Second paragraph of third chapter:
As a schoolgirl studying geography in Madras, India, Hema had to mark where coal and wool were produced on a map of the British Isles. Africa figured in the curriculum as a playground for Portugal, Britain, and France, and a place for Livingstone to find the spectacular falls he named after Queen Victoria, and for Stanley to find Livingstone. In future years, as my brother, Shiva, and I made the journey with Hema, she would teach us the practical geography she had taught herself. She’d point down to the Red Sea and say, “Imagine that ribbon of water running up like a slit in a skirt, separating Saudi Arabia from Sudan, then farther up keeping Jordan away from Egypt. I think God meant to snap the Arabian Peninsula free of Africa. And why not? What do the people on this side have in common with the people on the other side?”
Another long book which I was reading alongside Paladin of Souls, this came to my attention as the best-known book set in Ethiopia , a country that I know mainly because I once spent two days in Addis Ababa by accident (my flight to Juba was delayed) in April 2010. It’s a fascinating country, with 135 million inhabitants, more than any other African country except Nigeria and more than any European country except Russia (if that counts). At present it is suffering a lot of internal instability, but when Ethiopia has its act together the rest of us will need to pay attention. Dervla Murphy visited it in more innocent times.
Most of Cutting for Stone is set in Addis, the protagonist being the son of an Indian mother and American father, brought up in a hospital with his twin brother; both of them train to be doctors, like their parents, and live through the tumultuous years of the third quarter of the twentieth century (the protagonist is born in 1954, and flees to the USA in 1979). It’s told from a place of love and sympathy for Ethiopia and its people; I actually felt it went slightly off track when we eventually reach America and the search for the protagonist’s long-lost father, and the climax of the book, involving sexually transmitted hepatitis and a liver transplant, was a bit too neat (and not very empowering for the women in the story). The faint-hearted will also be deterred by surgical details throughout the book, especially the graphic gynæcological descriptions at the beginning.
Still, I very much enjoyed it. The author himself was born and brought up in a medical environment in Addis Ababa, so he clearly knows whereof he writes. He is a year younger than the central character of the book, he left Ethiopia in 1974 rather than 1979, and both his parents are Indian rather than just one, so it’s not completely autobiographical, but must include a lot of life experience (there is nonetheless an impressive bibliography). You can get it here.
This was my top unread non-genre fiction book. Next on that list is Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch.
