A sweeping story of love, friendship and betrayal in post-9/11 United States that crosses international and generational boundaries, reaching back from the colonial history of India to the recent global financial crisis and the quagmire of Afghanistan. The book asks big philosophical questions about love, truth, and knowledge.

I've reduced the rating to 4 stars from the 5 I had in my previous update primarily because the story telling gets a bit too choppy in places and as there are two narrators it can sometimes be difficult to tell who is talking (I'd sometimes find myself a page or two into a story before realizing it was the other narrator talking).

Even so, this was a very good and thought provoking read. In addition to the ruminations on class and ethnicity, there's plenty here to think about regarding the "White man's burden" attitude of Western foreign policy (especially US foreign policy). You encounter characters on the other receiving side of that attitude as well as characters (the main protagonist) who are conflicted by being on both sides of it. And there's the continuing theme of the Incompleteness Theorem as well as epistemology (how do we know what is true?).

On the face of it the novel has a straight-forward premise. The narrator – an investment banker who’s facing the end of his marriage and his career, the latter due to the global financial crisis – comes home to discover an old friend waiting for him. Zafar, who like the unnamed narrator is of South Asian descent, is a math’s prodigy who disappeared under mysterious circumstances six years previously. Now penniless and bedraggled, he has come back to America to confess where he has been. Or so it seems.

It’s a deliberate choice of the unnamed narrator not to provide us with a chronological order of his conversations with Zafar. He admits this early on in the narrative saying,

"I won’t deny that I have already altered his narrative, not the details of each episode, to be sure, nor the order in which things happened, but the order in which he recounted them."

While the narrator speculates that he’s re-ordered Zafar’s story so as to “put off the things that I myself fear to confront,” he concludes that as this is not a biography, but rather a “private and intimate connection between two people” then a chronological approach is not warranted. But it becomes clear that both explanations are true. After so many years apart, this three month conversation / confession / interrogation does bring the men closer. But it’s a conversation that constantly circles and avoids the heart of the matter.

Zafar’s avoidance technique is to discuss a wide range of topics and move the narrative from place to place. His story zips between Afghanistan, London, Paris, Islamabad, Bangladesh and New York. In terms of topics he explores colonialism and post colonialism, Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, the GFC and the Bangladesh War of Liberation in 1971 (the year Rahman was born). And throughout it all, Zafar constantly refers to scientific papers or thought experiments or just bits of trivia that sometimes reinforce whatever point his making and sometimes are just there because both Zafar (and Rahman) thought they were interesting. For example, it never occurred to me that trees transform the carbon part of carbon dioxide into wood. So, in a sense, wood comes out of thin air. Neat, isn’t it.

As a number of reviewers have pointed out, knowledge, whether it’s knowledge about how trees grow of near genocidal slaughter of Bangladeshi’s in 1971, is a key theme of the novel. In particular the power dynamics that comes with knowing stuff. Personally I was less interested in the theme than what’s actually being discussed. Zafar’s deep exploration of class, colonialism and Bangladesh post 1971 is genuinely interesting. While this is a novel I have deep reservations about, and I’ll get to those in a second, the random, near chaotic nature of the discussion between Zafar and the narrator means it’s never boring. One striking aspect was the cultural scars left by British colonialism, especially in terms of class. Sparked by Zafar’s dissection of the ruling classes both in the UK and the sub continent, the narrator – who unlike Zafar comes from a place of privilege and wealth – makes the following observation:

"My grandfather spoke diplomatically, but his message was clear enough. I was going to marry beneath me, and he thought that this could cause problems. I loved my grandfather, but as I looked at the old soldier sitting in the armchair, the titan of Pakistani industry, I saw a man whose homes were crawling with respectful servants, a man who couldn’t bear “all this queuing one has to do in London and New York.”… His suggestion that the success of my parents’ marriage was founded on something like shared class status did trouble me. I knew that other families would rather a child marry outside, marry a Westerner—which always meant white—than marry a Pakistani of lower class or birth. But weren’t they other families, not mine?"

