In the Light of What We Know Lib/E

by Zia Haider Rahman

A bold, epic debut novel set during the war and financial crisis that defined the beginning of our century


An investment banker approaching forty, his career collapsing and his marriage unraveling, receives a surprise visitor at his West London town house. Confronting the disheveled figure of a South Asian male carrying a backpack, the banker recognizes a long-lost college friend, a mathematics prodigy who disappeared many years earlier under mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced with a confession of unsettling power.

Zia Haider Rahman takes us on a journey of exhilarating scope, ranging over Kabul, London, New York, Islamabad, Oxford, and Princeton and dealing with love, belonging, finance, science, and war. Its framework is an age-old story: the friendship of two men and the betrayal of one by the other, both of them desperate in their different ways to climb clear of their wrong beginnings. Set against the breaking of nations and beneath the clouds of economic recession, the novel chronicles the lives of people carrying unshakable legacies of class, culture, and faith as they struggle to tame their futures. 

In the Light of What We Know is by turns tender, intimate, and panoramic, telescoping the great upheavals of our young century into a first novel of rare ambition and profundity.

 

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Contemporary, Novels, Literary Fiction, Bangladesh, Literature

Audio CD

First published March 4, 2014

About the author

Zia Haider Rahman is a British novelist of Bangladeshi origin. Born in Sylhet in the shadow of the 1971 war, Rahman moved with his family to London, where he flourished academically and gained a place at Oxford University to study mathematics.

His success at Oxford led to a host of scholarships and further studies at Munich, Cambridge and Yale Universities. After working for Goldman Sachs as an investment banker, Rahman studied law and became an international human rights lawyer.

His debut novel In the Light of What We Know was published in 2014. It has been received with international critical acclaim, and was long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award 2014 and shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2014.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 2 out of 5]

New authors take note : there IS a market for your plotless meandering portentous musings! Don’t despair, just because you don’t have any kind whatsoever of a story. I appreciate that there are so many 4 & 5 star reviews of this large novel that speaking ill of it seems like farting in a cathedral. But there are also enough jerks who have one and 2-starred it and in their company I find much solace – I will take the liberty of quoting a couple of GR disbelievers :

It's verbalistic, snobbishly ambitious, borderline patronizing and in the end, boring, as it is weighed down by the very burden of its over ambition. (Arhondi)

this is one of those great Kitchen Sink novels, so stuffed with the author’s conviction of his Great Project that nobody in the book, let alone the poor reader, has a chance to come up for air (Gerhard)

Uch. Another book written entirely for the critics, in which men sit around having Important Thoughts, disgorging uninterrupted Important Paragraphs about Important World Events and Significant Mathematical Concepts while ladies hover at the periphery to make them feel sad. (Aharon)

The novel is a bromance between two high flying Asian guys, one being involved in The Matter of the Economic Meltdown and the other being involved in The Matter of Afghanistan. It’s like a single year-long conversation where one (unnamed, why? Why not give your loquacious didact at least a name? was this Significant or Zia Haider Rahman did you just FORGET?) writes down the story of the other’s life. Well, that approach isn’t necessarily bad. Look at Moby-Dick. But here’s the thing – the tone never varies. The ambient temperature of the novel is set to 22 degrees and the emotional dial is set to “mournful”. A fine mist of “elegiac regret” is also present throughout, I think that must be from the air conditioning. Every sentence is long. There are no jokes except one about A Mathematician, A Physicist, and An Astronomer observing sheep from a train. So eventually I too couldn’t take any more of these erudite maunderings. Call me shallow but after 100 or so pages I just wanted something to happen, one teeny tiny something. Couldn’t Zafar or Unnamed have, I dunno, knocked over a teacup and had to clear up the pieces? Anything.

[Violet wells · Rating 4 out of 5]

First of all, bear with me as I’m writing this with a Christmas day hangover!

In the Light of What we Know has inspired me to reread Sebald’s Austerlitz with which it shares many similarities, not least of all the weathered tone of its voice and its duality of narrators – the first person authorial voice acting as a mediator for Zafar, the true subject of the novel. It also has similarities with The Great Gatsby in as much as a privileged but rather prosaic individual is narrating the story of an underprivileged but more glamorous and brilliant individual. Both characters are Asian in origin but from very different backgrounds. The unnamed narrator of Pakistani roots was educated at Eaton, Oxford and Princeton; Zafar, his friend, was born in a small village in Bangladesh and his father was a waiter. They meet at university where both study mathematics. Later they both become bankers on Wall Street. And from New York the novel will take us to Kabul and Islamabad.

I remember when John Banville won the Booker prize and there were amused criticisms that even in the post 9/11 world award winning novels were still about reclusive introspective art historians as if the world we read about in newspapers is somehow out of bounds for novelists. Well, In the Light of What We know is a novel that enters into the worlds within those newspaper headlines. It goes backstage of the invasion of Afghanistan and the 2008 banking crash. It seeks to unravel some of the mysteries of global events by personalising them. You might say it’s a novel about corrupt and corrupting infrastructures.

Someone has said it’s more a novel to admire than love and there’s some truth in this. The erudition is dazzling, the themes incredibly ambitious, the wisdom inspiring but there’s little dramatic tension and at times Rahman digresses, veers off towards self-indulgence – it’s yet another novel that demonstrates editing is a dying art. Alex Preston says this is the novel he wished Freedom was and I can see what he means but at the same time Franzen’s novel was a character driven page turner which this isn’t. Rahman’s novel is more impressive than loveable. It’s also an overwhelmingly masculine book. More so perhaps than anything I’ve read since Hemingway.

It’s most compelling theme for me was its subtle and penetrating investigation of social hierarchies in the UK. The passport control of class. Rahman does a great job of evoking both the compelling allure and the spiritual bankruptcy of the British upper classes, much as Waugh did in Brideshead Revisited. Zafar marries into a very posh English family but is never quite able to shed his sense of displacement, not even his emotionally repressed wife can help him acquire a sense of belonging – shades of Kit in The English Patient here. Interestingly Rahman says in an interview that what stopped him from writing earlier in his life was his sense that writing was the prerogative of a social class above his own. That it took him a long time to overcome this hang up, this social sense of inadequacy.

There’s the sense in this novel that Rahman is suggesting we all know a lot less than we like to believe. And that this belief in our knowledge is a kind of smokescreen. To bring this home its erudition certainly made me feel uneducated at times. But it read to me like a journey from the clouding inadequacies of general knowledge to the smaller but both richer and more explosive rewards of personal knowledge. It’s almost like Zafar has to be stripped of much of his learning before he can finally recognise what constitutes native ground.

All in all a tremendously impressive debut novel, though the admiration supersedes the love.

[Karen·]

My personal ice-bucket challenge

It's the voice that does it, takes you by the hand and whispers in your ear, promising delights, seducing with a grace and ease, persuading you that this is someone you want to spend time with, hours of your time, the next five hundred pages of your time. Yes, this is someone whose company I will enjoy.
That, at least, is how it usually would work.
Not here. Initially, I thought oof. Great cumbersome wadges of epigraphs head every chapter, and then the voice of the narrator, although he writes in elegant and beautifully cadenced sentences, is a little stiff, formal, a little old-mannish, a little Serenus Zeitblomish in his well crafted formulations, pedantic, mouse-like. And then his friend Zafar, who turns up on his doorstep after seven years, speaks in the same rhythms, I cannot distinguish them at all.
Aaah, but then, but then. I was utterly disarmed to read:

In writing this account, I can't deny that my own language, on the page, beats in places to the rhythms of his, rather like - I don't mind admitting - the movement synchrony and posture mirroring of couples. Zafar spoke in balanced sentences, apparently crafted, on occasion perhaps sounding rehearsed, though this should not be regarded as a criticism, bearing in mind that he had probably spent most of his life considering the matters he was now setting out.
At times the composition of his speech evidenced a South Asian sensibility, as if he had learned English grammar from Victorian textbooks. There was no reason to expect his command of English to be other than fluent. But I always believed that I could detect an occasional unruly inflection of accent and, moreover, I perceived in some aspect of his composition - its occasional verging on the stilted, perhaps - that English was his second language, though I dare say he'd long outgrown his use of his childhood language, Sylheti, a language related to Assamese and Bengali yet with its own script, he told me.

