Blurb:

The Covenant of Water is the long-awaited new novel by Abraham Verghese, the author of the major word-of-mouth bestseller Cutting for Stone, which has sold over 1.5 million copies in the United States alone and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for over two years.

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala’s long-existing Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl—and future matriarch, known as Big Ammachi—will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.

A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the difficulties undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. It is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.

Review

There are a lot of people who love this book. It was an Oprah book club pick. It was a New York Times bestseller. And it was a selection in an online book club I am in, A Book, A Beer, A Brotherhood.

Unfortunately, I was not in the group that loves this book. I struggled to get through it. I debated several times whether or not I should finish it. And while some of the more intriguing stuff was near the end, I probably should have given up on this one when I originally debated it. It was not bad by any means. And I can even see why people like the book, but it just did not resonate with me all that much, and with the enormous length of the book (731 pages in hardback or 31+ hours of audio) it became a chore for me. And with my ridiculous To Be Read list, I have to remember it is okay to not finish a book, no matter how much it is liked by others. There is no shortage of reading material out there, so don’t be afraid to move on. Yes, I’m talking to myself here as well.

As for an actual critique of the work, I don’t have much. This was a decades and generations long story of one family. And while that family has very much respectable members, the stories were only mildly interesting to me on the micro level, requiring the reader to think macro with the generational changes. That led to me to respecting the family story, but not loving it, if that makes sense.