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48 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Magnificent travel without leaving home, July 24, 2007
This review is from: Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman's Skiff (Hardcover)
The single word that summarizes this beautiful book is "exquisite." It is an exquisitely written travel diary, a brief and inquisitive glimpse into an alien world and culture, in a land that has entranced travellers, tourists, and adventurers for centuries. The result is neither patronizing nor rose-tinted, but compassionate, human, often perplexed, and occasionally fearful.
An accomplished rower, Rosemary Mahoney sets off to fulfil her long-time ambition to row down part of the Nile. Most regard her as stir crazy for even thinking about such a feat, particularly as a woman, in an Egypt paranoid about tourists travelling alone.
Her greatest difficulty turns out to be the seemingly simple task of procuring a boat. Having spent days in Aswan, trying to persuade somebody, anybody, to sell her a small craft, she eventually meets a gentle Nubian felucca captain, who agrees to let her use his boat on condition that he sail his felucca at a distance behind her for protection. Having successfully completed this leg of her trip, she travels to Luxor where she buys another boat and travels a farther stretch of the river to Qena, this time completely alone.
The real treasures in this book are the accounts of Rose's encounters with ordinary Egyptian people, from the giggling group of Nubian village girls, to the creepy Jimi Hendrix look-alike felucca captain. Her conversations with some of the Egyptian men make for wonderful reading. Their mixture of mischievousness, naivety, and malignity; their bizarre and unhealthy obsession with sex; their `doublethink' attitudes to Western and Muslim women, all offer a unique insight into the minds and culture of the people that is accessible, refreshing, and humorous.
Rosemary Mahoney's descriptive powers are at times breathtaking. Her language is simple and yet evocative: the reader can feel the tension in a room, hear the tone of voice in a conversation, see the baked skyline, and feel the oppressiveness of the heat. She has an unusual ability to capture the trivial detail that conveys the essential substance of a situation.
Armchair Interview says: This is one talented writer--and is a top-drawer book.
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28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Lady, please, let me help . . ., November 18, 2007
This review is from: Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman's Skiff (Hardcover)
Knowing that this book is about an American woman who makes it her mission to row a boat down a section of the Nile, you may think you've got an idea of what it's about. You don't. You have to read it. Just about anything you might anticipate doesn't happen. It's a travel book that's really about being a foreigner - and a woman - in a culture where both tourists and women are regarded with a mixture of fierce protectiveness and alarm. It's easy to use the word chauvinistic to describe the Egyptian men's response to Mahoney as she attempts to buy a row boat to start her journey in Aswan. But it's far more complex than that. Along the way, she meets men of all kinds, most determined to take her under their supervision, while making over-familiar advances. Only one, a Nubian, seems to regard her with the respect she is accustomed to, and half of the book has passed before she is able to finally make an arrangement with him that lets her borrow his boat, while he follows her downstream at a distance in another. Meanwhile the few women she meets envy her freedom and her ability, as a westerner, to move about in the world as she wants.
The journey she takes in the book is not so much about what she sees along the way. Like Florence Nightingale, Flaubert, and other earlier visitors to Egypt, whose travel writings she includes in the book, she focuses on how travel "washes one's eyes and clears away the dust." Illumination comes in the form of talks with the people she meets, and what they reveal is often a kind of perplexed dismay at the cultural ironies that weigh down the spirit and generate a longing for a life that is always elsewhere. Until the final pages, rowing down the Nile itself turns out to be mostly uneventful. Then a late-night encounter with another traveler on the river galvanizes all the pages leading up to it into an eye-clearing vision of what some would call a collision of cultures. Finally, this is a disturbing book that haunts one long afterwards with post-colonial images of a world strangely adrift and - what's the word for it - foreign.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
But what about Madeleine Stein?, October 14, 2007
This review is from: Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman's Skiff (Hardcover)
This book is a rather strange take on the usual "My Trip to Egypt" memoirs written by other intrepid adventurers to the area. Most of the book is spent with the author obsessively searching for a boat in which she can row herself down the Nile - alone. The quest to obtain such a boat brings her in contact with a bevy of wild and wonderful characters - none of them keen to see the author realize her ambition.
I thoroughly enjoyed Mahoney's description of the Egyptian people - their confusion as to why on earth a woman alone would want to row down the Nile, and their often bumbling efforts to allow them to do the rowing for her. She brilliantly evokes the feeling of the Nile and the Egyptian land, so that you can almost feel the heat from the sand and hear the river in it's relentless flow. I came to love the character Amr - a gentle Egyptian with a huge heart and even bigger spirit.
Mahoney peppers her account with fascinating insights from luminaries such as Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert, both of whom had travelled to Egypt in the previous century and had each written of their own
experiences. And along with the historical points of interest, Mahoney unearths all sorts of weird and wonderful facts that won't fail to surprise and titillate the reader.
But then we come to Madeleine Stein. Here is a woman who lives and works in Egypt, speaks fluent Arabic, is obviously somewhat of an adventurer, and she agrees to accompany the author down the Nile in order to satisfy the legal requirements of the inspectors. Indeed, the book is dedicated to her. A fascinating woman by anyone's account, but what does she look like? How old is she? Who does she live with? What does she think about things? Whereas Mahoney has intricately described every other character in the book, including herself from a self snapped photo, there is absolutely no quality information on Madelaine Stein other than the bare facts of her presence. This omission was almost irritating enough to deduct a star from my review.
Other than this, an enjoyable read and highly recommended.
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