Basically the set-up here is that of Serenus Zeitblom, or Nick Carraway, or the narrator in Sebald's Austerlitz, the slightly colourless side-kick who re-tells the tale of the more glamorous, more adventurous, more intriguing hero. The narrator who is puppet-master and puppet, both. Manipulator and manipulated. Observer and participant. But that question of the language is more than mere rhythms, these two really are almost indistinguishable, so far as to be the two sides of one character, so similar as to throw the one distinction between them into yet sharper relief: that of class. The narrator was born into the kind of privileged family that had staff. Zafar's family were the staff.
Zafar will, in the end, explain what he thinks happened to him in Afghanistan in 2001, but the path to that story is not a straight one. A mass of side tracks, as digressive as Tristram Shandy, take the two friends into; the nature of biography and the heroic life; the Peters projection as opposed to Mercator's; Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem; exiles and refugees; America and Britain; banking and the financial markets and their meltdown in 2008; geopolitics; immigrant parents and the gap that grows in the next generation; rape as a means of warfare; the availabilty bias; political correctness; cognitive load; mathematics; epistemology; woodwork. And we're only halfway through. So in my slightly carping way, I began to think that this whole undertaking, enjoyable as it was, could be seen as over-ambitious. But again, again, I was disarmed to find the following epigraph to chapter 11:

Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function. Since science has begun to distrust general explanations and solutions that are not sectoral and specialised, the grand challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various "codes", into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world.
Italo Calvino, 'Multiplicity', translated by Patrick Creagh

And there are more of such self-referential comments. Ones along the lines of 'If I were writing a novel...' The effect, however, is not archly self-regarding, but playful and sprightly. Indeed, the conversation between the two men is spiced with the kind of gently joshing banter that you would expect from long-time friends, despite the crafted sentences. And I was overjoyed at the irony of the Oxford maths student who needed a spreadsheet to stress-test the numbers in order to work out when his girlfriend became pregnant. A little simple counting would have done it.

There we have it, a hugely ambitious, wide-ranging, inclusive novel. Interestingly, the German word for poetry, Dichtung, is also the word for a tight seal, something so closely woven as to be unbreachable. Poetry as a tightening up of the language, making it denser, thicker. Here, the poetry is rather created out of an opposite effect: an amplification, story layering over story, looping round and back and forth, meandering and expansive, a loosening of the vibrations so as the better to reverberate.

So why is this my ice-bucket challenge? Well, to honest, this is a book that makes me feel inadequate. I find it hard to escape the impression that I ought to be able to pull everything together, there is something there that I can't quite catch hold of, maybe it's the maths? I never was good at maths. Ah no. That is my intellectual arrogance. Life is not an exam, in which I have to have the correct answers. Yes, it is the maths, go back to the maths: Gödel's Theorem says “Within any given system, there are claims which are true but which cannot be proven to be true.” At the heart of a pure science there is an acceptance of that which cannot be proved. Sit back, relax, go with the flow.

(Zafar)..had come to see, as he himself said in so many words,that understanding is not what this life has given us, that answers can only beget questions, that honesty commands a declaration not of faith but of ignorance, and that the only mission available to us, one laid to our charge, if any hand was in it, is to let unfold the questions, to take to the river knowing not if it runs to the sea, and accept our place as servants of life.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Εξαιρετικό βιβλίο, λεπτομερώς δουλεμένο, όπου με την επιλογή των πρωταγωνιστών αναδεικνύονται πολλές κοινωνικές τάξεις του σύγχρονου κόσμου: πρωταγωνιστές δύο Νοτιο-Ασιάτες μεγαλωμένοι στην Αγγλία με λαμπρές σπουδές. Ο ένας Πακιστανός από εύπορη οικογένεια (ναι, υπάρχουν και τέτοιοι, που τους ανήκει το μισό Πακιστάν και τους "γλύφουν" όλοι οι ευγενείς του κόσμου) και ο άλλος Μπαγκλαντεσιανός παιδί-θαύμα που κέρδισε με το σπαθί του όσα του άξιζαν. Φίλοι από τις αριστοκρατικές γειτονιές του Λονδίνου, συνάδελφοι από τις χρημαστηριακές του Λονδίνου και της Νέας Υόρκης, και κάπου εκεί ο ΟΗΕ, οι ΜΚΟ και η ανοικοδόμηση του Αφγανιστάν μετά τον π��λεμο.

Φιλοσοφίες επί παντός επιστητού (προσωπικά δεν βαρέθηκα καθόλου, θα σας παραθέσω παρακάτω μερικές), ιστορικά γεγονότα που πολλοί ίσως αγνοούν, αμεσότητα λόγου, συναισθήματα ταπεινωμένα, υψηλοί σκοποί, λιγότερη κυνικότητα από όση θα φανταζόσασταν, εξομολογητικό ύφος...

Μου άρεσε πάρα πολύ, το συστήνω ανεπιφύλακτα (προειδοποιώντας για τον όγκο του!!!)

Ένας κακός καθηγητής μαθητικών, έλεγε, μπορεί να κάνει μεγάλη ζημιά. Όταν είσαι 12 ετών, ένας κακός καθηγητής Ιστορίας μπορεί να σημαίνει ότι δεν θα κατανοήσεις σωστά τον 1ο Παγκόσμιο Πόλεμο ή τη Συνδιάσκεψη του Πότσνταμ. Θα αφήσει ένα κενό στην εκπαίδευσή σου. Τον επόμενο χρόνο, όμως, θα τα βγάλεις πέρα. Αυτό το κενό δεν θα σε δυσκολέψει και πολύ, όταν, αργότερα, θα μάθεις για τη Ρωσική Επανάσταση - ιδίως στα σχολικά χρόνια, που όλα αυτά δεν τα μελετάς σε μεγάλο βάθος. Με τα μαθηματικά, αλλάζει το πράγμα. Αν δεν αφομοιώσεις το υλικό που προβλέπεται για μια χρονιά, τότε θα σου είναι σχεδόν αδύνατο να κατανοήσεις όλα όσα ακολουθούν τα επόμενα χρόνια. Η μαθηματική γνώση είναι από την πρώτη στιγμή αθροιστική, μια πυραμίδα που η κάθε στρώση τούβλων υποστηρίζει την επόμενη, μέχρι την τελευταία... Η μεγάλη πλειονότητα των μαθητών είναι ευάλωτη, μπροστά σε έναν και μόνο κακό καθηγητή.... η παρουσία έστω και ενός μόνο κακού καθηγητή μαθηματικών στην αρχή της πορείας ενός παιδιού θα το δυσκόλευε στην κατανόηση των μαθηματικών, αν δεν το καταδίκαζε κιόλας σε μαθηματική αμάθεια.

Η λέξη decision προέρχεται από το λατινικό decidere που σημαίνει κόβω ή σκοτώνω. Το βλέπει κανείς, για παράδειγμα στη λέξη homicide, που σημαίνει σκοτώνω έναν άνθρωπο. Απόφαση, λοιπόν, σημαίνει αποκοπή, αποκλεισμός όλων των ενδεχομένων εκτός από ένα. Το ότι αφήνουμε το χρόνο να επέμβει και να αποφασίσει για εμάς δεν οφείλεται στο ότι η απόφαση είναι εγγενώς περίπλοκη: το κάνουμε αυτό, επειδή το να ασχοληθούμε εμείς με τη λήψη της απόφασης μας γεμίζει άγχος και απελπισία... Αυτό κάνει ο χρόνος σε όλους μας: σκοτώνει όλες τις ζωές που θα μπορούσαμε να έχουμε ζήσει, καταστρέφει όλους τους κόσμους που θα μπορούσαμε να έχουμε γνωρίσει. Και γι' αυτό ένας άνθρωπος μπορεί να αυτοκτονήσει χωρίς ποτέ να χρειαστεί να θέσει τέρμα στη ζωή του.

Νομίζω ότι ο Φάινμαν ισχυρίζεται, γενικότερα, ότι η εξήγηση ενός πράγματος μέσω της σύμπτυξης και της απλοποίησής του, μέχρι που να μην απομείνει τίποτα άλλο παρά μια οικεία μεταφορά άνευ περιεχομένου, δεν συμβάλλει στην κατανόηση του ίδιου του αντικειμένου και αποτελεί απλώς επανάληψη μιας οικείας εικόνας.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Race. Class. War. Colonialism. Memory. Choice. Epistemology. This is a Big Ideas book. In some ways it collapses under the weight of all that meaning, as well as the unnecessary complications of its structure. Yet I would still argue that, even though it’s a debut novel, it takes its place in a rich tradition of refined immigrant-British literature, alongside Kazuo Ishiguro, Vikram Seth and Salman Rushdie. (There is even something of an old-fashioned English sensibility to it – some of the most common literary references are to Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and W. Somerset Maugham.)

Rahman’s narrator (who is never named) is of Pakistani origin but grew up in Princeton, where his father was a physics professor. Now, as the novel opens in 2008, the narrator is a London banker trapped in a loveless marriage and facing investigation into his financial dealings. Out of the blue his friend Zafar, a lawyer raised in poverty in Bangladesh and London, shows up on the doorstep and plunges him back into their separate and shared memories of the last few decades. Their flashbacks will cover a lot of physical and metaphorical ground: as the narrator sums up, this is “the story of the breaking of nations, war in the twenty-first century, marriage into the English aristocracy, and the mathematics of love.”

The novel is presented as the narrator’s reconstruction of Zafar’s (selectively revealed) confessions, built through Zafar’s notebooks and audio recordings of their conversations. In that the narrator keeps up a pretense of being only the impartial editor of Zafar’s memoirs, I was reminded of Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees. But Zafar’s words blend with the narrator’s in sometimes confusing ways, especially because there are no speech marks. It is not always clear who the “I” is in this narrative – which I’m sure is a very deliberate querying of identity, minimizing the distinctions between these two characters.

