Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman's Skiff
"A pilgrimage about pilgrims and holy places that is not only enlightening but also very funny." -Paul Theroux (on The Singular Pilgrim)
"Mahoney is a wonderfully effective catalytic agent: she goes to Ireland and just makes the country happen around her." -Jonathan Raban (on Whoredom in Kimmage)
"Mahoney, who has been rowing for 10 year, brilliantly juxtaposes an account of her own palm-blistering hours on the Nile....with the diary entries of two Victorian travelers-Gustave Flaubert and
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Product Details
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This is travel writing at its most enjoyable: the reader is taken on a great trip with an erudite travel companion soaking up scads of history, culture and literary knowledge, along with the scenery. The genesis for the trip is simple: the author's love of rowing. Her plan, "to buy a small Egyptian rowboat and row myself along the 120-mile stretch of river between the cities of Aswan and Qena," is less so. Mahoney (The Singular Pilgrim; Whoredom in Kimmage) conveys readers along the longest river in the world, through narrative laced with insight, goodwill and sometimes sadness. Mahoney's writing style is conversational, her use of metaphor adept. She cleverly marshals the writings of numerous river travelers but focuses on "two troubled geniuses": Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert. The device allows readers a backward glance at the Edwardian travel accoutrements of sumptuous riverside dinners, staggering supplies of alcohol and food, trunks of books and commodious accommodations. The physical environment is demanding. "When I removed my hat, the sun had made the top of my head sting... it was like having a freshly baked nail driven into one's skull." Yet her biggest obstacle isn't the climate but the slippery hurdles of culture and sex. Whether struggling to buy a boat, visiting historic Luxor or rowing, innocent encounters become sticky psychological and philosophical snares. Still, the ride is smooth, leaving the reader wishing for more nautical miles. (July 11)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Boston native and avid rower Rosemary Mahoney, once an assistant to playwright Lillian Hellman, has led a peripatetic life, and her writing reflects the breadth of her travels and the depth of her thinking on cultural matters. Previous efforts include The Early Arrival of Dreams, the author's experiences in China just before Tiananmen Square; The Singular Pilgrim, a spiritual travelogue; and Whoredom in Kimmage, a treatise on Irish gender roles. In On the Nile, the author writes beautifully of the connections between culture and history-though critics note how reluctantly she shares details of her own life outside her travels. Still, Mahoney's voice is direct and honest, her Nile as evocative as Paul Bowles's desert, her wit a counterbalance to the unease engendered by such a profound cultural divide.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
Review
'Mahoney, who has been rowing for 10 year, brilliantly juxtaposes an account of her own palm-blistering hours on the Nile...with the diary entries of two Victorian travelers-Gustave Flaubert and Florence Nightingale.' Lisa Fugard, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 'Sensuous and richly textured writing and an eye for vivid and startling details' NEW YORK TIMES 'Utterly frank; sometimes rather scary; often extremely witty, brave and revealing in its generalizations; and above all essentially kind' - Jan Morris
Customer Reviews
Falls short
When I bought this book I thought I had found the Freya Stark of the 21st century, but after reading the first few chapters I realize Rosemary Mahoney was anything but. This is not the adventure that the picture on the cover implies. It's a story of an unprepared American tourist that spoke very little Arabic, who took a short journey on part of the Nile after spending far too much time trying to procure a rowing boat.
I did enjoy the excerpts from the diaries of Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert who traveled the Nile a century and a half ago, and the book is very well written and somewhat insightful. However it could have been so much better had the author been fluent in Arabic and had spent more time on the river. Perhaps Rosemary should have written about her friend Madeleine she briefly mentions, who sounds far more interesting and adventurous.
For anyone who wants to read about a real woman adventurer in the Middle East, check out Freya;
The Valleys of the Assassins: and Other Persian Travels (Modern Library Paperbacks)
Amazing
I read this book because I enjoyed another book, Whoredom in Kimmage, by the same author. This one, though very different, is every bit as excellent. I have done business in several developing countries, including Egypt, and I found Mahoney extremely well informed. Her descriptions are surprisingly on the mark for a person who only spent a total of three months in the country. The book is full of history, detail, and fascinating information about the Egyptians and their culture. The writing is beautiful. It's also very colorful and funny. But for me, the most moving part of the book is the story that lies at its heart: the tender and mutually respectful friendship the author finds with a Nubian man who accepted her desire to row on the river and helped her realize it. The story is just beautiful. Mahoney's affection and interest for him--and his for her-- is a model for the way we all should treat people from other cultures.
Mahoney makes no pretensions to being an Egypt expert, just a curious traveller. She also doesn't pretend to have had a "grand" adventure. She makes it clear that the part of the Nile she wanted to row was just a fraction of that river. She prepared carefully for her trip and followed it through with guts, persistence, and patience. The book is obviously not about rowing but about all the things that happened on her way to fulfilling a dream and the lessons she learned, which is what it makes it so human and interesting. She finds Egypt beautiful, complex, and compelling and describes it in a vivid and intelligent style.
Mahoney went all over Egypt alone, striking up conversations with strangers, visiting their houses with curiosity, openness, and an attitude of acceptance that is rare. She was sensitive and thoughtful and talked with nearly every person she met, many of whom were men who followed her down the street drilling her with intimate questions, telling her that all foreign women are prostitutes, and making lewd comments. This a common occurrence in Luxor and Aswan. But Mahoney is very perceptive, even-handed, and forgiving about it. Just read this passage about a felucca captain who tricked and mocked her:
"Hussein . . . had tricked me, I knew, as much in bitterness as in fun. More than one felucca captain in Egypt resented the foreigners they served. It was understandable: they earned a marginal living facilitating the leisure of privileged individuals who came to bask in the exotic scenery and mysterious history of Aswan; people who stayed in five-star hotels that the languishing locals in their dusty flip-flops were not allowed to enter; people, pale and plump, who had enough money to bask in a false superiority yet haggled ferociously over pennies with their malnourished hosts . . . the condescension Hussein showed me was likely an echo of the condescension he received."
I could quote many passages like this one.
I read a lot of travel literature. The best travel books are always comprehensive, colorful, and balanced. I'm sure you won't find a more intelligent, informative, self-aware, or sympathetic travel narrative about Egypt than this one.
Highly Recommended
Rosemary Mahoney has a rare sense of clear-eyed wonder that -- combined with great writing -- makes this book a rare delight.
As someone who has lived in the Middle East, I found her descriptions realistic, honest and always engaging. I wanted to pull out an especially great passage as an example and I ended up feeling like a kid in a toy store -- this one, no, this one. There is rarely a word that doesn't hit the mark, a description that doesn't ring with wonder. This is travel writing at its best.
I won't give you the basic plotline; I'm sure that's in a dozen other reviews. I will just leave you with this excerpt from the book: "Aswan's desert air seems to caress the town with warm promise, lending vividness and meaning to manifestions of poverty and and human struggle that would elsewhere be considered ugly. The piles of garbage, the heaps of smoldering ashes, the scatterings of broken glass, the architectural rubble, the human excrement, the sun-bleached plastic shopping bags and rusted tin cans that seem to ring all Egyptian villages and besmirch every empty plane between them are, in Aswan, softened by the sheer volume of sun and water, color and air. Here, fishermens's houses cobbled together out of mud bricks and rusted tin cans appear somehow more ingenious than slovenly, more fascinating than dispiriting."
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