In order to start to get rid of your slippers, you have to admit they are yours, and if you do, then they will get rid of themselves. The slippers in the story mean that everything you see and do and touch, every seed you sow, or don't sow, becomes part of your destiny. That night the old man died in his sleep. Why try to lose them? He'll never escape.' The old man laughed, and he seemed happy when he said that. 'One night when Tawfiq finished, another prisoner, a quiet dignified old man, said, 'Abu Kassem might as well build a special room for his slippers. But his every attempt to get rid of his slippers ended in disaster: when he tossed them out of his window they landed on the head of a pregnant woman who miscarried, and Abu Kassem was thrown in jail when he dropped them in the canal, the slippers choked off the main drain and caused flooding, and off Abu Kassem went to jail. At last, even he couldn't stomach the sight of them. The title derives from a line in the Hippocratic Oath warning against medical hubris, and the novel’s signature move is to carry questions of ethics, duty, love and faith directly to the drama of the operating table.“It was a tale well known to children all over Africa: Abu Kassem, a miserly Baghdad merchant, had held on to his battered, much repaired pair of slippers even though they were objects of derision.

His breakout was the 2009 novel “Cutting for Stone,” a sprawling family saga whose plot hinges on disease and surgical procedures. Verghese, who was raised in an Indian family in Ethiopia, practiced medicine in India and the U.S., and his first book, the 1994 memoir “My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story,” elucidated his work with the invisible victims of AIDS/HIV in rural Tennessee in the 1980s. Today the economic realities are such that just about the only professional designation realistically available to writers is writing instructor, which accounts for the hermeticism of so much current literature-its tendency to be mostly about itself-and may explain the popularity of exceptions such as Abraham Verghese, a doctor turned smash bestseller.ĭr. There was a time, back when literature enjoyed a central position in culture, that novels were commonly informed by worldly experience statesmen, civil servants, scientists and other specialists were apt to have a hand in the game. Photo: Frank Bienewald/LightRocket/Getty Imagesįor the fiction writer, expertise has become something of a superpower.

A woman offers flowers at the Triveni Sangam, the confluence of the Ganges, Yamuna and Saraswati rivers in Uttar Pradesh, India.

Verghese cutting for stone