"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.