It’s impossible to overlook Rahman’s digressive style: his points of reference range from mathematics (especially Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem) and physics to the construction of MDF bookshelves, spending plenty of time on abstractions like motivation and certainty. Some of the facts are fun to learn about, such as the Gini coefficient of income inequality and Duchenne smiles, but others are tedious. Likewise, the multiple epigraphs (often long ones of a paragraph or more) heading each chapter don’t feel necessary.

I couldn’t escape the feeling that all of these very interesting facts and Ideas didn’t quite coalesce. The suspense element (what actually happened to Zafar in Afghanistan? And who fathered that baby?) fizzles out, and the financial crisis is rather shoehorned in as backdrop. Even elements like war, romances and economic depression can feel more like filler than they should. The narrator insists, “I am convinced now that nothing in [Zafar’s] account was out of place, nothing extraneous, even if at times it seemed incomplete and obtuse. If I am left with the sensation of being manipulated, then it also appears to me that there was a method and, behind that, a purpose.” I wasn’t always so sure of the purpose myself – but I did share the narrator’s sense of behind-the-scenes manipulation.

For, although impressively constructed, the novel is almost too self-aware, too eager to remind readers that it is a composite artifact, both found and built. Zafar recognizes his friend as a literary trope borrowed from Fitzgerald and the like: “That character, a narrator who’s in the story but not really of it…I wonder if you like them because you know what it’s like to stand on the sidelines.” Zafar, too, is hyper-conscious of his status as a memoirist with an Asian background: “Memoirs are stories of redemption, said Zafar, half of them about a tragic childhood finally overcome, the rest about fleeing the working treadmill for the romantic Tuscan hills or the countryside of Provence and finally discovering what life is actually all about.” He slyly imagines his resulting autobiography as “A thick book with a lovely cover, a silhouette of a minaret and dome, a view of the hills. Lace the edges with the pattern of a henna tattoo or a sari border.”

Still, if you give yourself over to this book it can be a very enjoyable reading experience. It’s supremely quote-worthy. Rahman writes great banter and puns, and has a firm handle on verbal registers ranging from working to upper class. (I also liked his observation that random unsourced quotes are always attributed to Churchill.) Some of my favorite bits were the flashbacks to Zafar’s return trip to Bangladesh as a child (there’s a really dramatic bridge collapse and train crash) and his interactions with Bill and Dave, a pair of philosophical Essex carpenters.

The title speaks of vision and knowledge, and ultimately this highly intelligent novel is a canny meditation on the limitations of both – in the context of friendship and personal memory: “our actions don’t tell the whole story, they never do. It is not that thought is hidden behind all the actions but that all the omissions and silences, the evidence of things not seen, must be accounted for if you’re to see anything.” In the end the gaps, the silences and the unknowns are almost as meaningful as the undeniable truths.

[Marxist Monkey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel is every bit as good as James Wood says it is. If you have the slightest interest in the consequences of the 20th century (wait, that's a ridiculous way to put it), if you have the slightest interest in the consequences of colonialism (that's not right either), if you have the slightest interest in the intersections of mathematics, physics, finance capital, the crisis of 2008, masculine egocentrism, South Asian politics, the dominance of Western ways of knowing, the arrogance of American global politics, the intricacies of storytelling as a way of knowing, the incoherence and unknowability of the real conflicts that confront us and, finally, the violent intricacies of desire (although this last bit is the most clumsy part of the book), and, if you remember loving Magic Mountain, this will be your new favorite novel. As it is mine.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

An impressive debut novel, the sort of book that the phrases "novel of ideas", but also "flawed" and "baggy" were invented for.

The central character in the novel is Zafar, and although large parts of the novel are ostensibly told by him in the first person, what we are actually reading is the unnamed narrator, Zafar's old friend, recollection of his conversations with Zafar and his own re-organisation of Zafar's notebooks.

Zafar's was born 9 months after the 1971 Bangladesh war of liberation, and his life takes him from rural poverty in Bangladesh, via urban deprivation in London, to the privileged surrounds of Oxford University, on to a brief Wall Street career, and into the fringes of the English upper classes via a love affair with Emily, another key character, then to development work in Bangladesh and then, post the invasion, Afghanistan. The narrator introduces his tale as "the story of the breaking of nations, war in the twenty-first century, marriage into the English aristocracy, and the mathematics of love."

As that self-introduction suggests, the ambition and scope of the novel are impressively extensive, indeed omitted from the above inventory is that this is one of the best fictional accounts of the origins of the 2008 financial crisis in the sub-prime securitisation markets. Zafar's own tale essentially finishes in 2002, but is told to the narrator in September 2008, and the narrator himself is a key member of the mortgage securitisation team at Goldman Sachs, pondering whether to whistle-blow before he is called to testify in front of a Congressional committee.

Unlike most novelists tackling the subject (e.g. James Lanchester) this is written by an author who knows what he is talking about, as he was there, and with no polemical axe to grind. (Although as the excellent financial commentator Nick Dunbar has pointed out on his website, http://nickdunbar.net/2014/10/15/in-t..., the account seems to borrow heavily on Gillian Tett's Fools Gold).

Similarly, mathematics features heavily, notably Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, which is used heavily as a metaphor during the story. Often this sort of thing is done lazily in novels by people with superficial knowledge of the underlying, but here the author, himself a mathematician by background, explicitly acknowledges this problem. The father of one character, a theoretical physicist, will when he hosts social events, "will listen as well, smiling warmly, as a guest invokes - as a theoretical physicist's guest will do - Einstein's theory of relativity as a metaphor for some proposition in the social sciences." But he

will remember but will never mention what Einstein came to wish after long suffering to hear the abuses to which the mere heading of his theory was to import all the authority of the ancient and timeless lambdas, epsilons and deltas of a beautiful mathematical argument. Einstein wished to hell that he'd called it the theory of invariance, which is to say, he wished he'd given it a name whose meaning was the exactly the opposite of relativity and which, he said, would have been just as accurate.

At the other end of the mathematical spectrum from Godel, the young Zafar explains how one day, walking to school and thinking about why long division actually works, "I grasped that when we add, subtract, multiply, and divide numbers, we are relying on a base of ten to represent them, but this base is entirely arbitrary, of our own choosing. The numbers themselves do not care."

This quote itself leads on to three other key themes. First the pure nature of maths, a science that doesn't rely on subjective opinion or observation, "in mathematics, the why is everything" - a system that hints at the possibility of certain knowledge and completeness, which is why Godel's theorem was so shattering.

Secondly the way the story is told. I actually had to search back two pages when recording the quote to see if the "I" was Zafar or the narrator, so closely does the latter intersperse his own story with his first-person re-telling of the former's. More on this below.

Thirdly, the use - the necessity but also inadequacy - of mathematical symbols and verbal/mental metaphors. This is crucial to the novel, and Zafar first uses maps to make this point:

Maps, contour maps and all maps, intrigue us for the metaphors they are: tools to give us a sense of something whose truth is far richer but without which we would perceive nothing and never find our bearings. That's what maps mysteriously do: they obliterate information to provide some information at all.

The book's title also comes from this concept:

If metaphors increase our understanding, they do so only because they take us back to a familiar vantage, which is to say that a metaphor cannot bring anything nearer. Everything new is on the rim of our view, in the darkness, below the horizon, so that nothing new is visible but in the light of what we know.

The invocation above of an indirect quote from Einstein also highlights another deliberately key aspect to the novel. Zafar is fond of quotation and narrator uses them extensively. A whole page of 2-3 epigrams begins each chapter, selected deliberately to help him guide his thoughts and signpost the story and quotes frequently infuse Zafar's conversations with the narrator.

Often the quotes are un- or speculatively attributed, and indeed Zafar even has a false quote about that:

"Isn't there a convention that if you don't know who the author is, you can always attribute it to Churchill"

"In fact, as Churchill himself said, the false attribution of epigrams is the friend of letters and the enemy of history"

He said that?

No, replied Zafar.

All of the above makes the book sound as if it focuses on the big picture of world events and on pure maths and theoretical physics, but in practice these are merely a, albeit impressively explored, backdrop for what is at heart a psychological novel, focusing on the relationship between Zafar, the narrator, and Zafar's partner, Emily, an intriguing character, but only seen at two removes via Zafar's version.

The narrator's telling of the story is at times tortuous and self-referential, groping towards an understanding of the story as an active part of it's telling. For the reader, this can make the book both a difficult read but also rewards a re-read. The following is a typical paragraph:

Nothing I can say about my feeling in those early days after his reappearance can properly account for the depth of my wish to talk to him and to hear him. I had yet to understand it myself, or begin to do so. There were some obvious things, and I'll come to those, but they didn't explain the sense of urgency and commitment. But the foregoing paragraph brings into view something I had not seen clearly before, something that is one more piece of explanation.

