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.