Banville and Verghese: Twin Writers?

At first glance, John Banville and Abraham Verghese--who both read on March 1, the next date in this year's Brown Reading Series--are very different writers. On the one hand, we have an Irishman who has been publishing literary novels for decades; on the other, an Indian-Ethiopian-American who established himself as an eminent doctor before publishing two memoirs and now, with Cutting for Stone, an acclaimed debut novel.

But there are more similarities here than meet the eye. Both men have duel careers: Banville was a newspaper editor for many years, and now "moonlights" as the crime writer Benjamin Black. One can hardly call Verghese's life as a physician moonlighting--his writing and doctoring careers seem more like the helixes that make up his vocational DNA--but he also must be familiar, all too familiar, with the business of competing demands on his time.

Both writers are great stylists, and there are also points of connection in the content of their work, too. For example, Cutting for Stone revolves around the story of a pair of twins, Marion and Shiva Stone; and the novel which won Banville the Booker Prize in 2006, The Sea, concerns narrator Max Morden's childhood fascination with another pair of twins, Chloe and Myles.

Twins, of course, are one of the great devices, one of the great engines of storytelling. For example, what would Shakespeare's comedies be without twins? In Twelfth Night (my personal favorite) we have Viola and Sebastian. The Comedy of Errors features not one but two pairs of identical twins. And, of course, when you get to thinking of figurative twins and doubles, the literary floodgates open.

Posted on Mon, February 8, 2010 by Robert Cremins

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