Time and Place in The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
One thing it took me awhile to get used to with audiobooks is that they flow past you like water. You can’t stop them to make notes. Well, you can, but it interrupts the flow. The library app will let me rewind and listen to passages now and then but often they’re gone before I recognize that need.
There were many passages in Abraham Verghese’s novel, which he reads himself The Covenant of Water, that I wanted not only to revisit, but also to mark up and write notes about, and more, maybe I just wanted to see them. I wanted to see how they scanned on the page.
But since I didn’t have the physical book, I decided to quit overthinking and let the story wash by. In the end, that turned out to be the best way to listen to it.
Verghese reads this wonderfully so you want to keep listening. He varies pitch and tone, inflections and accents, even managing a faux Scottish accent for the Digby character. All of it comes across as oddly endearing.
There are images in this book that will stay with me forever. Sometimes they are of terrible things that happen to good people—the death of a child, the discovery of a family secret. At other times they are images of this very particular place and its very particular history. The description of Travancore, its past and its language and people, is fantastically woven in, with little asides that upend how the region is so often overlooked in wider histories of India.
Mind you, the framing of some elements of setting tripped me up in the opening chapters. Some of the descriptions felt underlined and outlined unnecessarily, as if to make sure that an audience unfamiliar with this lesser-known region of India would get it. Example: we hear the word chatta several times, enough to know it is an article of clothing. I recognized the word from its similarity to a Tamil one, derived from the English “shirt” but I think I’d get it even without that connection. Then we arrive at this: Concealment is also the goal of the shapeless, short sleeved V-neck blouse, the white chatta.” Groan!
There’s more like this. Mind you, I’m not sure if I just got used to it after a while, or if the examples stopped clustering in the narrative. Parethentical explanations always annoy me—they yank me out of the story and make me remember there’s a writer who wrote this book. Out of the book is not where I want my attention to wander.
The medical details also left me wanting to fast-forward, except I hate to do that in an audiobook and there’s no way to skim, the way you can with words on a page.
Still, there was much to admire here. Hours of wonderful listening, in fact. That said, I’d really like to read this one for myself, scanning words visually, skimming where I want to.
