The Covenant of Water (Oprah's Book Club) by Abraham Verghese on May 2, 2023
Genres: Fiction / Family Life / General, Fiction / Literary, Fiction / Medical, Fiction / World Literature / India / General
Pages: 736
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The Covenant of Water is a door stopper that I wasn’t sure was worth my time. I switched from print to audio to finish this one. The writing style is very lyrical and it is very slow moving but the characters are impressive.
This book starts with an interesting premise. That someone in each generation of this family carries “The Condition.” And what this condition is, is a drowning condition. Someone in each generation dies of a drowning. This one starts off with Big Ammachi as an adolescent to an older widower in Travancore, South India. We track her progression into older age and learn about the influence of Hinduism (the most widely professed faith in Kerala), the Muslims, and Christians. We learn about the high volume of drowning cases in Kerala. A small child, JoJo dies early on near the start of this novel in a shallow river. This sets a revealing stage that the drownings, called ‘The Condition’ for storytelling purposes, are generational fears/the curse, as drownings continued to happen throughout seventy-something years (and are still happening today).
This book covers the lives of so many people that I couldn’t begin to cover them all. (hence the BIG BIG book) I did enjoy all the connection’s that were made throughout the book with all the characters. I continued to read this to find out what the outcome was going to be. In the end, we find out a lot of medical information and how it relates to the family. I feel like this story is all about connections.
The Covenant of Water is a door stopper that I did have a hard time getting into at times, but I did enjoy it overall. I thought this could have been about 200 pages shorter and I’m not typically into character based stories, so this one was better than I expected. This is also an Oprah pick so that should have given me an indication of the low action level. But the characters were amazing and the connections that were eventually made surprised me in the end. If you like character based stories, you will love this one. If you don’t, this one might bore you.