The Twelve Rooms of the Nile by
Enid Shomer
My rating:
5 of 5 stars
Who could have imagined that Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert
would be so good together? Apparently, Enid Shomer did just that, and
her debut novel is thoroughly engaging, witty, philosophical, sensual
and intellectual. From the bare coincidence that both Nightingale and
Flaubert spent a summer sailing up and down the Nile in 1850—but on
separate boats, with no indication that they ever met at any
point—Shomer has written an epic but personal tale of the meeting of two
exquisitely intelligent people (much too smart for their own comfort,
or those of their families as well). Florence is desperately searching
for a way out of her upper-middle-class prison, having disappointed her
severe mother by refusing to marry; she feels a call to something higher
but she’s not sure what it is. Gustave struggles with the memory of
past mistresses, a domineering but beloved mother, and his own desperate
need to do nothing in life but write—and yet he falters, believing he
has no talent and nothing to say. In the mostly “uncivilized” lands
along the Nile, the two meet again and again as their parties track each
other to sites of ancient ruins and across the desert. The effect of
living unconventionally both releases their spirits and pulls them into a
vortex of sensual discovery that opens the eyes of both these
exceptional persons to a new understanding of their own experiences as
well as empathy for another. This is a book to be savored and read with a
calm spirit of openness and acceptance of the new and the strange. -
from my review for the Historical Novel Society Review journal, Summer
2012.
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