Quick Take
- Narration: David Drummond brings a measured, literary delivery suited to Dombrowski’s poetic prose; his pacing through the longer descriptive passages is patient without being passive.
- Themes: Environmental stewardship and its personal cost, expertise and erasure in the tourism economy, poetry and the attention it demands
- Mood: Contemplative and elegiac, with the particular beauty of watching light on moving water
- Verdict: A quietly remarkable meditation on fishing, mentorship, and what happens to the things we love when too many people come to love them.
I came to Body of Water having heard someone compare it to Norman Maclean, which is a comparison that should be made carefully and usually is not. The invocation of A River Runs Through It is the default gesture for any literary fly-fishing book, and most of them do not survive the comparison. Chris Dombrowski’s memoir earns it. Not because it resembles Maclean’s novella in tone or structure, it does not, but because it operates at the same level of serious attention to both the water and the life lived alongside it. The reviewer who called it a modern River Runs Through It was pointing at something real.
The setup is almost too perfect to be true, and Dombrowski knows it: he is a poet and fly fisherman with two children (one in utero), an income hovering near zero, and a fishing trip to the Bahamas falls into his lap through a last-minute email. Can’t go, it’s all paid for, just book a flight. This kind of providence is the stuff of lesser travel narratives, but Dombrowski is after something larger, and he finds it in the person of David Pinder.
David Pinder and Forty Years of Reading Water
Pinder is a Bahamian bonefishing guide who built the industry he eventually lost. His accuracy and patience were virtuosic, in Dombrowski’s phrase, and the description of Pinder’s ability, he knows what the fish think before they think it, is not hyperbole but the compressed summary of a lifetime’s specific attention to a single environment. Pinder represents a kind of expert knowledge that does not translate into academic credentials and that the market, having extracted its value, discards.
By the time Dombrowski meets him, Pinder has been abandoned by the industry he helped build. He has cataracts from a lifetime of staring at the Bahamian flats. He has a tiny severance package after forty years. He watches as the world of his beloved bonefish is degraded by the tourists his own expertise helped attract. This is not a metaphor that Dombrowski imposes on the situation; it is the situation, and he is honest about the uncomfortable position it places him in as a visiting American fisherman who is, in a precise sense, part of the problem he is witnessing.
Poetry and the Attention Fly Fishing Demands
Dombrowski is a published poet, and Body of Water is not shy about what that means for the prose. His sentences are long and carefully weighted, attentive to the quality of light and the specific movement of water in the way that poetry trains you to be. This could easily become self-indulgent, but he is too conscious of Pinder’s presence, and of the ethical weight Pinder’s story carries, to let the prose float away into pure aestheticism. The beauty of the writing is always in service of something.
David Drummond’s narration understands this balance. He reads the more lyrical passages with full commitment but does not over-perform them, and his handling of Pinder’s dialogue is attentive without being imitative. The audio format suits the prose’s rhythmic qualities particularly well; these are sentences that benefit from being heard rather than read silently on a page.
What the Bahamas Take Back
The memoir’s emotional spine is the question of what happens to the places and people we love when attention, commercial attention, tourist attention, the kind of attention that Dombrowski himself represents, overwhelms them. Pinder is not angry in any simple way; he has the equanimity of someone who has spent his life outdoors and has a longer view of things than most. But the devastation of what has happened to the bonefish flats, and to his place within them, is present throughout the book as a kind of ground bass that the more lyrical passages resolve against.
One reviewer who found it filling an impossibly large gap after another fly fishing memoir praised its ability to match the emotional register of books that occupy a specific literary niche. The comparison to Middleton’s The Earth is Enough is the right kind of praise: it places Body of Water in genuine literary company rather than simply within the genre. At just over six hours, the memoir is compact and unhurried, asking for patience and attention and offering the particular satisfaction of spending time in the company of someone who sees the world carefully.
Who This Memoir Rewards
Body of Water is for listeners who bring genuine interest in either fly fishing as a literary subject or the broader questions the memoir raises about expertise, environmental loss, and the ethics of tourism. Those who come to it purely as travel narrative will find it more demanding than they expect. Those who come to it as readers of literary nonfiction in the tradition of environmental memoir will find it one of the more quietly exceptional entries in recent years. The comparison to Maclean is not a promise of plot; it is a promise of prose quality, and on that score Dombrowski delivers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do you need to know anything about fly fishing or bonefish to appreciate Body of Water?
No. Dombrowski provides context as needed, and the memoir’s emotional core, Pinder’s story, is fully accessible without technical knowledge. Those who do fish will find additional layers of specific pleasure.
How much of the memoir is about Dombrowski’s personal life versus the story of David Pinder?
Pinder is the central figure, but Dombrowski’s own circumstances, the financial precarity, the young family, the dual identity as poet and fisherman, frame everything. The two stories illuminate each other.
Is the comparison to A River Runs Through It fair, and should listeners unfamiliar with Maclean still pick this up?
The comparison is about literary quality and seriousness of attention rather than narrative similarity. Listeners unfamiliar with Maclean will not be at a disadvantage; they will simply be meeting literary fishing writing for the first time through this book rather than that one.
At a 4.5 rating, what do the occasional critical notes from listeners tend to say?
Some listeners find the lyrical prose style demanding if they came expecting a lighter travel narrative or adventure story. The book is unhurried and meditative, and that quality is a strength for some and a friction point for others.
