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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: #263372 in Books
- Published on: 2014-04-22
- Released on: 2014-04-22
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.25" h x 1.64" w x 6.20" l, 1.65 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 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
“Rahman's novel [is] astonishingly achieved for a first book…Rahman proves himself a deep and subtle storyteller, with a very good eye for dramatic detail--the wounding stray comment, the surge of shame, the livid parable... 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
“An ambitious novel by any measure, In the Light of What We Know is particularly striking as a first novel. …[It] is a novel of ideas, a compendium of epiphanies, paradoxes, and riddles clearly designed to be read slowly and meditatively… [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, New York Review of Books
“[A] strange and brilliant novel . . . I was surprised it didn't explode in my hands.” ―Amitava Kumar, The New York Times Book Review
“[B]ristling with ideas about mathematics and politics, history and religion, Rahman's novel also wrestles with the intricacies of the 2008 financial crash. It is encyclopedic in its reach and depth, dazzling in its erudition... 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. This is the novel I'd hoped Jonathan Franzen's Freedom would be (but wasn't)--an exploration of the post-9/11 world that is both personal and political, epic and intensely moving.” ―Alex Preston, The Guardian
“[A]n ambitious and extraordinary achievement . . . Pre-eminently a novel of ideas, the book overflows with sparkling essays on free will, the perception of time, the nature of memory, maps, flags, etymology and the axioms of mathematics... As a meditation on the penalties of exile, the need for roots and the ways in which anger can consume a thoughtful man slighted by prejudice, this is a dazzling debut.” ―Sunday Times (UK)
“[A] sweeping and brilliant tale... Rahman's rich and complex debut novel is like [a] great meal... In the Light of What We Know may be the best meal you eat this year. [Rahman's] insights--whether related to Pakistan-India enmity, Ivy-League attitude or non-governmental organizations' idealism--were right on target, [his] characters' experiences plausible and compelling, and [his] grasp of the widely varied subjects in the novel was breathtaking.” ―Paul Overby, Pittsburg Post-Gazette
“[A] hugely impressive… and profound debut… The book's depth is utterly absorbing, its stories as real in their effect as they are illusory.” ―Alex Clark, The Guardian
“Beautifully written and renewed evidence that some of the most interesting writing in English is coming from the edges of old empires.” ―Kirkus (starred review)
“[In The Light of What We Know] is a splendidly enterprising debut.” ―The Wall Street Journal
“[Rahman's] fascination with mathematics and the universe of ideas is contagious, and enriches the complex narrative about how we know the reality around us… [T]his ambitious debut novel has considerable depth and scope.” ―Library Journal (starred review)
“[I]t is immediately apparent that one is dealing with a work of major ambition…[T]he main reason to get excited over Rahman's emerging presence as a writer are his sentences, ramifying and unraveling to bring in more and more ideas between full-stops in a way that few still alive can command.” ―Nicholas Muncusi, The Daily Beast
“[In the Light of What We Know is] epic in scale and reach, and pulsing with life.” ―The National
“[A] a sprawling and thrillingly ambitious debut novel…A cross between Herman Melville and David Foster Wallace as refracted through Graham Greene, In the Light of What We Know offers 500 pages of self-described "digressions" and "tangents" involving bracing, sometimes mind-blowing discussions of high math, theoretical physics, cognitive science, Central Asian politics, the English class system, the bloody birth of Bangladesh, Bach, literature, epistemology, collateralized debt obligations and the 2008 collapse of world markets... Rahman drives home that every story is a lie. But stories like this one can teach us great truths about the ways we see--and how much we therefore miss.” ―Mike Fischer, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“[A] standout debut.” ―Vogue
“This formidable and compelling novel offers the reader pleasures not often found in the same venue. Its boldness in engaging elements of our contemporary crisis is bracing. In presenting his cast of characters, Rahman supplies close readings of class, mores, and manners that are extraordinary. And throughout, he sustains an almost subliminal resonance with the conventions, strengths, and tone of certain classic social novels in the English canon--Conrad's in particular. This is a debut to celebrate.” ―Norman Rush, author of Mating and Subtle Bodies
“Here it is, the vast and brilliant debut novel of our time for which readers have been waiting. Set against the backdrop of economic crises and the war in Afghanistan, Zia Haider Rahman's novel about a troubled friendship between two men--one born in the United States to well-placed parents from Pakistan, and the other born in Bangladesh--is deeply penetrating and profoundly intimate, as if made by a muralist whose heart belongs to the details. In the Light of What We Know is a novel of startling vision, written in a prose that's as strong and bold as it is impeccable. Who's the true heir to such greats as George Orwell and V.S. Naipaul? It's Zia Haider Rahman.” ―Richard McCann, author of Mother of Sorrows
“Brilliant and heartbreaking, In the Light of What We Know is the first truly great book of the new century.” ―Ceridwen Dovey, author of Blood Kin
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
76 of 81 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.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
The ending ruined it for me [no spoilers]
By Amos
This is a book very much assured of its own intelligence, which often comes across as a bit smug. I got it because I know a lot of the worlds it deals with first hand or through friends, and like the themes. However, much of the story's satisfaction hangs on how the threads are all brought together in the end, and--without spoiling anything--the ending left such a bad taste in my mouth that I retroactively disliked the rest of the book and gave it away rather than have to be reminded of it every time I see it on my shelf. It's possible that there are thematic justifications for the ending, but I found it gratuitous and it made the character--the only one in the book possibly likable--completely repulsive. What's to like?
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Five Stars
By Mary Ann Eagle
Riveting. A bit dense in parts, but a marvelous 5 day marathon read.
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