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In the Light of What We Know: A Novel, by Zia Haider Rahman
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A BOLD, EPIC DEBUT NOVEL SET DURING THE WAR AND FINANCIAL CRISIS THAT DEFINED THE BEGINNING OF OUR CENTURY
One September morning in 2008, an investment banker approaching forty, his career in collapse and his marriage unraveling, receives a surprise visitor at his West London townhouse. In the disheveled figure of a South Asian male carrying a backpack, the banker recognizes a long-lost friend, a mathematics prodigy who disappeared years earlier under mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced to make a confession of unsettling power.
In the Light of What We Know takes us on a journey of exhilarating scope―from Kabul to London, New York, Islamabad, Oxford, and Princeton―and explores the great questions of love, belonging, science, and war. It is an age-old story: the friendship of two men and the betrayal of one by the other. The visitor, a man desperate to climb clear of his wrong beginnings, seeks atonement; and the narrator sets out to tell his friend's story but finds himself at the limits of what he can know about the world―and, ultimately, himself. Set against the breaking of nations and beneath the clouds of economic crisis, this surprisingly tender novel chronicles the lives of people carrying unshakable legacies of class and culture as they struggle to tame their futures.
In an extraordinary feat of imagination, Zia Haider Rahman has telescoped the great upheavals of our young century into a novel of rare intimacy and power.
- Sales Rank: #81699 in Books
- Published on: 2015-02-17
- Released on: 2015-02-14
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.21" h x .89" w x 5.54" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 512 pages
From Booklist
This expansive novel sprawls over the past half-century and has as its primary settings the U.S., the UK, and South Asia. Its nameless narrator is an upper-class Englishman of Pakistani parentage, and its main character and secondary voice is the Bangladeshi-born Zafar, the narrator’s brilliant former Oxford classmate. Our narrator gets ensnared in the banking scandals of the early 2000s, and Zafar in the coterminous conflict in Afghanistan. This is, in part, a novel of international geopolitics going back to American involvement (or inaction) in the South Asian wars of 1971; in part, a novel of global finance; in referential detail, a novel of ideas; and, in addition, a novel of personal relationships in which issues of caste and class figure prominently. The narrator (and the book’s author) has background on Wall Street, and the complex narrative weaves together the strands of worldwide interconnectedness with which both are familiar. This is a big book with grand themes, and while some readers may enjoy its discursiveness, others might wish for a tighter narrative style. --Mark Levine
Review
“Astonishingly achieved . . . In the Light of What We Know is what Salman Rushdie once called an ‘everything novel.' It is wide-armed, hospitable, disputatious, worldly, cerebral. Ideas and provocations abound on every page.” ―James Wood, The New Yorker
“[A] strange and brilliant novel . . . I'm surprised it didn't explode in my hands.” ―Amitava Kumar, The New York Times Book Review
“An ambitious novel by any measure . . . In the Light of What We Know is a novel of ideas, a compendium of epiphanies, paradoxes, and riddles. . . . [A] unique work of fiction bearing witness to much that is unspeakable in human relationships as in international relations, while it is also unknowable.” ―Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books
“In the Light of What We Know is an extraordinary meditation on the limits and uses of human knowledge, a heartbreaking love story, and a gripping account of one man's psychological disintegration.” ―The Guardian (London)
About the Author
Born in rural Bangladesh, ZIA HAIDER RAHMAN was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and at Cambridge, Munich, and Yale universities. He has worked as an investment banker on Wall Street and as an international human rights lawyer. In the Light of What We Know is his first novel.
Most helpful customer reviews
75 of 80 people found the following review helpful.
Learning what we know
By Kathy Perutz
Some months ago, facing long illness, I read Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, and was enthralled by it, a book that ends with the outbreak of World War I and contains in its pages more or less everything that was known in the Western world at that time. When I finished the book, I felt restless; nothing else could measure up to the intensity and breadth of Mann's great novel. Then I read James Wood's review in The New Yorker, and felt that Zia Haider Rahman's book was exactly what I'd been seeking. As indeed it is. A wonderful book, written in clear prose that never grows arch or hectoring - thereby avoiding even the missteps of Mann - that looks at the world we have inherited in 2014 through the consciousness of a man who is aware of the sides and angles of whatever topic he is concentrating on. A Bengali, he is from the East, whereas his friend the banker (to whom the story is being told) is from Pakistan, the West, with India between them and the legacy of British colonialism all around. Zafar, the protagonist, goes to Afghanistan and finds the same attitudes, the same patronizing views of native inhabitants that he has learned at first hand at home in Bangladesh and in the sitting rooms of London, where he, a brilliant mathematician with an Oxford degree, is often treated as a curiosity, a colonial with a brain. This is only one of a labyrinth of themes that wend their way through this marvel of a book. Through it the reader learns to know what she already suspected, and confronts the reality of confusion and complexity. No either/ors, no good/bad, we are all only partly decipherable selves, containing goodness and violence, love and treachery, radiance and darkness.
63 of 76 people found the following review helpful.
A book that truly deserves the extraordinary praise it's receiving
By Leah
Even before James Wood's astonishing review in The New Yorker came out (astonishing because so few novels receive that kind of attention any more, or that kind of space; also because James Wood is famously picky, and he was so full of the most beautiful and effusive praise for this book), I was intrigued by what I'd heard and read about In The Light of What We Know. Now that I've read it -- couldn't put it down -- I understand the praise. It strikes me as the kind of novel an author pours his entire self into (and Wood's review, if it got the author's biographical details right, suggests the same). For that, as readers, or just as people who do care about what one reviewer here called the "Grand Sweep Of Important Contemporary Issues And Ideas," we should be grateful. I am grateful. I'm grateful to any artist who has the courage to grapple with the painful realities of our time (never mind just of one human life), and the imagination to turn that grappling into a story, and the skill to make that story beautiful.
I've never reviewed another book on Amazon, though I'm an avid reader; the couple of negative reviews that have been posted here seemed so wildly inaccurate -- and so gratuitously negative -- that I felt compelled to write. This book may not be for everyone, but if you like some of the best writers of our time -- Naipaul, Sebald, Munro -- you will love this one.
43 of 52 people found the following review helpful.
A Novel of Our Century
By Roger Brunyate
Calling Zia Haider Rahman's extraordinary debut novel "the novel of the century" is not necessarily 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, TS Eliot, AE Housman, John le Carré, Herman Melville, Edward Said, Tayeb Salih, WG 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 THE GREAT GATSBY and THE QUIET AMERICAN. The Fitzgerald comes into play in 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!
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