Name: In the Light of What We Know
Rating: 3.833333333333333 (12 reviews)
ISBN: 9780374175627

Zia Haider Rahman

A debut tale set during the war and economic recession at the beginning of the 21st century follows a reconnection between two college friends including a London investment banker with crumbling prospects and a mathematics prodigy who has struggled with his culture and faith. 50,000 first printing.

A Novel

In the Light of What We Know

Gavin

Two globish co-dependents of unequal intelligence but equal mawkishness take turns at monologue, for ages and ages. One’s oracular, the other Boswellian, which means that both talk about the nasty past of the oracular one, Zafar. Everyone’s always trying to educate everyone else, without invitation. 

Tragic, panoptic, and treats big C21st problems – neocolonialism, quant finance, the ineffectiveness of NGOs, the nature of the transnational élite that administers all these things. But also dull, overwritten and clumsily polymathic (characters can be found over-reading, variously, Gödel, Middlemarch, the birth of Bangladesh, the Brit-pop band James). The book is aware of its own pomp – there’s a long discussion of sincerity as virtue and vice, a raging attack on Anglophone Indian literature, and Zafar quotes more and more as he disintegrates, suggesting that the book’s larding of quotations is a knowing prop. But while I don’t know whether it’s Zafar or Rahman that the book’s clumsiness is rooted in, I don’t have to, to know that his conceit of desperate knowledge didn’t take root in me. 

I shouldn’t say panoptic: there’s only one woman in this, really, and we don’t see much even of her except as deceiver and appalling vehicle for privilege. Chapter 14’s good – a big bickering, drunken dinner with Pakistani elites, and there are details to admire throughout (Zafar broods over microaggressions, and some of his apercus are sparkling – like his characterisation of maths as “thinking without the encumbrance of knowledge”, or his likening of a good essay to “a good dress – long enough to cover the important bits, short enough to be interesting”). 

Last, very superficially: there are no speech marks, and this deadens the dialogue for me; it makes everything look past-tense and snarky. (Ok sure this works incredibly well in Blood Meridian, but only because all the men in that are wholly dead inside). 

Will Self minus electricity; Coetzee minus originality and 12-gauge philosophy. Speaking as a pompous generalist and an inveterate over-writer…

Hannah Swithinbank

Jeff Roche

One September morning in 2008, an investment banker approaching forty, his career in collapse and his marriage unraveling, receives a surprise visitor at his West London townhouse. In the disheveled figure of a South Asian male carrying a backpack, the banker recognizes a long-lost friend, a mathematics prodigy who disappeared years earlier under mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced to make a confession of unsettling power. In the Light of What We Know takes us on a journey of exhilarating scope - from Kabul to London, New York, Islamabad, Oxford, and Princeton - and explores the great questions of love, belonging, science, and war. It is an age-old story: the friendship of two men and the betrayal of one by the other. The visitor, a man desperate to climb clear of his wrong beginnings, seeks atonement; and the narrator sets out to tell his friend's story but finds himself at the limits of what he can know about the world - and, ultimately, himself. Set against the breaking of nations and beneath the clouds of economic crisis, this surprisingly tender novel chronicles the lives of people carrying unshakable legacies of class and culture as they struggle to tame their futures. In an extraordinary feat of imagination, Zia Haider Rahman has telescoped the great upheavals of our young century into a novel of rare intimacy and power.

Neta Steingart

Liz Prinz

Jane McCullough

One September morning in 2008, an investment banker approaching forty, his career in collapse and his marriage unravelling, receives a surprise visitor at his West London home. He struggles to place the dishevelled figure carrying a backpack, until he recognizes a friend from his student days, a brilliant man who disappeared years earlier under mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced to make a confession of unsettling power.Theirs is the age-old story of the bond between two men and the betrayal of one by the other. As the friends begin to talk, and as their room becomes a world, a journey begins that is by turns exhilarating, shocking, intimate and strange. Set against the breaking of nations and beneath the clouds of economic crisis, and moving between Kabul, New York, Oxford, London and Islamabad, In the Light of What We Know tells the story of people wrestling with unshakeable legacies of class and culture, and pushes at the great questions of love, origins, science, faith and war.In an extraordinary feat of imagination, Zia Haider Rahman has woven the seismic upheavals of our young century into a novel of rare compassion, scope, and courage.

Casper Oppenhuis de Jong

WINNER: JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE 2015 SHORTLISTED: GOLDSMITHS PRIZE and SPECSAVERS NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS 2014 LONGLISTED: GUARDIAN FIRST BOOK AWARD and ORWELL PRIZE FOR FICTION 2014 One September morning in 2008, an investment banker approaching forty, his career in collapse and his marriage unravelling, receives a surprise visitor at his West London home. He struggles to place the dishevelled figure carrying a backpack, until he recognizes a friend from his student days, a brilliant man who disappeared years earlier under mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced to make a confession of unsettling power. Theirs is the age-old story of the bond between two men and the betrayal of one by the other. As the friends begin to talk, and as their room becomes a world, a journey begins that is by turns exhilarating, shocking, intimate and strange. Set against the breaking of nations and beneath the clouds of economic crisis, and moving between Kabul, New York, Oxford, London and Islamabad, In the Light of What We Know tells the story of people wrestling with unshakeable legacies of class and culture, and pushes at the great questions of love, origins, science, faith and war. In an extraordinary feat of imagination, Zia Haider Rahman has woven the seismic upheavals of our young century into a novel of rare compassion, scope, and courage.

In the Light of What We Know A Novel

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