A Cafe on the Nile [Paperback]

Bartle Bull (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 16, 1999

East Africa, 1935. A nation sits at the brink of war, a city is fraught with conspiracy, and at the Cataract Café in Cairo, a colorful cast of characters - professional hunter Anton Rider, his estranged wife and her Italian lover, the pampered American twins Bernadette and Harriet Mills, a German freebooter who has stolen a fortune in silver from the Italian army, the Goan dwarf and café proprietor Olivio Alevado - gathers to gamble with destiny. "Pulses with entertainment value . . . The sort of yarn that can keep you up late at night . . . [A] spirited, sensuous, hot-blooded evocation of a rich and eventful historical world" - Richard Bernstein, New York Times "A breathtakingly entertaining historical novel . . . packed with daring exploits and sinister intrigues, with larger-than-life characters and exotic locales" - Orlando Sentinel "An enthralling novel" - Booklist "[A] rattling good blockbuster yarn" - Publishers Weekly "A Café on the Nile achieves the aim of fiction: The reader gladly suspends disbelief." - Houston Chronicle "[Bull] is a terrific novelist." - San Jose Mercury News

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Where are the new Casablancas coming from? Here's one possible source. Bartle Bull, a lawyer, publisher, explorer, and writer, centers his latest thriller at the Cataract Cafe, a floating version of Rick's in 1935 Cairo. The owner, Olivio, is a dwarf from Goa, and his regular customers include a stalwart British professional hunter, his unfaithful wife and her lover, an Italian aviator, American twin sisters in search of all kinds of adventure, and various rogue Germans, including a doctor who regrets not being able to use Olivio for medical research. Bull's writing is wry and deceptively simple:

The waiter set before the doctor a glass of warm boiled water and the flesh of a Nile perch, cleaned from the bone and rearranged on the plate in the shape of a smaller fish. The water was pink from the three spoonfuls of vinegar that had been stirred into it, the day's first weapon in his battle with arthritis. The German leaned forward. His high hooked nose hung over the table like a chimney over a fireplace as he widened his nostrils and smelled the fish.

Outside the cafe, larger forces are at work: Mussolini is helping to start World War II with his attacks on Abyssinia, and other countries are jockeying for power. By focusing on the lives of a few assorted cafe goers, Bull makes his book add up to much more than a hill of beans--he gives us a rich, exciting picture of a world about to disappear. --Dick Adler --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Bull, an explorer who turned his extensive knowledge of Africa to excellent use in The White Rhino Hotel, has produced another rattling good blockbuster yarn. The description seems inevitable, because this is very much a period pieceAthe period being 1935 (a few years before The English Patient takes place), when Mussolini was flexing his military muscle in Africa and pouring men and munitions through the Suez Canal for the conquest of Abyssinia, in one of the harsh prologues to WWII. The large and spirited cast includes Olivio Alavedo, the wily Goan dwarf who runs the Cataract Cafe on a barge in Cairo; his friend Anton Rider (a British great white hunter raised in England by gypsies), whose long absences on safari have spoiled his marriage to plucky Gwenn. She, alas, takes up with a suave but untrustworthy Italian flying ace, Count Grimaldi, and soon finds herself, when the attack on Abyssinia begins, trying to patch up the natives his planes are massacring. Other characters include a pair of sexy, sharp-shooting American female twins on Anton's war-beleaguered safari, a grizzled German adventurer attempting to make off with Italian silver booty and a delightfully languid British aristocrat, Adam Penfold, who seems to know everyone. The action is nonstop, the details are rawly authentic and the whole thing makes for a fast-paced and absorbing, if somewhat old-fashioned, read. The only problem is that Bull seems to take rather excessive relish in the many imaginatively brutish ways in which men kill each other.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press (November 16, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786706759
• ISBN-13: 978-0786706754
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #966,174 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sample the exotic treachery, intrigue, and love, July 16, 2000

By 

Kay Mitchell - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: A Cafe on the Nile (Carroll & Graf) (Hardcover)

A beautiful cover led me initially to this book as the Sphinx glowed from the clouds amidst palms and distant mountains. The exotic beckoned as I iimagined what interesting pleasures might issue forth from a "cafe on the Nile." I was not disappointed!. A cast of fascinating characters led me into the labyrinths of intrigue, love, and war, not to mention the treachery and calculating energy that existed in Cairo in the early days of WWII. A brilliant and wealthy dwarf, a German soldier of fortune, an English gypsy safari leader and his medical student wife, an impoverished English Lord, and energetic twin sisters from Kentucky make up the main cast of characters, but there are numerous enduring indigenous characters that round out the multi-layered ethnic mixture of Egypt and Africa. This is a novel of intrugue, of close ties of friendship and of betrayal. It focuses on the Italian campaign in Africa where the Italians violated all rules of civilized warfare when they dropped poison gas on thousands of Abyssinian warriors and bombed Red Cross hospital tents. The ensuing torture and vengeance that traveled with their forces illustrates the horror of war and what it can do do one's humanity. Another element of this novel that distinguishes it from the usual historical novel is its focus on the pleasures offered in that part of the world that might be considered decadent in other cultures but that exists hand in hand with the austerity of Islam and the hypocrisy of Chrisianity. Sexual favors and delights are there for the enjoyig, given freely as gifts, as bribes, and as favors. Here the exotic manifests itself in an enchanting and throbbing rhythm that whets the appetite without being vulgar. In addition, the actual love affairs and intimate relations thrill without repulsing. All in all, this is a novel full of energy and excitement. History is there as well as adventure, intrigue and international affairs. Descriptions of the African bush are as beautiful and poetic as the animal and plant life that charm and enchant those on safari. To read Cafe on the Nile is to enter a world of fascinating intrigue and drama that dashes from start to finish, leaving the reader breathless and wishing for more.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Cafe on the Nile, November 20, 2000

