I mean, I don’t think the sex is particularly male. I don’t think it’s any different from the sex in Toni Morrison’s novels, for example. — The Adroit Journal
The consonance between these unfoldings not only centers close kinship among the dissenters and with their country but also real grief over the relationships and futures lost in the tumult. The Dissenters immortalizes those fallen sons and daughters of Egypt, whose existences are words, lines, and pages in that ongoing love story of revolution. — BOMB
Now in his late forties, Nour has reached the conclusion that the only way he can know himself is “by finding out how the story of [Mouna’s] life is the history of this country”. His letters to his sister about the Jumpers are the only thing that can assuage Mouna’s look of “grief, hatred, and letdown”. For Youssef Rakha, who is a similar age to Nour, this powerful, shimmering and clever novel may fulfil an equivalent function. It is worthwhile to witness, even when there is so little hope of change.— TLS
Rakha pushes these transgressions further through his use of language. By blending vernacular Arabic with the standard and the religious, Rakha initiates us into a world where change can be enacted through the words we choose to utter. Rakha blurs the lines of language, dialect, life, family, memory, and desire—not only in content but in form and style. — The Florida Review
I don’t suppose you’d imagine me going in the attic either, any more than you’d expect a letter from me. You were the reason I first stole up there, while Mouna was still alive. Since then something has come unstuck in my access to time, and I’ve found I can experience events that happened before I was born just as well as the episodes that marked me. Mouna might be beggaring my soul for spending too much in Alexandria or she might be jumping about in a mini skirt, unrecognizable. — The Dial
For Youssef, to be a novelist is to unravel the psyche of his country through the acuity of his observations, his ear for dialogue, and his refreshing disinterest in the manifesto. — Bidoun
Youssef Rakha is an Egyptian novelist, poet and essayist working in both Arabic and English.
Writers are there to reconstitute reality in a way that generates questions, not to moralize or lay down the law. Real, deep, serious questions into and across reality are the writer’s responsibility, and that necessarily goes beyond expressing moral outrage at individuals or actions that always turn out to be the usual order of things. — The Master's Review