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In The Light Of What We Know: A Novel (2014)

by Zia Haider Rahman(Favorite Author)

3.92 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0374175624 (ISBN13: 9780374175627)

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

review 1: I'm finished because I simply can't get through this book. Some of the writing is exquisite. In fact each sentence, yes, each sentence is beautifully weighted and carries a meaning. That, however, makes for a very heavy book. I have abandoned this book on page 300 which is pretty much unheard of for me but, although relating to the theme of class and finding it very interesting, the fact that that theme is so wound up with mathematics and banking leaves me blank.I think Rahman's book is probably very important.Unfortunately I failed to connect and am moving on.
review 2: I read this novel on the James Wood endorsement and immediately detected the delectable flavours and influence of the great novelists (Sebald, Barnard, Joseph O'Neill, Teju Cole, Ben Lerner) th... moreat I have discovered - and learned to appreciate - over the last few years thanks only to him. The office of the literary critic is very much intact! (Alas! Goodreads aggregators have a long way to go still!)Having only just finished reading the novel, however, I have trouble not focusing on its flaws; the two greatest of which appear in the penultimate chapter. Why, I ask myself, did this novel have to hang on this heinous crime of Zafar’s rape of Emily? And why did the novel insist on morphing itself into a spy novel as an afterthought? I’d like to blame the publisher – and much like the rest of this novel – the reader will perhaps never really know how this chapter made its way into this otherwise beautiful and enviable first novel. I prefer Lerner's protagonist in Leaving the Atocha Station whose heroic banality endures until the very end. While there are other formal flaws (clunky language at times and the author’s reluctance towards – dare I say fear! – of the female character), this is a truly masterful work of literature: A perfect fusion of the subjective and the universal, the imminence of the present otherwise held hostage by history, the indeterminism of identity in what has truly become a globalized world. I also felt that this novel was something of an ode (consciously or not) to Don Delillo's Underworld. In that novel, the Cold War provides the backdrop for a collective psyche, paranoid and mistrustful, which, in spite of itself, endures to materialize into half a century of social history. That is the same scaffolding you will find here. Only the ominous towers on the cover of that novel are conspicuously absent, as they must be, in Rahman's. A negative space that, appropriately, forms the backdrop of this literary social history that courageously maps out the first decade or so of this young century. Bravo! less

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