DISCOVERIES

Down the Nile

Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff

Rosemary Mahoney

Little, Brown: 288 pp., $23.99

ROSEMARY MAHONEY is a traveler in the intrepid tradition of Gertrude Bell, Isabella Bird and Florence Nightingale, and she prefers to go it alone. This proves difficult in Egypt, where women doing anything alone, much less rowing down the Nile, is cause for comment and intervention. “Down the Nile” is thus as much about perseverance as it is about crocodiles and currents. It is also a book about respecting different cultures while holding on to your own. Mahoney is careful not to wear skimpy western clothing; she is polite but firm confronting the constant barrage of male curiosity. Finding a boat to buy is a transaction that involves 1,000 questions. Explanation seems “hopeless in the face of this universal age-old contradiction: women were calculating temptresses whose sexuality needed to be stifled at any cost, and yet they were the object of constant speculation, interest, and discussion.” She is inspired by Flaubert’s writing on the Nile and Nightingale’s “Letters from Egypt.” In the end, Mahoney is unable to row the entire 120 miles from Aswan to Qena by herself; she finds an Egyptian man who understands her goals and accompanies her from Aswan to Luxor; she continues alone to Qena, noting that travel “washes one’s eyes and clears away the dust.”

--

The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit

My Family’s Exodus From Old Cairo to the New World

Lucette Lagnado

Ecco: 352 pp., $25.95

LUCETTE LAGNADO’S story begins in a Cairo cafe in 1943, before she is born. Leon, her father, is 42 and a boulevardier in a white sharkskin suit; Edith, her mother, is 20, a typically protected Egyptian girl. They marry in the Jewish community they grew up in. Less than a year later, Edith wants a divorce -- Leon has not given up his nightlife or his mistresses -- but is bullied by the family into staying. They have four children and live in a beautiful apartment building, surrounded by family, including the author’s grandmother Zarifa, who extols the healing powers of apricots, raw eggs and olives. After the fall of King Farouk in 1952, Nasser nationalizes Egyptian industry and the family is left with nothing. Many of the city’s Jews immigrate to Israel. Leon moves his family to Paris, then to New York; he brings Lucette along as he sells silk ties on the subway. When she’s diagnosed with cancer, Leon feeds her olives, which, thanks to her grandmother, she believes are responsible for her remission. Little by little, Leon sinks into Alzheimer’s. As in so many immigrant stories, the resilient dignity of Lucette’s family transcends the fiercest of obstacles.

--

The Iambics of Newfoundland

Notes From an Unknown Shore

Robert Finch

Counterpoint: 270 pp., $26

FROM 1987 to 1996, naturalist Robert Finch made several trips to Newfoundland. On one of them, he picked up a hitchhiker on the Trans-Canada Highway who told him that Newfoundland was unique if you got “the iambics of the place.” In his meticulous way, Finch sets out to parse the province’s iambics, collecting “impressions and observations.” He visits St. John’s, Cape Spear, Fogo Island, Squid Tickle, Red Bay and Forteau in Labrador, the outlaw town of Petty Harbour. He learns to cook seal flipper, sees his first caribou, visits the haunts of the aboriginal Beothuks. The Newfie lexicon includes various words for ice or icebergs (ballicatters, bedlamers, skinnywhoppers) and ways to describe fish (leggy, glutted, half-saved, pipsi, snig). Finch’s focus is on the natural world, but he veers into local notions -- of time, for example, a refusal to be specific that he attributes to the area’s rich oral tradition. Like many cultural observers, he’s fascinated with the weird and the quirky; fortunately, he manages to avoid the glorification of another culture that is the downfall of many books in this genre.

--

susan.reynolds@latimes.com