Reviewed By Gabrielle Pantera
Rating: Three Stars
“Initially I found the huge differences between Nightingale and Flaubert…huge and provocative,” says The Twelve Rooms of the Nile author Enid Shomer. “One scholar I consulted told me that they lived in different sides of her brain despite being contemporaries, and that she had never thought of them together. Of course, it turned out that they had much more in common than was apparent for they shared the same general culture and came from similar social classes. They both rebelled against middle-class European values.”
Shomer’s debut novel takes you through mid-nineteenth-century Egypt with Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert – two vastly different personalities. They were both in Egypt in 1850. There is no record of their meeting. Nightingale became known as the woman who revolutionized nursing and Flaubert became a literary giant for his first novel Madame Bovary. We get a glimpse into Egypt and the different religions that lived in harmony and how unspoiled and vast the land was. The story is complex and at times hard to believe. If you suspend your disbelief and approach it with an open mind you get a feeling for two lonely people who are drawn together by their similarities, as well as their differences.
At 29, Florence is the daughter of a well-to-do British family, who takes a trip down the Nile with longtime family friends and her maid, Trout. Gustave Flaubert has come to Egypt with his friend Maxime Du Camp to document the unexplored monuments of ancient Egypt. He also hopes the heat will help his health as he’s prone to seizures. The two meet and strike up a friendship.
“About eight years ago, I read an essay by William Styron about his cruise down the Nile as a guest of the Agha Kahn,” says Shomer. “Styron frequently quoted from Gustave Flaubert’s Nile journal. The Flaubert material was raucously entertaining and I decided to read all of it for myself. I became fascinated by Flaubert.”
“I’d written about half of the first chapter, when I discovered Florence Nightingale’s book Letters From Egypt,” says Shomer. “She was on the Nile at the exact same moment and also kept a journal and wrote numerous letters home. She seemed the perfect foil for Flaubert and he for her. In a very real sense I wrote the book so that I could read it. I mean, I wanted to read a book about a friendship between two apparent misfits, two geniuses: Gustave Flaubert and Florence Nightingale.”
“Europeans called the Middle East the Orient, and they viewed it as a colorful place to let down their hair,” says Shomer. “But travel there involved real risk and therefore real adventures for both Nightingale and Flaubert. They climb through pyramids, cross the eastern Sahara in a caravan, visit the Red Sea. Sometimes they are in mufti, disguised as Moslems. Flaubert explores a series of caves at great peril searching for a souvenir mummy. Nothing was restricted to visitors at this time.”
This is Shomers’s first novel, but her seventh book. She has published four books of poetry and two collections of short stories. Shomer was born in Washington DC and currently lives in Tampa, Florida. In October 2012 Shomer will be appearing at the Tampa Bay Times Festival of Reading in St. Petersburg, Florida.
The Twelve Rooms of the Nile by Enid Shomer. Hardcover, 464 pages, Publisher: Simon & Schuster (August 21, 2012), Language: English, ISBN-13: 978-1451642964 $26.00