Rahman also critiques how post colonialism has effected his journey as a novelists. At one point the unmanned narrator suggests that Zafar write down his story, about his life, about what happened in Bangladesh. Zafar dismisses the idea saying sarcastically,

"“You’re right. What the world needs now is answers to all its questions about Bangladeshi history. And it especially needs to hear these answers from me, an alien in his native land and interloper amongst his hosts, because I know so much about Bangladesh. I’m a bloody authority, that’s what I am, a leading international luminary on the history of Bangladesh.”"

And when the narrator follows this up with, “what about writing for a Western audience,” Zafar quotes Naipaul who said that:

"“Indian literature written in English is astonishing because nowhere in history has a literature been produced that is written by one people about the same people but for another people to read, a literature sustained by a market abroad, the book readers of the West.”"

It’s powerful stuff, partly because Rahman is shining the torch on his own endeavor and essentially questioning it’s worth and partly because it raises all sorts of questions about appropriation and this offensive notion of having to dumb down complex cultural and political issues to the very people who caused them in the first place.

However, it’s when Zafar eventually broaches the heart of the matter that the book falters. Throughout the novel reference has been made to Zafar’s ex-fiance Emily Hampton-Wyvern. As the hyphenated surname suggests, Emily comes from wealth and privilege. Emily and Zafar become a couple after they’re introduced at a party by the narrator (though we later find out that Zafar was aware of Emily before they met). Their relationship is strained from the outset. Emily is aloof, detached from her emotions and often treats Zafar as a pet to show off to her friend rather than a real person. Zafar also grows increasingly jealous as Emily spends more of her time with other people. On a couple of occasions the narrator asks Zafar what he saw in Emily. Zafar mentions something about being attracted to her surname and her position of privilege. Oh, and the sex. It’s all very unsatisfying.

Zafar’s confusion and frustration and jealousy comes to a head when he commits himself to psych award. While there, Emily never visits. Instead, she has a brief affair with the narrator, becomes pregnant, convinces Zafar, once he’s left the ward that the baby is his, and just as Zafar is becoming a bit starry eyed at the idea of being a father, she aborts the pregnancy. Of course, Zafar and the narrator focus on the betrayal of the affair – that’s one of two revelation that this novel has been leading too.

The second revelation is that Zafar raped Emily while they were both in Afghanistan in 2002.

There’s more then a misogynistic whiff to Zafar (and Rahman’s) treatment of Emily. We only ever see Emily through Zafar’s eyes (and briefly the eyes of the narrator who knew her when they were young) and his description of a cold, aloof, calculating woman who is incapable of emotional engagement but is great in the sack actively dehumanizes her. As Hannah Harris Green states in her lengthy, but excellent review of the novel for the LA Review of Books:

"We are never given evidence that Emily has feelings or thoughts of any depth. She is introduced as almost a non-entity. The first time Zafar sees her, she is rehearsing the violin in a church, and he is struck by how profoundly she has failed to move him with her playing. Her main two emotional states seem to be envy and annoyance. She never smiles out of genuine feeling, only with some ulterior motive in mind. Zafar is smarter than she is, and she resents him for it. When they arrange to meet, she often shows up hours late."

I don’t believe Rahman is crass enough to want us to think that Emily deserved to be raped due to her betrayal. But you can’t help but feel that way given how she’s been depicted, how we never get her side of the story and how in the last third of the novel she becomes the focus of Zafar’s hatred. And yes, I get that in 1971 Bengali woman were dehumanized and sexually assaulted by Pakistani soldiers, and I get that Zafar is a product of this and I get the sad, tragic irony that a man appalled by what happened to his people would end up committing the same act to the woman he supposedly loved. Yes, all those boxes were ticked. But it doesn’t change the fact that Rahman asks us to focus on the perpetrator – Zafar – and not the victim., That there’s no room in his lengthy novel for the victim to be heard.

The title, In The Light of What We Know, suggests that we’re not going to be given the full story, that knowledge is going to be withheld. But, in the case of Emily, its’ not so much that information has been held back but that there’s no attempt by Rahman or his characters to cast Emily as anything but a cipher, a vessel for some of the larger themes of the novel. The real tragedy here is that a novel so brilliantly insightful about class and colonialism, is so appalling in its treatment of women.

