I loved reading this book. It was one of those rare novels that made me want to put sticky notes on every page and copy down quotes for use later. When the author digressed, I either learned something new or read something I already knew but saw it expressed in beautiful, thought-provoking prose. What did I learn about? Maps, flags, East and West Pakistan, finance (although I had to skim a little in this section--too complicated for me), Godel and mathematics, physics, optical illusions, and using the proper name for the tool in your hand. This is not a book to read for an easy narrative structure and predictable or fast-moving plot, although by the time I got about half-way through I was hooked on the mystery and wanted to know what Zafar was going to confess.

If I hadn't bought this book on the principle of "go into a bookshop and pick up the first book you see", I probably would never have chosen it as something I'd read. However, I'm very glad I did. It took a while to get used to the style and the formatting, but before long I found I couldn't put it down. A "riveting read", if I may insert such an overused phrase.

Jan 2015 first read: I wish it were longer.

Aug 2016: abandoned second read, wrong time

"Man has not one and the same life. He has many lives, placed end to end, and that is the cause of his misery. Does Auster mean that a man’s lives run consecutively or concurrently, that he is condemned to live again and again, or that he is many and that his sentences run concurrently, alongside each other, placed end to end? In which sense? In the sense that each life within him rises as the last one falls, or in the sense of a man going forward as many selves contained in the same, standing shoulder to shoulder?"

The style of this book is best described, I think, as stream-of-consciousness within stream-of-consciousness. Someone is telling you a story, with their own commentary, of someone telling them a story, with that person's commentary within it. You end up with a story, but you get dozens of tangents along the way. The tangents are fascinating. For a while I couldn't put the book down, not because the narrative was gripping, but because I wanted to read more tangents.

Toward the end I thought about Disgraced, the play by Ayad Akhtar. It consists of a dinner party and a lot of conversation about immigrants, including Muslim Americans, and how they do/do not fit into the West. The play, I think, has very similar themes to this book -- the casual discussion of the idea that there is an Eastern rage that is inherent rather than the result of something, the admitting of the general misogyny of South Asian men and their objectification of women (which, I have to say, is disappointingly apparent in In The Light Of What We Know) in relation to this rage, the detailed painting of the roots of someone’s anger before revealing why they cannot live with themselves. In interviews, Rahman talks about how jarring it is to be considered part of the "liberal elite," and these criticisms come through effectively in the book as well.

I recommend this book in general; the style of it is such that you're taking a walk with a very well-read person, on whom you've agreed to suspend judgement for the time being.

The story of two friends, catching up after years apart. They're both pretty despicable. The female characters are really quite shallow which is too bad because I feel this book could have been much better than it was--too much going on in it. Thought I'd love it due to it being set in the late 2000s and reflecting on Afghanistan/the economic collapse, but unfortunately too much of this didn't work for me.

I wanted to like this. The non-linearity of the narrative was good and effective at drawing one into the story of Zafar. The history of South Asia was interesting, and the tie-ins to the financial crisis and Afghanistan War were well-done. It was a bummer that every female character was flat and peripheral, and then the last chapters.

Spoiler alert but Zafar rapes Emily. This is revealed in like one page (and hinted at by juxtaposing some love poem with the UK's legal definition of rape) where Zafar can't even own up to what he did, and then the last chapter is some sappy bullshit about male friendship. Fuck this book.

(First appeared at http://www.thenewdorkreviewofbooks.com/2015/02/in-light-of-what-we-know-dense-dazzling.html)

Last May, James Wood, the New Yorker's venerable, but often grumpy, literary critic gushed and raved about Zia Haider Rahman's 2014 debut novel, In The Light of What We Know. He called it "dazzling" and "full of knowledge," and I thought, "Hmm...definitely worth a try."

I should've known any novel Wood raves about would be like this: in a word, dense. Plane/beach reading, this is not. The story is essentially a conversation between two really smart fellows — one, Zafar, is telling the other, our unnamed narrator, his story. It's 2008, and we're just on the onset of the financial crisis — our unnamed narrator is a banker, and when his good friend Zafar, who he hasn't seen in many years suddenly shows up on his doorstep in London wanting to tell him his story, it's a welcome distraction from his failing professional life.

Zafar's story involves a beautiful, mercurial woman named Emily, his experiences in Afghanistan in 2002 at the outset of the war, and several snippets of other stories that explore culture, class, and race (he's Bangladeshi, but people are constantly mistaking him as Pakastani or Indian, infuriating him, and negating the sacrifices of his countrymen during the horrific war for Bangladeshi independence in 1971).

The central question of the novel is this: How can we really know anything? Zafar had studied mathematics at Oxford, and is a huge fan of Kurt Godel, and his Incompleteness Theorem. But this question of how we know what we know (if we can know what we know) is also explored through language, religion and faith, and love.

Zafar's story is fascinating — and along the way, he provides us all sorts of tidbits of trivia, interspersed throughout his philosophical meanderings. He's an unusual fellow, to be sure — but insanely smart (as, no question, is Rahman himself).

So it's an often exasperating, sometimes truly though-provoking, periodically entertaining, and ultimately pretty satisfying novel. It took me about three weeks to get through these 500 pages, and I was glad when I finished — I felt like I'd truly accomplished something just by reading this.

A big meal of a thing, and synapses-changing.

This is a hard book to love, even accounting for its scope and ambition.

At the basic level of the story itself, I think it works - I finished the book because I was compelled to learn more about Zafar. Of course there has been a lot said about how much the books digresses from the central plot, but this is clearly intentional. I think what I couldn’t get myself to like was the author imposing the readers with his perspective on the world with limited self reflection and meaningful character development. The book is littered with the authors opinions on the world masquerading as subjective reflections by his characters. Great novels are able to get under the skin of the character, and through this assumed voice reveal more of the world from conflicting perspectives. There are no conflicting perspectives here. , You two protagonists, who agree on everything. Even as they probe their own feelings and motivations, they are reduced to being props for the author’s world views, on class, gender and geopolitics.

To my mind, the writers treatment of female characters is especially revealing. For a modern novel, it is strange to find a book where almost every female character is portrayed negatively. I could still understand the way Emily’s character is built up given the reveal in the end, but the personalities of most other female characters are perceived through the authors lens on class and sexuality. The one exception to the rule (Nicole) is not only a minor side character, but also someone whose worth is defined by her marriage and children! Both central characters have meaningful formative moments with their fathers, and have nothing to say of their mothers.

All of this adds up over the course of a big ambitious novel - it’s hard to ignore. There is simply too much of the writer in these pages, and therefore a very narrow view of the world he wishes to describe.