Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0653/2006034168-d.html
Available:*
Library | Collection | Collection | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Beale Memorial Library (Kern Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Adult Non-Fiction | 916.20455 MAH | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Bear Mountain Branch (Fresno Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Non-fiction Area | 916.20455 MAH | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Betty Rodriguez Library (Fresno Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Non-fiction Area | 916.20455 MAH | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Delhi Branch Library (Merced Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Non-Fiction | 916.2 MAH | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Frazier Park Branch (Kern Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Adult Non-Fiction | 916.20455 MAH | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Fresno Central Library (Fresno Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Non-fiction Area | 916.20455 MAH | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Visalia Library (Tulare Co.) | Searching... Unknown | Non-Fiction Area | 916.2045 MAH | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Rosemary Mahoney presents an exciting and amusing adventure that offers a fresh view of Egypt in the past and the present.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly 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) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
New York Review of Books Review
THEY follow her along the banks of the Nile, entreating: "Halloo. Come here!" They hike up their djellabas and wade in after her. They want to row for her; they insist they are "bolice" officers. And in ways at once oddly innocent and salacious, they nudge the conversation toward sex. Of the Egyptian men she encountered in Aswan and Luxor, Rosemary Mahoney writes: "You never knew whether to give them a brisk slap for the impertinence or to welcome the irreproachable trust they seemed to offer. It was ... what made them interesting." And most of them refuse to sell her a rowboat. It's a good thing, for in this quest for a boat in a culture so at odds with her own, the author is vexed and perplexed and bemused all of this rendered in gorgeously vivid prose. Mahoney, the author of four previous works of nonfiction, most recently "The Singular Pilgrim: Travels on Sacred Ground," arrives in sweltering Aswan, more than 500 miles south of Cairo, intent on making a solo rowing trip down the Nile. It is 1998, a year after the massacre of 58 tourists at the Temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor, but security issues aren't her greatest obstacles. A woman rowing a boat? For fun? Fishermen laugh at her, dismiss her, flirt with her. Worn out by the banter and fed up with having to create a fictitious husband - the dozy fellow wants a boat but is always napping in the hotel - she is astonished when Amr, a gravely polite Nubian felucca captain, simply says: "This is my boat. You can using it any times. ... Just take if it is there." Mahoney, who has been rowing for 10 years, brilliantly juxtaposes an account of her own palm-blistering hours on the Nile (where "batlike green bee-eaters darted over my head like gaudy bits of paper" and dogs sat in the water "blinking grimly in the terrible sunlight") with the diary entries of two Victorian travelers - Gustave Flaubert and Florence Nightingale. They were both on the Nile in 1849, often visiting the same sites at the same time, although there's no record they met. Their diaries expose the feverish excitement a journey down the river held for Victorians and offer a hilarious study in contrasts. Nightingale is up for any adventure; on climbing the Great Pyramid, she noted, "as to the difficulty ... there is none." Arab guides haul the "sometimes prissily melodramatic" Flaubert to the top. Nightingale is so well versed in Egyptian history she writes about Cheops and Rameses II "as if they were long-lost neighbors." Temples bore Flaubert; instead he visits bathhouses and prostitutes. And documents his exploits. "I performed on a mat that a family of cats had to be shooed off," he writes of one encounter. Much has changed since the Victorians traveled in large comfortable boats called dahabiehs - "a bit like floating down the Nile in a brownstone," Mahoney says. Cruise boats full of boozy revelers now ply the river, and sweaty tourists clamber aboard feluccas, the classic lanteen-rigged sailboats. But surprising things remain the same. Walking over a barren hill on Elephantine Island near Aswan, Mahoney steps on bones, discovers pieces of turquoise faience and is "startled by the sight of a mummy's linen-wrapped skull and shoulders poking out from the side of a mound of dirt." Florence Nightingale described the same site: "Such a world as might have been turned out of the cauldron of Macbeth's Weird Sisters." This intriguing book encompasses far more than Mahoney's hours on the Nile and a delicious recounting of the river's history. Her visits to Amr's home on Elephantine Island, one of the oldest continually inhabited sites in Egypt, provide an intimate glimpse into the lives of rural Egyptians. On seeing Amr's invalid mother, wrapped in layers of heavy black clothing and staring at a ubiquitous flickering TV, Mahoney writes, "Frailty and sadness seemed to be holding the woman captive, and it made me uneasy to be standing there looking at her this way." The author has a gift for revealing apparently unremarkable moments in such a way as to make them utterly engrossing. She badgers the men she talks to about their assumptions concerning Western women and the restrictive demands they place on their wives. But even Amr, who is unlike any other man she has met in her travels, simply says: "This is Nubian way from long time ago. ... Nubian woman should not be doing nothing. Nothing. They should only be staying home and minding the house." The women she meets - Safaa, who works at a hotel and loves to exclaim the word "crap," which she picked up from tourists; Hoda, Amr's radiant sister, whose deformed foot will surely determine her life as a spinster - chafe at this expectation. But black gowns and veils can't suppress the giddiness as the young women of Elephantine Island prepare for a night out - captured in a madcap scene with wailing Nubian music and hysterical laughter. Mahoney rows from Aswan to Edfu - a three-day journey - in Amr's boat with Amr following in his felucca. She then takes a taxi to Luxor, where mobs of Europeans soak up the sun in skimpy attire and young Egyptian men work as gigolos. The inevitable conversations about sex - with Ahmed, a male prostitute, and Adel, a lawyer - are surreal, lurid and terribly sad. The freedom of being able to talk to a Western woman in an open way soon dissipates, and we see men who are frustrated and bored, struggling against the strictures of Islamic culture. The rowboat Mahoney finally buys is decorated with Arabic writing and painted red hearts. Alone on the river, she feels "a rare, raw, immediate sort of happiness that was directly related to my physical situation, to my surroundings, to independence and to solitude." The pollution around Luxor gives the dawn a "beefy, congested hue," but soon she is rowing through a timeless landscape, past ancient mud houses and Coptic churches. The exotic birds are unafraid of her. A call to prayer carries over the river, the voice with "a plaintive catch in it, a thrilling break that seemed to express great emotion." The satisfaction of eating a simple dinner alone on a small island, the notion of feeling free as a hobo, vanishes when night falls. Cockroaches scuttle out of the boat, and her fears make sleep almost impossible. At the end of her journey, she sits exhausted in her boat at the Qena waterfront. A nighttime encounter with a fisherman named Mahmoud has left her deeply unsettled; and in untangling the knot of her emotions, she concludes, "He had very little English and therefore no graceful or subtle or polite way to make himself understood, to make himself human." With her sinuous and richly textured writing and her eye for vivid and startling details, she has done that for Mahmoud. And for Hoda and Amr, for joyless Adel and for Safaa, who, at the end of their visit, said: "Rose, I tell you. I wish I could be free like you." The inevitable conversations Mahoney has with Egyptian men about sex are surreal, lurid and terribly sad. Lisa Fugard has written frequently for The Times's Travel section and is the author of a novel, "Skinner's Drift."
Table of Contents
| The River That Flows the Wrong Way | p. 3 |
| Aswan | p. 21 |
| The First Small Boat in Egypt | p. 49 |
| The Cataract Islands | p. 67 |
| At Elephantine | p. 88 |
| Hoda and the Women | p. 103 |
| Not Floating but Flying | p. 118 |
| Maritime Etiquette | p. 136 |
| A Night at Silwa | p. 160 |
| Luxor | p. 180 |
| A Boat of My Own | p. 194 |
| Alone | p. 214 |
| Fear Afloat | p. 234 |
| Bibliography | p. 271 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 275 |