Zafar's story is, as I've said, largely told via the, somewhat clichéd, device of notebooks and detailed confessional conversations - in a way that reminded me of Volumes 2 and 3 of Elena Ferrante Neapolitan series (see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). However, here the author, via the narrator, explicitly uses this to highlight the limitations of his, or indeed, anyone's account of someone else's life. Indeed he comes to realise that often when we discover something new about a friend, we are in reality often only finding something new about ourselves, or at best about our relationship with them. And searching for causes can sometimes be futile:

There is an observation in Zafar's notebooks: In our twenties, when a friend tells us his relationship has ended, we ask. Who ended it? In our thirties, we simply say, I'm sorry.

In that shift is, I think, a change in our attitude to causation, from a belief that causation can be understood to a recognition that at certain times it is useless.

Similarly, our inability to ever really be certain of anything is key to the story:

I have always believed - and believed it so clearly that I should say that I have always known - that certainty is a subjective state, and no less so the certainty about other subjective states, so that when one is asked whether one is sure about anything, one can only answer: Yes, but I might be wrong.... between the subjective state of certainty and the world presented to us there is the mediation of this laughably fallible perception.

Zafar's tale and the novel itself, are clearly leading up to a major revelation and confession about his time in Afghanistan in 2002. But when it comes it is, while literally explosive, something of a disappointment at first read. Zafar's tale ends in a rather corny spy tale straight out of a Le Carre novel. But on reflection I was left wondering if the story was actually true - Zafar is fond of referencing Graham Greene (amongst many others) and the story is so reminiscent of A Quiet American that Zafar could be using this as a literary device to disguise his guilt over a much more personal event that marks the end of his relationship with Emily.

[Mandy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I seem to be out of step with most readers on this one. The novel has garnered an amazing number of very positive and laudatory reviews, which completely puzzled me when I read them after finishing – or rather not finishing – the book. I admit to having skipped large chunks of it, so perhaps it is unfair of me to pass judgement, as I can see that others have spent much time reading and pondering on this very long and complex novel. However, pass judgment on it I do, for it totally failed to engage me. It’s certainly a literary novel par excellence, and a clever novel of ideas, covering an enormous and unwieldy range of subjects. But I found it sprawling and disjointed, with the narrative constantly going off course, and with no clear trajectory. And with far too many footnotes.
The novel focuses on Zafar, born in rural Bangladesh, who rises through his intelligence and hard work, to a position of some prominence. Long-time friends with a wealthy Pakistani investment banker, he turns up on his doorstep one morning, dirty and dishevelled, and in a long narrative relates his adventures, all set against a turbulent backdrop of political upheaval and economic crisis. Ranging from Kabul to London to Islamabad, and all stops in between, exploring themes from love to science to war to knowledge and many others, this is a hugely ambitious, comprehensive and wide-ranging novel, even bringing in Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem (although it lost me completely at that point) and this sprawling meandering book, full of twists and turns and with epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter, presumably to emphasise the author’s erudition. I just found it so full of…well, talking, endless talking that after a while just wanted Zafar to, basically, shut up.
Maybe it’s my loss that I couldn’t relate to this book, but for me it all simply amounted to very little in the end, and impressed though I am by the author’s skill and ability to just about hold the various strands together, this was not one for me.

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Remember how excited you were when you discovered Pynchon? Remember how proud you were when you finished The Recognitions? When you first read Ulysses or Moby-Dick with understanding? Because we've read many of the world's acclaimed works and having, through long years of reading, hammered a receptacle of appreciation together on the anvils of many great books and intoxicating glory days of reads and rereads, we (or I at least) often have trouble finding fiction that satisfies. And if a novel takes my breath away while also satisfying, that's frosting on the cake. I was excited when I learned of Zia Haider Rahman's In the Light of What We Know. Feeling I was on the threshold of a memorable experience, I wasted no time in reading it. Having finished, I'm still excited by it. Perhaps it's not in the same lofty stratosphere as Gravity's Rainbow or The Recognitions or Ulysses, but it's the most intelligent novel seriously and artfully addressing some of the issues and ideas of our time that I've come across in a while. It totally satisfies, and it frosted my cake.

In the Light of What We Know is many things. It's primarily a philosophical novel of ideas which becomes a love story and in its final chapters develops a spy twist. It's no accident that Graham Greene's The Quiet American is mentioned more than once in the novel, though the halitosis (the thought is more Greene's and Rahman's than mine) is breathed on Afghanistan these days, rather than Vietnam. It's also about being an alien, the difference between information and knowledge, mathematics and how it relates to the world and finally how it validates its reality, and it's about writing. Politics and community are also addressed. Rahman is Bangladeshi in origin and Muslim, and his lessons on South Asian and Middle Eastern politics is fascinating.

It's Proustian. A novel can be made lovely by its digressions, by stories within stories and by reflection within an overarching idea. It's digression that makes In the Light of What We Know so lovely. Much of it is conversation between 2 South Asian men, and the loops and spins of their talk carry them to the far corners of their lives, and ours. It's that use of the tributaries and oxbows of narrative that make great writing, allowing not only demonstrations of style but reflection on the primary themes which shoot like arrows through the novel. Proust could do it well. Rahman can, too. In the spaces of the narrative filled by digression is his finest writing. In this terrific novel there's even frosting between the many layers.

[Hella · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like W.G. Sebald, if you like Elsa Morante, David Foster Wallace, Jean Rhys, and J.M. Coetzee, you will love Zia Haider Rahman's debut novel. No novel written in the past decade has been as sweeping in scope, as devastating in honesty, as heartbreaking in intensity as In the Light of What We Know. None has examined the predetermination of class so fearlessly, and none has grasped the moment we live in with such crystal clarity, showing us how little we know about our world, the people we love, the work we do, our own effects on the lives of others. And none has done so with the same brand of humor, intelligence, and, somehow, optimism. The main characters -- Zafar, who shows up on the narrator's doorstep one day; the narrator, who listens to Zafar's gripping tale about his travels through war-time Afghanistan and his own inner wars; the narrator's wife; and Zafar's girlfriend, Emily -- will stay with you long after you put the book down, and their hopes, efforts, and failures will change you -- as will the ways in which they come to terms with all that we cannot know in this world.

[Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship · Rating 2 out of 5]

For the educated reader, this book has a couple of seductive qualities. First, the author’s writing – by which I mean his use of language – is good; read a sample and you’ll be convinced this is quality literary fiction. Second, he has an apparently encyclopedic knowledge of a wide range of subjects, which he does not hesitate to share at length. There's something rather charming about a book in which characters are sitting around chatting about history, and someone says, "There was a telegram sent by the British ambassador at the beginning of the 1971 war in Bangladesh that you simply must read," and then the book quotes the entire telegram. It makes you feel you're learning something. But the storytelling is poor, and so I recommend you back away before getting sucked into its 500 unsatisfying pages.

This book is about a British-Bangladeshi guy named Zafar, who is brilliant at everything, from mathematics to law, and who shares many biographical details with the author. Zafar has something to get off his chest, so he looks up an old college friend and rambles at him about other things for hundreds of pages. The college friend isn’t given a name, so I’ll call him Amir, after the narrator of The Kite Runner; like that character, he is privileged, dull and a bit of a douche. (Zafar is the same without the privilege – the two narrative voices are identical, of course – and even more pedantic.) Amir is so fascinated by Zafar’s non-story that he decides to record all their conversations, and then writes a book about it. Amir does not have any plotline of his own, despite all the page time he gets.

Novels, in general, are made up of scenes with a beginning and an end, which serve to advance the plot. This book is made up of digressions, its scenes simultaneously never-ending and pointless; a mundane encounter in a bar can take up several non-consecutive chapters, only to finally end with a whimper, leaving the reader to wonder why a non-event would be given such narrative weight. For instance, here’s what happens over one 100-page stretch:

Chapter 11: Amir attends a dinner party at his parents’ home at which a guest expresses negative opinions about bankers (Amir is a banker); various financial instruments are explained to the reader; Amir has rambling intellectual conversations with his father.
Chapter 12: The inexplicably fascinated Amir tries unsuccessfully to convince Zafar to write a memoir.
Chapter 13: The life story of an Italian doctor who may or may not have been real, as "discovered" in one of Zafar's notebooks, is inserted. Never connects to anything else in the book.
Chapter 14: Zafar, during a layover in Islamabad, has dinner with some aging officials. International relations are discussed.
Chapter 15: Amir has lunch with a politician who is the father of a friend, and consequently gets his financial instruments approved by the politician’s ratings agency.

Someone along the way must have told the author that his book is boring and goes nowhere, because he inserts characteristically wordy passages insisting that it is brilliant and totally going somewhere:

“So began Zafar’s exposition of the events in Afghanistan, and even though I could not have imagined then where it would ultimately go, it had become clear that he had a story to tell, a disclosure by parts. There were the digressions, the tangents, the close analyses, and broad reflections – all deviations from a central line. I am convinced now that nothing in his account was out of place, nothing extraneous, even if at times it seemed incomplete and obtuse. If I am left with the sensation of being manipulated, then it also appears to me that there was a method and, behind that, a purpose.”