I don't think it has ever taken me this long to read a book. And I wonder why I bothered. I read the mixed reviews but decided to give this book a chance. By the time I got halfway through, I had to finish it just so that I'd figure out if anything was actually going to happen. Sadly, it was just more of the same boring, bland words - lots of words.

I have to concur with all the other 1 and 2 star reviews. Don't bother. I wish I'd abandoned it but I've never done with any book and I just couldn't do it here either.

This book is laudable for its ambitious reach and excellent prose.

From the financial crisis to Afghanistan to British-South Asian race relations I learned and thought a lot.

The plot itself is unnecessarily convoluted. It seems like it was constructed as a platform on which to display all of the ideas. This didn't bother me but I had to suspend disbelief as the plot took a right turn.

I saw a lot of Brideshead Revisited/Swimming Pool Library in the English class angst. Which made me read the characterization of Emily in a queer way. (Taking that to its logical next step, the ending--the rape--was very City and the Pillar.) But because Emily is a woman and the author a straight man, treating her like a cipher has a very different--and oppressive--connotation. The book would have been just as strong if Rahman had completely dropped her presence in the novel.

All that said, I really enjoyed reading this and despite some big flaws and lots of loose ends, I look forward to Rahman's next one.

This just completely and utterly blew me away! I must admit that my first casual encounter and the resulting rushed opinion of the book was not the most generous. The overlong opening quotes, a self-serious first person narrative given to unannounced tangents and author's penchant to sandwich random timelines at tandem did not hold my attention. Ditto for the start hook which was oddly reminiscent of Le Carre's post-9/11 work, A Most Wanted Man where a destitute immigrant finds himself at the doorstep of an influential man in a Western country, and this holds a predictable cue for piecing together his past years as an excuse into the enquiry of the "state of the world", the "clash of cultures" etc. Nothing I read in the first chapter quite reeled me in but I made a mental note to dip into it, time permitting, later. Propitiously, I found myself facing its cover during a patient week and am glad I submitted myself to it . As my reader biorhythms got adjusted to the themes, characters and syntax of Rahman's created world by the second chapter or so, I very quickly found myself aligned to the point of fusion with the written page. I knew then, this was a book I was going to love and admire.

It starts off with an unexpected and deliberate reunion of two university friends, both hailing from the South Asian subcontinent-although from completely opposite socioeconomic microcosms, sharing a singular passion for Mathematics, and this reunuion is the stage for two worn down warriors who have fought, thought and buckled through the corridors of high finance, legal chambers of Bangladesh and UN redevelopment initiatives in their post-university intervening years, and are ready for a contemplative face-off. One is in a state of meltdown (Zafar, the friend), one in a state of anxiety from an unfolding personal and professional crisis (the unnamed narrator). While the former has an ambivalent mission of setting things in order before moving on, the latter reveals himself to be a reluctant admirer and a curious observer who has set himself the arduous task of piecing together conversations, diary entries and dictaphone recordings. Fashioning himself into a self-awaredly amateur biographer-of-sorts territory and using the opportunity to pin down his friend for posterity as an exercise of self-discovery, the bulk of the following work (and this book) is the process of him padding the core of this wealth of material from Zafar with context and explanations and drawing copiously from his own bank of memories of interactions and incidents. Almost-helplessly he is found intercutting his friend's life-jumble with his own life's potpourri, and through this terrifically-used literary trope of a diary and a book-in-process, one of the book's main subtext, that of the sheer vastness of life and the contradictions in (and ultimate futility of) recording it, soaked as it is in the entanglements of people, relationships and perceptions, comes across with all its ache and angst.

The three other undercurrents to these high-achiever central duo's life trajectories as they measure them in retrospection are class, race and knowledge. In Zafar, Rahman erects quite a character: an intimidatingly intelligent, fiercely intellectual South Asian Male defiant for and because of his ethnicity, who is uniquely gifted in picking out the covert and overt bigots sensitive to his skin pigment and class-station. He gets many an occassion to make a mince of them, navigating as he is the upper, Enlightened, moneyed circles. Suffering no fools in public, cynical of West-sanctioned post-war grid-dropping on the East, he is revealed to be sensitive-to-the-point-of-pathologically neurotic in private, and this complex, endearing figure is continuously surprising. It is not at all unbelievable that he has his long time friend and our narrator's interest piqued enough to undertake a life-enquiry on him, a la The Great Gatsby.

