Nile Shadows Quotes

“… so it isn’t true any longer that we can just create ourselves. Now we must. Our childhood as a race is over and there’s no going back, no escape into barbarism, no way to lose ourselves in the mindlessness of our animal past. Now we have to be free in order to be at all. The child within us prefers its instinctual cage, and the wars of this century are the final tantrums of our childhood’s end, but the wars can’t go on and on and we all sense that. Our killing toys have become too clever and our killing fields have become the entire earth, and now we either have to put aside our childish ways or refuse to, and in refusing, renounce life. I mean destroy ourselves utterly….”
― Edward Whittemore, Nile Shadows

“… a night twenty years ago and forever and but a prelude to the century, but a shadow of the far deeper descent into darkness that was yet to come….”
― Edward Whittemore, Nile Shadows

“… and just as suddenly he was with Stern and it was a night twenty years ago in a city once called Smyrna, once long ago in the century before the age of genocide, before the monstrous massacres had come swirling out of Asia Minor to descend on Smyrna while Stern and Joe were there … the massacres ignored then by most of the world but not by everyone, and not by Hitler, who had triumphantly recalled them only days before his armies invaded Poland to begin the Second World War…. Who after all speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians? The world believes in success alone.”
― Edward Whittemore, Nile Shadows

“Ah well, he thought, we do what we can. It makes little difference but we have to do it anyway. Stern’s words, he suddenly realized. Stern’s very own words spoken to him long ago, whispered now in the shadows in another time and place altogether. Strange, he thought. Time is.”
― Edward Whittemore, Nile Shadows

“What this amounts to, and what makes the critic with his nose for genre and structure so nervous, is that by all accounts this shouldn’t be a good book at all, should in fact be a really terrible book, and the Quartet a rambling, self-indulgent mess. It’s too clogged up with words to be straight forward action adventure, it’s too in love with the power of old-fashioned story telling to be a safe member of any experimental literary camp, it’s too bawdy to be a tastefully controlled work of the intellect (what other work about the primacy of Man’s soul contains a sizable section on the history and art of prostitution?), and it’s combination of travel and digression, action and introspection, while they remind one in flashes (those comparisons again) of writers like Chatwin and Theroux, are too loose, too much under the sway of Whittemore’s pack-rat, all-encompassing, constantly changing focus of attention. In the end, against all odds, the book works because something binds together its lofty ambitions and disparate parts and makes it, if not a whole, then at least the tantalizing shape of something about to come into being at any moment. That something is the force of Whittemore’s integrity of vision. Ben Gibberd New York City, 2002”
― Edward Whittemore, Nile Shadows

“The real protagonists of the Quartet are surely the parched and beautiful deserts of the biblical lands, with their oases and ruins, and above all the Holy City of Jerusalem itself. Whittemore is profoundly in love with these, and it’s a love that shines forth in all the books. Much of the “talky” nature of the book comes not just from his characters endless speculations and declarations, but from their loving memories of past nights spent idling by the Nile, or the magnificence of the pyramids at dawn, or the smell of a scented garden during some long-ago secret assignation. What you come to realize as you read, unconsciously at first, and then with growing awareness, is that these are not really digressions at all, but rather the very meat of the book. The land speaking to the people, and the people speaking to each other in an endless cycle is the closest definition of what it’s all “about”, if one needs to pursue its meaning into some final corner. The book, and the whole Quartet, is a monument to digression, to the necessity of the circuitous and the roundabout as the only way to truth. Certainty of vision, unquestioned clarity of purpose, leads only to oppression—as the ruthless and single minded Nazi presence hovering in the background serves to remind us.”
― Edward Whittemore, Nile Shadows

“Once again, Whittemore escapes what might be a fatal mistake in another author. Far from the funhouse hall of mirrors one might expect from such endless fracturing, the compulsive replication of this same idea only intensifies the book, turning it into a single mirror and magnifying the image. What is the true nature of man? How close can one ever come to it? Is there something worthy and strong enough inside that will outlast our more barbaric impulses? The repetition of these themes by so many voices exerts a hypnotic sense in the end, like listening to an endless choral chant. It might almost be called “the poetry of self-exile”, if that didn’t strike too pretty a note for a book that for all its abstract bent is so firmly planted on the ground of historical fact and place.”
― Edward Whittemore, Nile Shadows