By 

John Ellingson - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Cafe on the Nile (Carroll & Graf) (Hardcover)

I read an average of two books a week. This is the best book I have read this year. This book has a fast moving plot and delightful characters and a pace I haven't seen since I read the Hardy Boys mysteries as a child. Bull has chosen a location and time that is unfamiliar to most of us. The historical setting alone is worth the time. His turn of phrase comes close to the quality of Tom Robbins with a richness of lexicon that is like rich chocolate. The predecessor novel The White Rhino Hotel is also worth your time. I only wish Bull were more prolific.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Rip-roaring Old-fashioned Read!, March 25, 2000

By 

Stuart W. Mirsky "swm" (New York, USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: A Cafe on the Nile (Paperback)

They don't write 'em like this anymore. Or at least they don't write and publish enough of them. Here is a tale of high adventure set in the wilds of Africa (from the rough and tumble city of Cairo, Egypt to the highlands of Ethiopia) on the eve of World War II. Bull writes vividly about a fascinating cast of characters caught up in events which are both world shaking and personally significant to each of them. World War I is only just behind these people and World War II is already looming on the horizon. Fascist Italy has pretensions to empire in Africa and poison gas is to be the key to it. All the while, the Goan dwarf, Olivio Fonseca Alavedo, is poised to grow rich with his schemes to corner the cotton market while his friends are struggling with the Depression-induced poverty of the thirties.

Into this shaken time come twin sisters from America, paying for a safari to be conducted by Olivio's old friend, the hunter Anton Rider out of Kenya, while Anton's lovely wife Gwenn, who has left him to do something more significant with her life, and for her two sons, lives nearby, the mistress of a clever Italian air force officer whose attentions enable her to pursue her medical studies at the University of Cairo. An elder, down-at-the-heels English gentleman rounds out Olivio's little circle of close friends while the rough-edged German adventurer, Ernst von Decker, shows up to draw Rider into his own schemes.

Although the players are mostly of the stock sort, they are engagingly drawn. I loved how Bull portrays the "white hunter", Rider, as a veritable fish out of water in the mean streets of Cairo, stumbling awkwardly about and giving his prospective clients second thoughts about him, yet a man who is masterfully competent in his own milieu in the bush. And the Goan dwarf, Olivio, is an especially intriguing (and oddly touching) personality in his machinations to outlast and defeat his scheming enemies in the Cairene bureaucracy while grappling with personal disabilities which would defeat lesser souls.

And yet, there was something pro-forma about it all. One of the inside blurbs called this book "a cup of CASABLANCA, a dollop of Isak Dinesen, a pinch of INDIANA JONES and a touch of TENDER IS THE NIGHT." I think that's about right and that it makes for a very heady brew if you like this sort of thing. As it happens, I do. There were, however, a few problems since the tale did seem somewhat drawn out and not nearly as compelling in the middle as at the end. And I was made a bit uncomfortable by the constant shifts between locales and story lines as the action was continuously deferred in one place to look in on alternating players elsewhere as the tale progressed.

My own preference is for a story which pretty much carries you right through the main line of action. But the varying streams were each interesting in their own way and, while slowing up the read, did not finally halt it. I found myself more and more anxious to see how the characters would work themselves out of their various predicaments (though I never doubted for a moment that they would). Although they were not the deepest of personalities and were plainly stereotypes, they were nicely drawn for the most part (though I had some problem with the lack of presence of Olivio's Kikuyu wife, Kina).

There is a bit of graphic sexuality and violence here but nothing that seemed out of the way for this sort of book and the events it portrayed. However, I thought Mr. Bull's credibility and authorial authority somewhat compromised in the end when he consistently referred to crocodiles as amphibians rather than the reptiles they are. At first I thought it an editorial slip but he did it more than once which I found jarring (though not debilitating to the tale which did seem to reflect a real feel for the terrain). I guess Mr. Bull is just not strong in the sciences . . . or had a momentary lapse. Yet, with all these caveats I have to pound the table for this book because most of the time I wanted to keep going back despite all and, in the end, I couldn't stop until I'd finished it. And when I had, it felt as though I'd been there.

SWM
author of The King of Vinland's Saga