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Around the World in Books / Ethiopia
When Men Got Swigs of Johnnie Walker Before Vasectomies
Clichés and Oprah-ready ideas take a toll on an overrated bestseller about twin brothers in Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia
This is the sixth book in the “Around the World in Books” series of 30 reviews of books from 30 countries that are appearing during the first 30 days March in alphabetical order of the country names. Tomorrow: France
Maybe he should have called the book Cutting for Oliver Stone. Abraham Verghese’s first novel abounds with far-fetched characterizations, heavy-handed moralizing, and historical implausibilities reminiscent of the melodrama in some of Stone’s more paranoid films, such as JFK.
But you wonder if even Stone would have taken the liberties Verghese does in this tale of mirror-image identical twin brothers — one is right-handed, the other left-handed — born in Addis Ababa in 1954. Marion and Shiva are orphaned at birth by the death of their mother and the disappearance of their father. As luck would have it, and luck often does have it in this novel, the twins grow up as the wards of sympathetic doctors who guide them toward medical careers as the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front steps up its activity against…