“I had gained the impression of hearing one digression upon another. But despite the lack of design, which such an apparently haphazard account might suggest, I sensed that there was some underlying theme or movement. I came to see that his stories ran together, like the rivers of his boyhood coming from the mountains and forests and the plains, a long way from their sources but ultimately joined together in one song, a harmony of place and time.”

But it isn’t going anywhere. It ends with a whimper, its climax relayed only through innuendo. As it turns out, the center of the story is Zafar’s relationship with Emily, a blue-blooded Englishwoman. This relationship makes sense only as a metaphor for international relations. Emily represents the West, England in particular, and Zafar represents the East: Afghanistan, or Bangladesh. The West alternately ignores and walks all over the East, and the East finally responds with random violence. Okay – but Afghanistan can't just break up with the West and leave for a different planet. On the other hand, Emily is two hours late to the first date without explanation – so why is Zafar still waiting, why is there ever a second date, why does this turn into a long-term relationship when her regard for him never improves? Why would someone who had experienced at least one healthy relationship ever want to be with this person? For that matter, why is Emily with Zafar when she values him so little? The book never answers these questions, presumably because if you replace “Emily” and “Zafar” with “England” and “Bangladesh,” they are nonsensical.

Ultimately, while there are a lot of ideas rattling around in this book, while the author certainly proves his worth to any trivia team, the story itself is empty. It is a long and wordy novel that goes nowhere in particular, and is not particularly convincing. I wish I hadn’t spent so much time on it.

[Philippe · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is no doubt that this is a very ambitious and thought-provoking novel. It reminds me of Diller + Scofidio’s Blur Building (2002) which was nothing else than a suspended platform shrouded in a perpetual cloud of man-made fog. Ephemeral, quite beautiful but it offered scant protection from the elements. In fact you needed a raincoat to enter it. Similarly this novel recounts a life, a coalescence of contemporary lives, in supple, elegant prose. And it takes its time to do so. Yet the somewhat nebulous profusion of voices, ideas, locales, and plot digressions leaves much unsaid. In this diaphanous narrative cloud nothing is as solid as it seems. In fact it seems the unsaid is very much at the core of this story. Which is both an annoyance and explains the suggestive beauty of it.

Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem is at the heart of this book. As the narrator confides to us in the final pages, the theorem opens a bifurcation, an intersection between two, for human beings challenging trajectories: one into a realm of irreconcilable and incompatible inconsistencies, and another into a twilight world of unassailable truths for which however there is no proof. But I would venture that the former path opens up another bifurcation. It’s up to us, human beings, to see this incompleteness gap as a limitation, or as a inexhaustible wellspring of new possibilities.

From this perspective In the Light of What We Know can be read as a coming of age story. Zafar, the uprooted protagonist, stumblingly, reluctantly comes to accept that knowledge will never be able to allow him to find home. He comes to see „that understanding is not what this life has given us, that answers only beget questions, that honesty commands a declaration not of faith but of ignorance, and that the only mission available to us, one laid to our charge, if any hand was in it, is to let unfold the questions, to take to the river knowing not if it runs to the sea, and accept our place of servants to life.”

The building does not protect us from the elements. Rather it exposes us to the vagaries of life on this planet. This novel reveals a hard-won glimmer of spirituality in a profoundly unspiritual 21st century.

[Maureen]

Well, this is my first DNF book ever, which is kind of insane. I was trying to push through but at this point I'm not even halfway through and it's not getting better, so here we are.
I can see how the story is beautiful and great to some people, but it wasn't that for me. The narrative is all out of order, which for me was really confusing, and there were a lot of British politics/class systems mentioned in passing but not explained as a major part of the story and those are things I know very little about. The stream of consciousness type of writing with no markings where someone's speech began or ended was also pretty confusing, if I put the book down I had to go back and look to see who was talking at the moment.
Overall, just not for me at the moment. Maybe I'll try to reread this someday, but not anytime soon.

[Stratos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Κάποιες σελίδες αριστουργηματικές. Κάποιες σελίδες γεμάτο φλυαρία. Δεν δικαίωσε τις μεγάλες προσδοκίες που εμφάνιζαν οι κριτικές...

[Stacey Falls · Rating 5 out of 5]

I actually wish I could give this book more than 5 stars.

It is the best book I have read in a long time. Possibly the best book I have ever read.

"Everything new is on the rim of our view, in the darkness, below the horizon, so that nothing new is visible but in the light of what we know."

Who are we if not a collection of our experiences and the choices we have made? But why do we make the choices we do? "What autonomy of choice do you have if your preferences are so obviously conditioned by your social milieu?" In other words, if our experiences dictate our choices, and our choices dictate our experience, who dictates the circumstances that we are born into, out of which everything else arises? Are we just a puppet of our race, our class, our gender? Are we just pawns in the story of empire, colonialism, oppression, and power?

Zia Haider Rahman explores the story of two immigrants from very different class backgrounds. Their stories unfold, and while not much happens in the plot, the story gracefully and deftly explores the entire nature of life, existence, love, belonging, math, free-will, and quantum physics.

Our narrator, and our protagonist are, in many ways, quite opposite, and yet their voices overlap. But the overlapping is difficult to trust. They both have their demons, are unable to account completely for the choices they have made, strive to absolve themselves without even acknowledging the desire or the need for acquittal since that acknowledgement requires an awareness of wrong-doing. Would they have made different choices in light of what they now know?

Maybe not? Different choices sometimes require a different perspective. How do we gain that perspective? Especially if we aren't even aware of the need for a different vantage?

Ultimately, this book is a genius attempt to analyze the nature of humanity. Rahman's exploration is deep, poignant, thoughtful, complex. Every page had brilliant insights. Bigger questions were brought up, not all of them answered. Our narrator says, "Who would deny that we are ever more than children in the face of existence?"

Exactly.

[Chryssouline · Rating 5 out of 5]

από τα πιο ωραία κ ιδιαίτερα βιβλία των τελευταίων ετών, με έναν πολύ ενδιαφέροντα κεντρικό ηρωα

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Novel of Our Century

I originally titled this review of Zia Haider Rahman's extraordinary debut novel The Novel of the Century. I did not necessarily intend it as a value judgment, although it is surely one of the best books I have read since the year 2000. But it is a book of immense scope that manages to combine so many of the themes that have dominated public debate in our century: Islam, American neo-imperialism, and the financial recession just for starters. Or, as the narrator puts it at the end of the third paragraph, "the story of the breaking of nations, war in the twenty-first century, marriage into the English aristocracy, and the mathematics of love."

He could have said a few hundred other things; never have I read a book that contained so much fascinating information about every subject under the sun, from ancient history and literature, via music, mathematics and nuclear physics, to carpentry and chess. Everything but the kitchen sink—but if Rahman had thrown that in also, at least you would have got an informative lesson on practical plumbing, shaped into a metaphor that would somehow have illuminated one of the salient problems of our time. You can get a sense of the author's range by noting the authors of the epigraphs that head each chapter: Winston Churchill, Joseph Conrad, Albert Einstein, T. S. Eliot, A. E. Housman, John le Carré, Herman Melville, Edward Said, Tayeb Salih, W. G. Sebald, Saul Smilansky, and the Bible—and that's only in the first half-dozen chapters. One of these epigraphs, from Italo Calvino, says something that may well be the grand theme of the entire novel:

Since science has begun to distrust general explanations and solutions that are not sectorial and specialized, the grand challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various "codes," into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world.

It is an audacious ambition, and though Rahman may not totally succeed, he has written one of the most multifaceted novels I have ever read.

Allowing for the countless flashbacks and digressions (and digression here is the name of the game), the novel is essentially an extended conversation between a fortyish banker and an old friend who turns up on his South Kensington doorstep one morning in 2008. The two had known each other years before at Oxford, where both were reading mathematics, and kept in sporadic touch in the intervening years in New York and London. In many ways, they are similar: both of South Asian ethnicity, both with a veneer of polished English manners, both with strong academic track records at Oxford and the Ivy Leagues, both involved for a time at least in international finance, and both bruised by unhappy relationships. But in important ways, they are also different. The unnamed narrator is from a background of privilege: his grandparents were landowners in Pakistan, his parents met at Princeton, his father moved from there to take up a professorship at Oxford, and he himself went to Eton, the premier boys' boarding school in England. Zafar, the surprise visitor, was born in a remote village in Bangladesh shortly after its war of independence from Pakistan. His father moved to London in poverty, working first as a bus conductor and then as a waiter. Zafar attended state schools and scraped his way through Oxford on a scholarship. The differences are important because, like most English novels, this one is largely about class—but class seen in a far from parochial context, with the politics of patronage and exclusion translated to the world stage.

