A Tale of Two Readings

Well, first of all I'm grateful to both Dr. Verghese and Mr. Banville for being so gracious and thoughtful when being interviewed by yours truly after their respective readings at the podium. I must admit that while I sat in the audience listening to the two novelists I almost forgot that soon I would have to get up on stage myself, so taken was I by the passages they chose to read. Given that The Infinities is just out in this country, I suppose that I was one of the few people in the hall last night who has had a chance to read both books, so I had the privilege of hearing the authors read passages that I'd read just a few days before. Hearing the author read a particular passage, of course, is an even richer experience than simply rereading it yourself.

The passages that Verghese and Banville read, and indeed their styles of delivery, were quite different, but in each case I felt as if a dimension had been added to the text. Dr. Verghese's reading underscored the comic inventiveness of Cutting for Stone. This comic vision does nothing to take away from the emotional impact of a story that is often, as Verghese's character Dr. Hema might put it, "more than tragic." Verghese's fictional vision is, ultimately, an all-embracing one. His mention of Dickens as an important influence makes a lot of sense.

Whereas the passages, especially the second one, that Dr. Verghese read were visceral, immediate, dizzying, hilarious, Mr. Banville's chosen passage was quiet, haunted, brooding; it had, I thought, a kind of slow-burning brilliance, for it took an unexpected turn and revealed itself to be more than just the memoir of a provincial childhood it--and, specifically, a child's apprehension of death--at first appeared to be. The turn came in the mother's tears falling into the cake mix, after the father's death. The boy's fascination with the sifted ingredients, those powdery domestic atoms, is the beginning of his initiation of the scientific mysteries. The passage, extracted from the mind of a dying man, was as much about the birth of the theoretical physicist as the death of the small-town father.

Verghese's Dr. Ghosh practiced a different kind of science, just as profound in its way, just as concerned with existence and non-existence.

Posted on Tue, March 2, 2010 by Robert Cremins

« Go Back

No comments (Add your own)

Add a New Comment

Your Name:

Your Email/URL (Optional):

Your Comment:

Enter the code you see below:
code

Comment Guidelines: No HTML is allowed. Off-topic or inappropriate comments will be edited or deleted. Thanks.