Customer Reviews

Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman's Skiff

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I recently returned from a tour of Egypt and a 5 day cruise down the Nile, and I've got to say that Ms. Mahoney has written one great story about this charming and mysterious country. Myself being a single woman and traveling alone in this strange land, I must say that this author is spot on with her descriptions and characterizations of everything Egyptian and there aren't enough words to say how much I enjoyed this book.

I highly recommend this book to anyone planning a trip to Egypt, especially single women traveling alone.

Over the past couple of months I've read all five of Rosemary Mahoney's books. The first one I read, Whoredom in Kimmage, I picked up because I have an interest in Ireland. I couldn't put the book down, mainly because of the author's perceptions, style, and voice. After Whoredom in Kimmage, my favorite of her books is Down the Nile. This story is so quirky and funny and informative and, like all her books, well-written. I gave the book to a friend of mine, an American, who lived in Cairo for four years. He, too, loved it and even confessed he envied her nerve to do what she had done: find a boat and row 125 miles down the Nile. (I read only one negative review of this book here at Amazon, also from an American who lives in Cairo. that person's criticisms reek of some kind of sour grapes. And envy. In fact, that person's review is not only misleading but flat-out dishonest. Nothing he says is true of this book. And he completely ignores the heart of the story: Mahoney's beautiful friendship with a graceful Nubian captain, a story that makes the book worth reading TWICE. Mahoney is neither condescending nor fearful and as far as I can see she accepts each person she meets on their own terms. I myself could not imagine being as trusting, open, respectful and sympathetic to a bunch of foreign strangers as this woman was)

My Cairo friend said that the thing that he noticed the most in Down the Nile was how accurate Mahoneys descriptions of the peoole and the place are. he said he was a little hestitant to read the book , because he never likes books about places he knows really well. Usually doesn't agree with them. But this one he loved. So, that says something for the book. But you don't have to know anything about Egypt, really, to love this book. You don't even have to have an interest in Egypt. It's a book all about human fragility and curiosity and the problems that come up when there's cultural misunderstanding. it's such a relevant book for the present times. It's full of entertaining hisorical anecdotes and interesting facts and, more than anything, very engaging stories. Mahoney is a storyteller of the first order.

I have been a big fan of this writer for a long time, so I was really excited when I read the great review of this new book in the New York Times. I bought the book and my expectations were far exceeded by the sheer beauty of it. I think Mahoney has matured as a writer over the years and has really found her voice. This is the story of her solo trip rowing a small boat 120 miles on the Egyptian Nile River. The adventure itself is worth attention, but the thing that always pulls you in with Mahoney's books is her voice and her personality. She is smart, very funny, very gutsy and tough, and has done some crazy travels--which she wrote about in her other book The Singular Pilgrim and also The Early Arrival of Dreams. Though she is tough and determined, she is also very sensitive. She seems to notice everything that happens around her, and though she can be critical and even a little cynical and impatient, you get the impression that she really loves the people she meets. She decided to take this trip, she says, because she likes rowing, which doesn't seem like a real justification for going all the way to Egypt, buying a fishing boat, and rowing alone down the longest river in the world. But then you figure out that rowing a boat in Egypt is just a way of meeting new people and understanding a culture that is very different from ours. I'd say that kind of in-depth travel and experiential analysis are Mahoney's trademark. She's the sort of person who will talk to anyone, even to the people the rest of us wouldn't bother to talk to.

The story reads very smoothly and the writer's encounters with the Egyptian people are what really make this book. In her attempt to buy a boat, she comes to know one sailor in particular and his sweet little sister who has a physical deformity. The way she writes about them is heartbreaking and it is probably my favorite part in this book, aside from the chase scene at the end of the book. What I like most about Mahoney's way of writing is that you feel you are sitting next to her as she is making her journey. Everything is described in a very vivid , intimate way so it's like watching a movie. You kind of feel like you know her, even though she doesn't say very much about her private life. I recommend this book highly and I'm eagerly waiting to see what she will do next.

I went to Egypt and sailed down the Nile in 1989 - Aswan, Luxor, many of the cities described in this book I explored. I had unanswered questions after I left Egypt and this book enlightened so many of them. The insight and straight forward approach to the Egyptian people and culture puts you in that boat right behind her. This was a book I could not put down and when I did finish it I mailed it off to my friends in Utah who traveled with me down the Nile. They two found it fascinating and very informative - it is a completion to the many scenarios mingling with the Egyptian people that we were not quite certain about. Excellent author and writer - I look forward to reading more of her books and adventures.

Cheri - Still Traveling to Exotic Lands

Rosemary Mahoney's sense of clear-eyed wonder combined with great writing make 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 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."

I read Mahoney's book before my trip to Egypt and again upon returning to the U.S. It was great to have seen the places she writes about; Abu Simbel, Aswan, Elephantine Island, etc. And the way she writes about the people she encounters is endearing. I've also read "A Likely Story" and look forward to enjoying more of her tales.

You can't know what this book holds in store for you until you read it. A beautifully written first person account of a woman traveling alone on a brave and determined adventure in Egypt, including much history of the region as well as current interactions with the people and the landscape. But really it is the story of what it is like to be a woman, particularly an independent woman, traveling alone, and traveling specifically in Egypt. The whole book builds toward a riveting climax, and the journey is riveting as well. A brilliant piece of work, and thrilling to read.