Unlike the narrator, Zafar did not remain in finance, but went to Harvard to study law, and then returned to Asia. The slow discovery what what he did in those lost years and how his attitudes slowly change is the main plot thread of the book. I was reminded more than once of Moshin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, except that Rahman's style of storytelling is a good deal less direct (downright difficult, some might say) and he is attempting something rather less obvious. Also lurking in the background, and eventually acknowledged, are Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and The Quiet American by Graham Greene. The Fitzgerald is relevant to the relationship between the two main characters, except they are more nearly equal than Carraway and Gatsby. Indeed Rahman's technique of avoiding quotation marks means that two competing "I's" come into play. Although confused at first, I soon got used to it myself, and appreciated the extraordinary flexibility this gives to the narrative, thought slipping imperceptibly into speech, and one character almost merging with the other. At least at the beginning; this starts as a novel of ideas rather than character, yet before the end, the characters have developed as distinct and three-dimensional, and interact with each other in emotional and often painful ways.

Zafar takes the Graham Greene novel with him on a couple of trips to Kabul in 2002, and the parallels to his own situation will be as obvious to him as they are to the reader. On his first evening, he goes to a bar in the UN compound, and is disgusted:

The music was loud, the soles of my feet tingling with the vibrations, a volume to muffle the clamor of sexual gambits unbuckling over the scene. It was a scene of horror. This is the freedom for which war is waged, in the venerable name of which the West sends its working-class heroes to fight and die. If the Afghanis had been asked, would they have allowed this blight on their home? Is this what [we were] fighting for?

Readers who are relieved to find the familiar tropes of political or espionage novel kicking in during the last hundred pages may be disappointed to discover that Rahman has little interest in delivering a simplistic denouement. The novel ends with a photo of Albert Einstein at Princeton walking into the distance with the mathematician Kurt Gödel, whose Incompleteness Theorem is also a talisman for the novel. The inevitable result of a lifetime's search for knowledge is the realization that there is some knowledge we will never possess. For Rahman, the destination is far less important than the journey—but what a journey!

[Donovan Lessard · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was really excited for this book: it got great reviews, had great authors talking it up (i.e. Teju Cole), and GOD DAMN that's a cool cover. And there are plenty of things to love about this book. The writing is phenomenal and there are frequently moments when you have the compulsion to write down quotes; the blank page at the beginning of the book is now littered with quotes and page numbers of all these fantastic little diamonds that catch you and hold your attention. These diamonds are strung throughout a narrative of relatively massive scope: moving across decades and continents, across wars and break ups and breakdowns.

The versatility of this book is staggering--I can see why Teju Cole would like this novel. The author has insights drawn from mathematics, philosophy, economics, finance, physics, poetry, literature, etc. etc. The book begins with an Edward Said quote about what it is like to be an exile, how that cannot be understood without being experienced. It begins beautifully, wrapping the theme of exile into that of friendship and insider-outsiderness as a Bangladeshi in the center of empire. There is a post-colonial sensibility and a brutally harsh critique of US imperialism and Western empire as it relates to the post-911 world. The overriding theme, though, which is hinted at by the title, is that of what can be known and what cannot be known and how this impacts the lives we lead. This novel is really about epistemology and ontology--not in a philosophical sense, but in a practical sense: how do we know something to be true? If we can or cannot, how do we make decisions and choices? Do we ever have the ability to make choices?

One thing that was troubling about this book is the portrayal of women, in particular the characters of Emily and the narrator's wife. Both women are portrayed as fickle, annoying distractions from the real stuff of life--which seems to be the narrator's friendship with Zafar, the central character of the book. There is an almost visceral hatred of these characters lying below every mention of them. This becomes elevated from a troubling, implicit facet of the book to an alarming and disgusting point of no return when, the reader is made to understand, Zafar rapes Emily. Perhaps this is meant to show that Zafar's anger undoes him as he cannot dispense with it. Perhaps it was meant to show the duality in each of us, another theme in the book, and the way acts of love can inspire intense anger from the other side of us and vice versa. Either way, instead of inspiring me to 'see' something I had not about Zafar or to learn something about humanity, I just felt like the rape was gratuitous and the final, ultimate misogynistic act in a relationship that was narrated misogynistically. I think the author would respond: her fickleness and irresponsibility and immaturity were due to her class, not her gender. While I can see some merit to this argument it is not thoroughly convincing to me.

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

Gratefully here I thought I had found an effective antidote to some lightweight trash recently published, like, for example, The Goldfinch.

But I was much disappointed: In the Light of What We Know is an unnecessarily complicated mishmash of Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad, W. G. Sebald, and several other modern and postmodern authors—all breathlessly listed elsewhere by supporting reviewers. It seems to have been written to display Rahman's ability to toss in literary allusions liberally throughout and showcase his wide-ranging interests.

What is advertised as a deep epistemological work is actually the author spamming his knowledge of nearly everything all over every page. This is deceptive literature that fakes out its readers, and as such is unforgivable. Using a kind of bait-and-switch technique, you'll find that the main character of the story is actually an uninteresting woman named Emily.

Rahman is no doubt smart but he needs to get over his need for intellectual display. He is no Sebald, and stands to learn a lot about authorial modesty from The Rings of Saturn.

Focus, Mr. Rahman, focus! You've done well (mostly) to resist the faddish yet bestselling trend of Murakami's weird unintelligible mystico-spiritualism. Now move away from David Foster Wallace's need to spew your vast knowledge all over the text, to the detriment of the story and its meaning. You've got real talent and I hope your next book delivers it, truly.

[Lefteris Filippou · Rating 4 out of 5]

Εξαιρετικό βιβλίο !
Εξόχως πολιτικό . Είχα πάρα πολλά χρόνια να διαβάσω ένα βιβλίο που απαιτούσε να το μελετώ σε κάθε σειρά του !
Σύγχρονο και απίστευτη μελέτη της κρίσης κι όχι μόνο !

[Marla · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh I really hate to give a highly rated book a low rating. When I first started reading it, I thought the writing was superb. And parts of it really were. It's beautiful.

A wealthy Pakistani (un-named) finds an old friend (Zafar) from Bangladesh on his doorstep one morning. He has a story to tell. The wealthy man decides the story needs to be documented so he gives Zafar a digital recorder for him to dictate his story to and then he transcribes it. (Really?) There was soooo much foreshadowing. The first 30 times I read "If only I had known then, what I know now..." (or something similar), I was wildly intrigued as to what the big secret could be. The next 30 times I read it, I thought "sweet jesus get on with the story."

And the voices got confusing. At times I didn't know if it were the wealthy man talking about the story of Zafar, or the actual telling of the story by Zafar, or Zafar was quoting one of the many long passages of books he'd read. While the writing was very good, the voices tended to all sound the same.

The math in the book kept me going at times. Godel's Theorem of Incompleteness had the math major in me interested. But even that got stale after a while.

There are great themes of class distinction, ethnicity, betrayal...it's complex, character driven and lyrical...well done. The writing is good. I sucked it in, in the beginning. But for 400/500 pages (or so) NOTHING happened. The only thought is "what could have happened to Zafar...what did he do?" After 400 pages, you find out. The End.

[Aharon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Uch. Another book written entirely for the critics, in which men sit around having Important Thoughts, disgorging uninterrupted Important Paragraphs about Important World Events and Significant Mathematical Concepts while ladies hover at the periphery to make them feel sad. It makes gestures towards the great 19th and early-mid 20th century English authors, but takes from them a fusty syntax and little else. Many, many other authors show their influence (W.G. Sebald and Richard Powers at the head of the line), mostly by having some annoying tic of theirs mimicked.

[Tanuj Solanki · Rating 5 out of 5]

The World is Not Enough

Parts of the review first appeared in The New Indian Express

Straight to the point: Zia Haider Rehman’s voluminous first novel, In The Light of What We Know, is a masterpiece. This is not to say that the book is without its flaws, but if a masterpiece is a novel that emotionally overwhelms the reader & gives them the feeling of having approached a truth crucial to their own lives, Rahman's book is just that.

It begins thus: In London, an investment banker of privileged Pakistani origins is caught between a flailing marriage and the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis. As one of the early innovators of credit default swaps and Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO) -- the much-maligned financial instruments that were blamed for the recession -- the banker is due some special cornering after the coming of bad times. One day, he opens his door to a long-lost friend Zafar. Zafar, like the novelist Rahman, was born in Bangladesh. He had studied with the narrator in Oxford; the two had also worked together in Wall Street for some time. Zafars starts to narrate his life's story, and apart from continuously stoking the narrator’s curiosity, also provides him welcome distraction. The two thus set about the process of peeling the past’s layers.

Although the narrator is not as relegated to Zafar as Carraway was to Gatsby (Rahman hints strongly at the comparison inside the novel), Zafar is still the give-or-take hero we have. And we do root for him. He had a severely underprivileged childhood, from which he grew up to earn a standing in the world through sheer genius and hard work. Yet the gulfs of class and race could not be overcome, and manifest as they were in Zafar's relationship with a thoroughly privileged and thoroughly British woman named Emily, continuously pushed him toward a state of rage from where his only outlet could be an act of violence.

