Member Reviews
A Revolution Described as If It Is a Romance Novel
Youssef Rakha is an Egyptian author who writes in Arabic and English. He received a BA in the UK. This is his first novel that was written originally in English. His first Arabic novel was released back in 2011. He tends to write about Arabic history.
“A transgressive novel… 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…’” I cannot imagine why this publisher decided to insert this quote at the beginning of this blurb. It confuses without revealing what this book is about, or intriguing readers. It sounds like a saying that’s supposed to be “deep” but fails to achieve the promised depth.
“…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 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.” The grammar and punctuation of this sentence is confusing. I’m not sure who’s-who. Mouna is never mentioned, while it seems some of the later descriptors are about her. “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” In other words this is an epistolary novel, which should have been more prominently mentioned here to avoid surprising readers. The narrator “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… a transcendent portrait of a woman and an era that explodes our ideas of faith, gender roles, freedom, and political agency.”
The opening letter begins very dully by describing finding letters in an attic with general details. The page ends oddly in the middle of a thought. There is a little leaf at the start of the next page that might suggest this is a different perspective than the one in the letter. Another clue that something new has started is the lack of indentation of the first paragraph on the next page. But both use the first-person voice. But the story has changed subjects from this mother’s two pseudonyms: Mouna to Amna. So little info is given about either of them that it’s hard to tell the difference. The blurb kind of explains why each is special, but the novel blurs these lines. The story also leaps between crawling on knees as a punishment and vague descriptions of lashes and furniture. There are constant appearances of general phrases, like “I see her…” and “I see the casuarina-flanked sand of the playground…” that slow the story without explaining anything relevant. There are threats issued against “dissent”, but no clear explanation of what the dissent is about. People are plotting a Revolution, but in such terms that they might as well be discussing the weather. Sexual imagery (“Nimo felt he was mentally undressing her in earnest”) tends to be inserted to “liven” the narrative, but merely flattens what could have been space spent explaining a fervor for the Revolution. This is just a horrid read.
—Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Fall 2024: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-fall-2024
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, 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.
This was a very good book! There were definitely parts of the book that were very dense and had an overload of information, but I learned a lotttttt of things from this book. I always had an interest in Egypt, so I thought it was so cool to learn a lot about it in this book. I do like the author's writing style, and was a fan of this book
Thank you to NetGalley, to the author, and to the publisher for this complementary ARC in exchange for my honest review!!!