tale that leaves its imprint on a listener tells the truth about how the world lives, and so, unavoidably, it is about families, their victories and wounds, and their departed, including the ghosts who linger; it must offer instructions for living in God’s realm, where joy never spares one from sorrow. A good story goes beyond what a forgiving God cares to do: it reconciles families and unburdens the secrets whose bond is stronger than blood. But in their revealing, as in their keeping, secrets can tear a family apart” (15-16).
“He’s reassured to think that no matter how disappointing humans can be, the bones, the muscles, and the viscera are constant, an unchanging interior architecture” (87).
“Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives” (235).
“[W]hat differentiates us from other animals isn’t the opposable thumb. It’s our brains. That’s what made us the dominant species. Not hands, but what we think to do with our hands.” (286).
“[W]hen I come to the end of a book and I look up, just four days have passed. But in the time I’ve lived through three generations and learned more about the world and about myself than I do during a year in school” (102).
“’Success is not money! Success is you are fully loving what you are doing. That only is success!’” (319).
“The antidote to shame is indignation, righteous anger” (388).
‘Such precious, precious water; Lord, water from our own well; this water that is our covenant with You, with this soil, with the life You granted us. We are born and baptized in this water, we grow full of pride, we sin, we are broken, we suffer, but with water we are cleansed of our transgressions, we are forgiven, and we are born again, day after day till the end of our days” (517).
“We are dying while we’re living, we are old even when we’re young, we are clinging to lif even as we resign ourselves to leaving it” (592).
“Every family has secrets, but not all secrets are meant to deceive. What defines a family is not blood, molay, but the secrets they share” (620).
“’Be useful,’ he said. I cut enough for three monsoon seasons. I noticed one of the logs take a shape of a toy soldier. I tried to refine it. I ended up with toothpicks. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was using my hands. Rune used to quote the Bible: ‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither though goest’” (685).
