Cutting for Stone (again)

It isn't often that a book and its characters continue to haunt my consciousness after I've finished reading the book. Of course it's the reason some books become classics, the people who inhabit the book really seem to exist. They are three-dimensional or multidimensional people. Think of Leopold Bloom, Anna and Vronsky, Elizabeth Bennet, Billy Prior, Shakespeare's vividly realized Rosiland, Lear, and a host of others; Charles Dickens's crowded city of all kinds of folk with oddly apt names like Scrooge and Pickwick, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, and so many others who come to life on the page. It's one reason these works are classics. Now I have another book to add to the list. Long after I finished reading it, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, Marion Stone, his twin brother Shiva, Ghosh the dedicated internal medicine specialist turned surgeon, Hema, Genet, and others who inhabit Cutting for Stone, live on still with me. The book ends in high drama close to melodrama and a surgical feat that strains credibility but is nonetheless possible, maybe has even been performed by now; by the time you get to the end you can believe it really happened, feel for the twin who lived and the enigmatic one who did not. That's why I think this book will become a classic; and I hope Abraham Verghese will write more I can read while I am still able to read.