It is in all the jumpy reminiscences into the narrator's and Zafar's lives that Rehman grants the novel its exhilarating scope, not only in the places where the action takes us, not only in the decades and events it traverses—from the sub-prime crisis of 2008 to war-time Afghanistan in 2002 to the Indo-Pak War of 1971 —but also in its desire to inform the reader with varieties of knowledge in an essayistic fashion—the class structure in Britain, T S Eliot’s poetry, the immigrant-savvy spirit of America, Godel’s Incompletness Theorem, Orientalism, carpentry, the narrative choices of Scott Fitzgerald, Green and Maugham, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, CDOs, the dual nature of particles in quantum physics, so on. Throughout all this, the novel remains skeptical of the act of knowing and its relationship with micro and macro power structures.

The two friends are connected to Pakistan and Bangladesh; India is often talked of as an important regional power, thereby having an impact on the whole subcontinent’s consciousness; and the most important events in the novel take place in Afghanistan. This trans-subcontinental tendency was last approximated in a novel this good in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. However, Rushdie’s view could still be called Indo-centric. Moreover, if Rushdie was said to derive his charm from magical realism, the only moniker possible for Rehman’s realism is erudite realism. But unlike Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red, where essayistic knowledge of miniature paintings and the threats faced by the art form—threats faced because of growing Western hegemony—served a more direct purpose in the plot itself, in Rehman’s novel, knowledge and its acquisition aren’t pegged to any particular area. Zafar’s indiscriminate erudition is itself a counter against discrimination. It is also contributive to the idea of shunning an untested life, which Zafar has decided to do.

It must, however, be noted that Rahman's little essays are all deftly dramatized, and do not appear to exist for their own sake. Rahman's true achievement with the novel form is to make these discussions appear to be contributing -- in fact, they are essential -- to the plot that he works with. And Rahman is going for breadth, not depth. No topic is dug deeper than it needs to. If you happen to have knowledge of any one of these, you might even find Rahman's explanations / usage bordering on cliche. Rahman uses what could be called local cliches - where you can make out if one passage is a cliche only if you have some specific knowledge of that specific field. The range of subjects ensures that most local cliches retain their original flavor - that of carrying extraordinary insights.

It is commonly agreed that the most important historical events of this fledgling century are 9/11 and the financial crisis. The complications that need to be traversed to gain any meaningful understanding of these events make it extremely difficult for any novelist to tackle them in a dramatic way. Rehman’s novel operates with a world-historical-consciousness that clarifies just who faces the brunt of History, of all that is wrong in the world. The idea of ‘The Age of Knowledge’ doesn’t work for those who cannot acquire it. But those who equate its acquisition with wisdom are also committing a desperate error.

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant novel. Not since grad school have I read something that compelled me to go back and take notes, but this is a novel that is so full of contemplative launch pads that you can't seem to digest it all in one read. The story itself is one thing, but the telling of the story is far more seductive than the tale itself. Beginning with a narrator who remains nameless throughout the duration of the tale, I often found myself frequently having to double-check to see if it was the best friend narrator or Zafar who was speaking, and that demanded that the reader acknowledge the multifaceteed point of view this story is written from....and yet, the inner life of the character of Zafar is often indistinguishable from that of his privileged friend.

How very appropriate to quote Edward Said at the beginning of this novel, almost like being introduced to your guide as you assume the role of foreigner in an unfamiliar land. The story of the NGOs in Afghanistan is a painful illustration of the underbelly of development, and the lack of any identifiable allegience amongst the power brokers of the world comes across as both shocking and redemptive, the chess board metaphor winding itself surreptitiously around the globe.

A worthy read.....and re-read.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

After a week of reading at a particularly ravenous pace, I fancied a novel that could not be speed-read. In the Light of What We Know was ideally suited to this, as it is erudite to the point of stodginess. The narrative is structured as a conversation between two old friends, meandering around incidents in their lives and important international milestones, particularly 9/11, the US invasion of Afghanistan, and the 2007/8 financial crisis. Even the narrator has his limits, though:

Zafar moved on to an explanation of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, but this took us along yet another digression carrying us further afield. He did not, in fact, lose his thread and, in due course, he returned to his story of meeting the Hampton-Wyverns and then the narrative of events in Afghanistan (in fact there was only ever just one thread, winding in ways that are now apparent). Even so, I am inclined to skip over the account concerning Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, a digression too far, which should not be taken as an indication of anything other than my own need to keep a grip on the twisting and turning of Zafar’s discussion, the ranging back and forth.
In 2000, how many people know what sub-prime mortgages were? He asked me.
Hang on! How did we get to mortgages? I responded.
Zafar simply repeated the question.

There are no speech marks throughout. This both adds to the sense of closely observing a long conversation between friends and leads to confusion about who is speaking. The latter certainly emphasises the unreliability of the narration – the reader knows that Zafar is telling his friend only parts of his story, but also that the narrator’s perspective shapes his reporting of what Zafar said, did, and wrote. Despite being 550 pages long and packed with carefully described incidents, this is a remarkably ambiguous novel. Zafar remains a mystery to the narrator and the reader, while the narrator is scarcely less enigmatic himself. There is certainly a sense that you can learn a lot of detail about someone’s life without understanding them at all, as it’s impossible to say whether what you’ve been told is actually significant. Zafar and the narrator gloss over events that would be the plot focus of a different novel. Indeed, the plot is not the point at all as the novel is concerned with big social and philosophical themes: wealth, class, privilege, freedom, love, duty, ambition, and the search for meaning in life.

Although the preceding paragraphs don’t really constitute a recommendation, I did enjoy In the Light of What We Know thanks to the beautiful and often insightful writing:

I have always felt that choice is a rarity in life, that it lies in wait in the crevices of time, to surprise us when we seem to have the least room to manoeuvre. The grand architecture of our time on earth bears no choice at all, no trace of will, free or otherwise. Without our will we are born and against it we die. We do not choose our mothers, any more than they choose the children that they bear. We do not choose the circumstances of our parents, the home and inheritance, the unearned talents, or the circumstances of our formative infant years when our brains congeal into a steady state, and our neural pathways set us on the course of our lives. Most of the time, we heed unwritten rules. They may be rules of culture and conditioning, patterns imprinted on the tender firmament of youth, or they may be the rules knotted into our brains, woven with DNA by our biological parents, but they are all still rules, by which we live, by which we are governed. That notion of choice as we move through the world, the free will that we claim so proudly, is only the reflection of the body’s foregone direction, an image in the distorting mirror of ego, a trick of the light.

Always running through the conversation between Zafar and the narrator is the frustration of any communication: how to effectively convey the subjectivity of your own experience?

Look, said Zafar. It was he who now showed exasperation. I don’t know how to get anywhere close to my own life, he said. My drama, like everyone’s, goes on upstairs, in the head. And I don’t think you can write the drama of the mind. All you have are the things people do. It’s always about what they do, and yet the mind if where the battles take place, the tragedies and comedies that rule the day. So we fall back on metaphors.

This drama of the mind is what the book is trying to convey, or at least demonstrate the difficulty of conveying. The text is full of quotations from and references to books, films, aphorisms, research, etc as these are amongst the tools we use to attempt explanations of our perspectives to others. However, this perpetual quoting at each other can be a little exasperating for the reader. It often seems to obscure rather than elucidate something, again emphasising the unreliability of the narrator, of Zafar, and of consciousness in general. In the Light of What We Know also contains one of the best descriptions I’ve ever found of the flow state:

It was only in those periods of concentration, when the self is abnegated and the mind and the subject are fused and all thought is governed by the matter at hand, determined by it, as if it is not you that engages the subject, the work, but the work itself requisitioning the tools of your mind for its inherent purpose – it was during those periods that ironically I felt most in control, that gave me the whole of time – before, after, and during – an aspect of will.

The short interview with the author included in the back of the paperback edition I read goes into the themes and context for the novel. Zia Haider Rahman’s comments are thoughtful and definitely added to my appreciation. That said, I wouldn’t unequivocally recommend In the Light of What We Know as some may find the meandering philosophical reflections, jigsaw of plot fragments, and exceedingly verbose protagonists trying. It rewards patience, but not with catharsis.

[Lili · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have never felt compelled to write a book review until I read Zia Haider Rahman's extraordinary debut novel, "In Light of What We Know". My interest in this book was piqued after I came across James Wood's effusive review of it in the New Yorker, which led me to promptly purchase it.

In Light of What We Know is an "ideas novel" in the truest sense; its pages are filled with meditations and dissections of topics spanning class divide, epistemology, carpentry, the white man's burden, memory, exile, identity, existence, financial regulations, and mathematics, just to name a few.

As a first-time author, Rahman still needs to work on honing his writing execution - namely pace and construction. As reviewers here already noted, the novel tends to ramble and digress. His utilization of first-person narrative for both of the two main characters frequently makes it difficult to figure out who is telling what story. At times it does seem that Rahman is guilty of being overeager to impress his readers with his wide breadth of knowledge, and of his high intelligence.