One of the book's choicest threads is Zafar articulating a progressive exasperation and bewilderment with his paramour stemming both from a personality trait and a larger class and cultural gap. This almost Naipaul-like unapologia on the written page married to Austen-like sensitivity impressed me, as did almost Rushdie-like symmetry-seeking from symbols and histories the world over. Both Zafar and narrator are not scared to meditate far and wide, dipping into annals of mathematics, history and literature as they recollect together the result is a discourse where the mundane is convincingly rendered Significant and the gestural Poetic.

Watching Rahman imbibe his characters' existential battle with the uncertainty and malleability of "knowledge": a battle that is free of gender/race/culture biases while at the same time getting bewildered as their realities are yoked by these very gender/race/culture realities, I was both surprised at him articulating the frustration of reducing a complex human life, both while living and remembering it to a series of definitions, while being left breathless at him painting concurrent action setpieces and emotional landscapes like a veteran artist on a fresh, broad canvas. His well-informed, sensitive auto-didacts, citizens of the world from the East can think and feel with as much fineness and vigour as they can bite and punch when slotted or poked.

For me, this expansive, global, universal book is one of the most astonishing debuts from the South Asian subcontinent, and a book that will easily outlive its contemporaries because of its universal enquiries on Truth, Experience and Knowledge. Its multi-limbed, intersecting, forever alluding to-this and linking to-that transcription of one fractured psyche by his comrade-in-spirit isn't the friendliest, and the passion in my endorsement certainly points towards it being an acquired taste but it can be rewarding if you stick by it and take to it. It certainly over-rides its time-and-place anxieties (Yes, it draws upon the 1971 Bangladesh liberation struggle; Yes, you get to know the innards of the financial bust of 2008 and a glimpse of the UN-funded reconstruction projects) and ultimately, like all good books, the sum is more than the total of its parts. Excoriating and mercurial like Naipaul and Rushdie before him, Rahman delivers a riptide of themes and meditations in this at-once epic and personal book with a voice new and loud enough to drown all patronisation and be remembered for years to come.

His achievement brought to mind this terrific recent passage from Ben Okri: "Great literature is rarely about one thing. It transcends subject. The subject was always the least important element in works that have endured. Sometimes an important work has a significant subject, but it is usually its art, rather than its subject, that makes it constantly relevant to us. If the subject were the most important thing we would not need art, we would not need literature. History would be sufficient. We go to literature for that which speaks to us in time and outside time." Bravo Mr Rahman! I look forward to your next book.

Dear oh dear, I am getting picky. This is another book I've ditched.
This book was our November pick for a reading group of which I'm a member. That usually is enough to cement my commitment to a book - but not this time.

I really struggled with almost everything about this book.

I hated the pretentious multiple slabs of quotes at the beginning of every chapter.

I found the change in narrators to be completely useless as a device. There was no discernible difference in the voices, so I just ended up confused and had to reread bits to work out who was saying what.

There might have been a fantastic story in this novel, but after reading 20% of it on my Kindle, I was no closer to discovering even a hint of what it might be because of the long-winded wandering off on tangents.
Sometimes those tangents were mildly interesting - but not interesting enough to make me want to keep plodding through them.

It would appear that the author is as smart as paint - and just can't resist letting his readers know that. All the talk of maths, physics and banking just made my eyes glaze over and was too clever by half in my humble opinion.

*DNF* pg. 130

Written by a Bangladeshi expat, I stumbled across this book in an attempt to find literary works created by Bangladeshis - but a little way in I realized that this book was not for me.

Similar in style to that of the Great Gatsby - the narrator is retelling the story of his friend Zafar, a British Bangladeshi who has returned into his life unannounced and begins to retell about parts of his life in an anachronistic manner - the dialogue is intertwined with the narrative descriptions, and there is no chronological order in how the narrative is relayed - and I also couldn’t tell you the point of the narrative as well - Zafar, the nameless narrator, and the other side characters mentioned failed to capture my attention of increase my interest in this overtly long and needed editing novel.