Pretentious, bloated and boring. And that's just how I felt listening to this interminable, pointless, plotless book. What a waste of 21 hours of my life, never to be recovered.

Profound and confusing, as befits its many layers of subject matter. I can see why some reviewers have given it 2 stars while most have given it 4 or 5. I assume the reader's (or at least this reader's) difficulty in always knowing who exactly 'I' was was part of the author's intention - in the light of what we were allowed to know.

An homage to Graham Greene (particularly The End of the Affair) and F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby).

What an infuriating book. First of all there is not much of a story - in fact I think the chapters could be read in any order. Second none of the characters are very likeable - their main purpose in life seems to be proving how superior they are to other people. This makes it really hard to care what happens to them. Third this reads like one of those books that was written to appeal to critics and win awards. Fourth the dialogue is like robots talking to each other.

The setting is in the chattering classes of north London and no one seems to have to worry about mundane things like paying the bills. As others have written the book is full of digressions which seem designed to show off the authors learning rather than advance the plot. And at times these digressions seem like a series of mini lectures joined together by a tenuous story. It clearly appears to be a modern day version of a mash up of The End of the Affair and The Great Gatsby - the reason you know this is that the author actually spells this out in one of his many diversions. Which illustrates one of its main failings - the book tries to be a literary novel but then goes and hits you over the head with its message. There is a lot of tell and not much show - in contrary to Graham Greene and Fitzgerald. And yet and yet... there are some gems here hidden in the lengthy text. This is not a book I enjoyed but it did provoke strong feelings and some curiosity. However if you don't have time to read the 500+ pages I would recommend you read the much shorter The End of the Affair or the Great Gatsby to get a similar and better experience.

Starting with the confession that I was not able to finish reading this book, I found the narrative structure and meandering nature of the storytelling to be frustrating and taxing to read. On a positive note, the writing is very well done, and the author touches on (seemingly literally) a thousand different topics ranging from identity to family relationships to class in Great Britain to of course mathematics and international politics in the middle east... However I found myself about halfway through and still unengaged in the essential story and the characters. As a friend advised, the best way to enjoy this book is to realize that the point is not the plot but the interesting philosophical waypoints. For me, that was not enough and at 250 pages I called it quits.

3.5

This was a really impressive first novel, and it read much quicker than its dense prose and long chapters led me to expect. It also had the merit of being the first modern literary work I've read where the failure to use quotation marks (seriously, though, what is up with that?) had an actual narrative purpose. It was the most "meta" novel I've read in years, constantly questioning itself and twisting the narration, but it had a lot of first-novel problems, too. I only understood why the narrators had been investment bankers after I read the author's biography at the end (he'd been one, of course), and the frigid English lady likely stood for someone he knew or loved, but that relationship never made much sense except as a really obvious metaphor.

"In het licht van wat wij weten" is volgens de critici - ik citeer - "a ground-breaking work of staggering genius", "een briljante roman", "het boek dat Jonathan Franzens "freedom" had moeten zijn maar niet was" en zo verder. In het licht van wat ik zelf weet is het boek één grote opgeblazen zeepbel. Meer dan 580 pagina's gevuld met .... ja, met wat? Het gaat echt nérgens over. Het boek loopt over van verwijzingen naar gekende boeken en pronkt met ontelbare citaten van mensen met dure namen maar inhoudelijk? Niks, nada niente. Overroepen. Ongestructureerd. Zonder boodschap. het verhaal van een auteur die zichzelf heel belangrijk vindt en zich interessant wil voordoen maar eigenlijk weinig te vertellen heeft. De eerste helft van het boek kan men zich nog afvragen waar het naartoe gaat, de tweede helft leest men diagonaal, de laatste hoofdstukken enkel de eerste zinnen. Een verlies van tijd. Dat is wat ik weet.

Rounded up from 3.5. This was a slow burn and not my usual type of read at all. I really enjoyed it, eventually but it wasnt a a page turner for me. A bit of a mystery but one where I learned a lot about Bangladesh and it's history.

The reader did a great job of a very subtle shift in tone between the narrator and Zafar. Having read the book, and knowing that it's a bit tricky figuring out when the shift takes place at times, I wondered how it would work as an audiobook. It worked very well. I was glad to "read" this a second time.

This deserves a re-read.