Despite the points above, I would urge everyone to treat this as an "ideas" book, and to read it for the ideas that Rahman discusses, instead of focusing on plot and character development, for those ideas are stunning. So often was I itching to get a highlighter to highlight every other passage, and to slow down in order to digest what I just read. The novel's insights and reflections (esp. regarding class barriers and human psychology) are of such incisive clarity, precision, and depth that it bespeaks an intimate familiarity on part of the writer. Throughout my reading, I could not shake off the feeling that In Light of What We Know is actually an autobiography told through the lenses of fiction.

I have come across very few writers, or people in general, who are able to exercise both "abstract and concrete thinking" as beautifully as demonstrated in this novel. This book goes on my "lifetime" bookshelf, and I hope it receives all the recognition and awards it so richly deserves.

[Caitlin Grabarek · Rating 1 out of 5]

I often think of books as people. This book was a seemingly polite man on a long bus trip who told me a long and meandering story. I gave him some of my time, as he promised to reveal to me a world of knowledge about mathematics, the 2008 financial crisis, The War on Terror, and philosophy. I tried to be charitable while enduring his endless tangents, knowing that he was the product of a different culture. The longer I listened, I began to see a deep streak of misogyny and tendency to view women as untrustworthy symbols rather than actual human beings which I could neither abide nor ignore. After spending over 500 pages stalling for time and painting his ex-girlfriend as an evil manipulative shrew devoid of any redeeming qualities, he admitted that he’d kind of sort of sexually assaulted her but he kind of had to because she was a living embodiment of Capitalism or The West or something. I felt taken advantage of and kind of gross and while this is the sort of experience one inevitably has when either using public transit or taking a chance on a random book at the library, it makes me a little more wary of investing so my time in a story I suspect is not going to end anywhere good.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dit is een lijvig en complex boek waarvoor je minimaal een week de tijd moet hebben om veel en intensief te lezen. Het gaat over twee mannen waarvan de een (afkomstig uit Pakistan) het verhaal van de ander (Zafar, oorspronkelijk uit Bangladesh) maar daar doorheen ook zijn eigen verhaal vertelt. En dat met een interpunctie zonder aanhalingstekens en veel wisselingen in locatie en tijd. Pfff, dat viel niet altijd mee…

Je krijgt te maken met thema’s als vriendschap, verraad, klassenverschillen, cultuurverschillen, hypocrisie, verbanning, ontworteling, identiteit en ga zo maar door….
De auteur neemt ook het bankwezen, de financiële crisis, de Pakistaanse geschiedenis, de oorlog in Afghanistan onder de loep, ageert tegen corruptie en westers paternalisme en praat een aardig woordje mee over (vooral) wiskunde, psychologie en religie. Verder filosofeert hij er bezielend, soms woedend op los over allerhande complexe economische, politieke en historische problemen. Regelmatig onbegrijpelijk en met verwarrende kronkel- en zijwegen maar vaak ook helder en treffend zoals in dit citaat:

‘Het incident bepaalt alles, verandert alles, niet alleen daarna maar ook ervoor. Mensen kunnen niet tegen het onverwachte, en zijn geneigd hun herinneringen aan te passen en zo te draaien dat het lijkt of het onverwachte juist werd verwacht. Net zoals de natuur een afschuw heeft van vacuüm, verafschuwen de mensen een vacuüm in de geschiedenis, de discontinuïteit die veroorzaakt wordt door het onverwachte. Ze gaan terug in hun herinnering en vullen de leemtes op, ze proberen erachter te komen waarom ze dat niet hebben zien aankomen, waarom hetgeen ze blind waren opeens zonneklaar is. We denken terug en herzien onze kijk op de wereld naar aanleiding van wat er is gebeurd.’

De rode draad in de roman is het verhaal van Zafar over zijn grote liefde Emily. En de niet helemaal frisse zaken waarbij ze betrokken zijn. Wat is er rond die twee toch voorgevallen op de VN compound tijdens een humanitaire missie in Afghanistan? Maar zoals we kunnen leren uit de Onvolledigheidsstellingen van Gödel; ‘de waarheid kan niet altijd worden achterhaald en we weten niet of de waarheid überhaupt onthuld kan worden’.
Kortom een knap boek maar neem de tijd!

edit: Na schrijven van mijn review toch besloten mijn review met 1 ster op te hogen ;)

[Lily · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hated this book. Two erudite blowhards talk at each other for 500 pages with no quotation marks and very little context clues as to who is speaking for this reader to follow. I found these two dudes excruciatingly dull. Absolutely nothing touched me in this book. (I'll be loads of fun at this book club.)

[Katia N · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked up this novel at the bookshop purely by chance. Usually I would not go for such a book based upon the blurb. But i got hooked from the first page. Not so much on what it was saying but on the way how it sounds, sincere, confessional and fiendishly clever. I did not buy the book then. But the words and ideas from those five pages I read were coming back to my mind unexpectedly and I wanted to continue reading.

Then I searched who was the author. It appeared to be a man born in Bangladesh, moved to England with his parents as a little boy, raised in relative poverty, read Maths at Oxford, further educated in Yale, worked for Goldman Sachs, then became a human rights lawyer. That intrigued me enormously as I was curious what such a man wants to tell to the world. I started to read the book properly and I am very glad I've done it.

It is difficult to talk about this novel. On the one hand, it is a very complex novel sparkling with the ideas, theories and knowledge. But on the other hand it is a simple, but deep and bitter love story, and the fight of the person who is very sensitive to the fact that he cannot fit into the canvas of the British class society.

The story is told by the friend of the main character. It is clear that the narrator writes his manuscript not only to tell the story of his friend, but to understand himself better, or to use it to help to decide what to do next with his life. And when i was reading, it felt much more like listening to a person talking to you directly. Talking about the modern world, its perception by an individual, wars, anger, love, betrayal, literature and financial crisis. And all of this, in no particular order, intersects with the story of the main protagonist, Zafar. Although I was familiar with many ideas, it does not spoil the experience, as it gives one a chance to reflect on them once more and see the protagonist's point of view.

Main themes raised in the book, which made me think:

Ability of a human being to know the world around, and especially himself. Zafar came to the conclusion we only can learn something new in the light of what we already know. That we are just not able to know yourself fully and there is this abyss of darkness which we cannot perceive. Godel's incompleteness theorem is central for the whole book. I've got an impression when Zafar realises the meaning of it, he stops looking for his perfect world in maths. And this adds to his disappointment with the world surrounding him. But the message the book delivers is broader - some see uncertainty as limitation and others as opportunities.

The work of developmental organisations in war zones and the relationship with the locals. "He, like many of them, came from that breed of international development experts unsparing in its love for all humanity but having no interest in people". And more broader the West-East conundrum: "West's enlightenment, and they call it human rights, and on that rock they have founded their new humanity, and in its name they act with clear conscience. Bush and the neocons, God bless them, might have wanted their natural resources and strategic positioning, but the liberals were always after their souls." You might not share this point of view of Zafar. But it definitely makes you look deeper from the point of view of the "recipients" of the benefits of the "Western civilisation."

Financial crisis - we have got this image built up by media of greedy bankers ruining the financial system for their personal benefit. But this novel looks at this from the perspective a banker. He questions why the bankers need to feel guilty about what they were doing. And it is appears to be not that straightforward question as we are made to believe.

Issue of belonging. Bitterness about inability to break class divide. Britain is still a class society. You might not notice it if you are in the middle. But if you are really aspire to be a high flyer, like Zafar, you would inevitably face with the issues related to your upbringing. He feels he cannot break through. But the interesting thing that the class both attracts and repulses him. He watches the privileged kids at Oxford. He falls in love with the girl initially just by picking up her fancy name on the message board. And when she is what she is, he is still hugely attracted to her. He never tries to change her, argue with her, he just takes everything in and converts it into more suffering and anger for himself. The novel directly does not say it, but the impression is he feels hugely inferior and he does not know how to fight this feeling. More important he does not know whether he wants to find the place for himself in this society.

I was not totally satisfied with the ending. It did not seem to me following from the novel. But it did not stop me to enjoy the book. The novel certainly builds up heavily on the author's own life and experience. And he certainly has got a lot to say in this respect. So I was not disappointed.

There are quite a few of literary influences mentioned elsewhere but for me personally the style of writing reminded Javier Marías - this slow, reflective conversation which flows without worry about the final purpose.

I look forward to the second book by this author if it is forthcoming. Though it would be not easy to keep up with his own achievement.

Traditionally a few quotes:

"I had a friend at Princeton, a Russian graduate student. He had a cute message on his answering machine, delivered in his thick Russian accent: Who are you and what do you want? Some people spend a lifetime trying to answer these questions. You, however, have thirty seconds."

"You know what a metaphor is? A story sent through the super distillation of imagination".

"I wonder if our experience of a novel is enriched by our experience of life".

"Listening to people is hard because you run the risk of having to change the way you see the world. We'd sooner destroy them."