“Something else apart from this heady fusion draws us in to Nile Shadows, though, and that’s a certain compulsive quality that, as in all great novels, appears to be beyond the author’s control. On the one hand Whittemore is the master story teller, weaving his tale of good and evil with its great cast of characters over its great span of time, while on the other he is also telling a much simpler story, a story about himself, one feels, and telling it again and again.”
― Edward Whittemore, Nile Shadows

“This heady mixture of the philosophical and the dramatic runs throughout the book, the one underlying the other, and the result, unlikely though it may be, is a seamless unity rather than an awkward tugging of opposites. Life is talk, after all, lots of it—crude, bawdy, serious, occasionally transcendent—and that’s what Whittemore gives us. It’s also a world of action and of unthinkable violence—in this century particularly like no other—and Whittemore gives us that, too. Because of the stream of conversations, memories, theories and thoughts that make up so much of the book, it’s easy to overlook the significant amount of violence contained within it.”
― Edward Whittemore, Nile Shadows

“The conversation can be serious, too, taking on the form of a grave philosophical discourse as the characters take turns to expound their views of life. When Joe finally comes face to face with his elusive prey, Stern, the chit chat gives way to pure oratory: Revolution, said Stern. We can’t even comprehend what it is, not what it means or what it suggests. We pretend it means total change but it’s much more than that, so vastly more complex, and yes, so much simpler too. It’s not just the total change from night to day as our earth spins in its revolutions around a minor star. It’s also our little star revolving around its own unknowable center and so with all the stars in their billions, and so with the galaxies and the universe itself. Change revolves and truly there is nothing but revolution. All movement is revolution and so is time, and although those laws are impossibly complex and beyond us, their result is simple. For us, very simple. And yet, this is where Whittemore’s great strength comes in: just as we are beginning to accept that this is more a philosophical treatise than a spy story, a pleasant meta-fiction, Whittemore suddenly pulls the strings taut with a dramatic piece of action worthy of Le Carré (more comparisons).”
― Edward Whittemore, Nile Shadows

“The distant rumble of gun fire and armored vehicles is the rumble of history itself, bearing down on Whittemore’s characters as they engage in their desperate machinations to avoid defeat. And yet what do those characters do in the face of such pressure? They talk, is what they do, and they talk and talk and talk. Each conversation leading on to something else, which in turn leads to something else, and suddenly a new character is introduced—a thumbnail sketch surely, a literary prop, no more—but no, suddenly he starts growing in front of our eyes, acquiring a languorous history stretching out over pages and pages while we think, Quick! Do something! The enemy is coming! At times there is something outright perverse about this compunction to hold forth.”
― Edward Whittemore, Nile Shadows

“Like many authors belonging to that large and unfortunate caste, “the unjustly neglected”, Whittemore suffers from being an embarrassingly good read. He also suffers from a bigger crime, in that he is almost impossible to pigeonhole. Reviewers’ comparisons bounce from Pynchon to Nabokov, Greene to Calvino and Fuentes to Vonnegut, only to hastily assert that he is, of course, very much his own man. Reading Whittemore, I found myself adding my own—a touch of Hesse here, I thought, a dash of Robertson Davies there, yet without what could be termed a debt to either of them. Each new reader will inevitably supply more. So what is it that makes Nile Shadows, and the rest of Whittemore’s works, so infinitely flexible? Are they simply baggy monsters into which one can throw whatever one wants? In a sense they are, and it’s not a criticism to say that Whittemore is probably one of the baggiest writers this century—his books represent that most vain of ambitions and the downfall of more than one literary great: a complete explanation of everything. Nothing less than a unified theory of human history is what Whittemore is after, and it’s a sign of his mettle that he realizes such an ambition is doomed from the start, yet undertakes it anyway.”
― Edward Whittemore, Nile Shadows