Youssef Rakha

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A transgressive novel by an acclaimed writer that spans seventy years of Egyptian history

Certain as I’ve never been of anything in the world that you have a right or a duty to know, that you absolutely must know, I sail through the mouth of that river into the sea of her life.

Amna, Nimo, Mouna―these are all names for a single Egyptian woman whose life has mirrored that of her country. After her death in 2015, her son, Nour, ascends to the attic of show more their house where he glimpses her in a series of ever more immersive visions: Amna as a young woman forced into an arranged marriage in the 1950s, a coquettish student of French known to her confidants as Nimo, a self-made divorcee and a lover, a “pious mama” donning her hijab, and, finally, a feminist activist during the Arab Spring. Charged and renewed by these visions of a woman he has always known as Mouna, Nour begins a series of fevered letters to his sister―who has been estranged from Mouna and from Egypt for many years―in an attempt to reconcile what both siblings know about this mercurial woman, their country, and the possibility for true revolution after so much has failed.

Hallucinatory, erotic, and stylish, The Dissenters is a transcendent portrait of a woman and an era that explodes our ideas of faith, gender roles, freedom, and political agency.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: "A truth-seeker, a lover, a revolutionary-I could never be any of those things if I didn't understand that I was an Egyptian woman's son. Only by finding out how the story of her life is the history of this country could I know who I am."

I wanted to be more impressed than I was by this first written-in-English novel from an Egyptian literary light. It's a bit more self-important than I thought was justified. It intrigued me most when Nour, the son, began to blur his identity in with his mother's. I did not eagerly seek the next chance to read the story, but would dutifully record notes of praise after each sitting. Odd.

Graywolf Press tells you the bill is $9.99 for an ebook. show less

How timely to be reading “The Dissenters” as Syria is full of promise and risk, liberated from
Bashar al-Assad’s regime. The story is told from the vantage of 2014, when the army commander Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has assumed the presidency of Egypt. The novel looks back to the fifties, when Gamal Abd El Nasser becomes president, or the true Zaim (leader). The story is told through the life of Amna, whose life experience mirrors the history of Egypt through the successive Zaims—Sadat, show more Mubarak, and Morsi—and their unfulfilled promises. Amna is known by three names: Amna the young woman married to an older man yet seeking a new life; Nomi, the woman who studies French and works for a news outlet, assisting foreign correspondents; and Mouna, the woman who survives her second husband’s imprisonment, becomes a mother, and, later, an activist. During the Arab Spring, Amna becomes focused on what she calls “the Jumpers”: women who, seemingly without forethought, are jumping out of windows. Amna attributes this to lies of men, the failure of the revolution, and the suffering of women throughout this succession of leaders. “The Dissenters” was not an easy read for me. The story is not chronological, and without much familiarity of Egyptian history at times I was confused about the time period. Characters who had long been absent reappeared. The narrator is Amna’s son, Nour, who is writing a letter (the novel) to his younger sister, who has escaped Egypt for the more liberal USA; at times, though, it seems to be written by Amna herself. Somehow, Nour has been able to inhabit Amna’s memories and wants his sister to understand her mother and her country of origin. The novel is multilayered, and I am glad to have read it, but it was a challenging read for me.
I received an ARC of this book. My opinions are my own. show less