Zia Haider RahmanReseñas

I tried. It just did not move. It didn’t move me, or the story. I attempted to read this twice. Once getting in about 80 pages, the second retracing said 80 and going a couple hundred more. DNF

I often encounter men of my age group (the not so young cohort) who say that they don’t read fiction. There is sort of an implied attitude that non-fiction is serious and fiction, is well, perhaps frivolous. Something that they might squeeze in as an indulgence every once in a great while.

They need to read “In Light of What We Know” which is a very good novel, but one that has more history, religion, carpentry, sociology and coverage of major world events than probably all of the books on the top ten non-fiction best seller list.

I am not a fan of non-punctuation dialogue unless it’s done by Cormac McCarthy and I really like to see a little white space on every page (I was tempted at times to increase the font size on my Kindle just to reduce the number of words on the screen), but this book was so good that those issues were, for me, inconsequential.

uitzonderlijk

Meaty but a little slippery and impenetrable for my tastes. I just didn't enjoy it as much as I should have done. Shame.

Extraordinary. There is much to unpack in this novel which touches upon wide-ranging themes regarding the human condition: class, ethics, the shifting nature of friendship and perhaps, most importantly, the power of self-delusion. It offers a withering depiction of how very intelligent people are subject to the same failings as those who lack their discernment, education, and experience. Readers stimulated by a driving plot will not fancy this book; those who delight in a good cipher will be dazzled. The two most significant plot points occur off the page though their consequences shape and reverberate through the whole. That is harder to pull off than it sounds, but Haider Raman executes this bit of structural sleight of hand brilliantly. It's the sort of book that begs immediate rereading and rereading at some remove. Each passage has revealed for me new layers and nuances.

wonderful along the way, but lost its way in the last 50 pages.
Something worth noting on almost every page.

What a book! It's about .... everything! Mathematics, History, Politics, Economics, Banking, Migration, Development, Friendship, Social classes, Marriage, Books, .... and about yourself. And yes, all in capitals because it is not just about all these themes, it's so profound, so documented, so impressive.
How much documentation did the author went through? How many books did he read? How wise must one be to come to the insights he shares with us in this book. All the themes of our modern times are put together which gives us lots and lots to think about.
This is the downside of the book for me, if there is one: you want to stop reading every page and Google a lot of things you've just been reading. So it takes some time to get through the + 500 pages. But it's not annoying, it's intriguing. The endless combinations of strategies by politicians, development workers, their mutual influence and the reasons behind it all, or the absence of reasons, i did learn a lot. It feels like non-fiction, the love story in the book reminds you that it is a novel.
Then why not 5 stars? Because for me the final development of the plot is too far fetched, i just didn't believe it. This was in big contrast to the well elaborated passages where the 2 protagonists overlook their life and mainly the storyteller in the book reflects in such an intensive way on his life that i felt seriously invited by some passages to do the same and ask myself: what do i really want?
But hey, read this book!
Final warning: you might never again think the same about some stuff!

Plodding plot, burdensome backstory weigh down In Light of What We Know

I’m not a very smart guy.

At least not compared to Zia Haider Rahman, author of In Light of What We Know.

I dropped out of journalism school because I got a job on a newspaper – hey, I thought if I could get a job on a newspaper before graduating just think of all the tuition I'd save, right?

Anyhow, this is a review about Zia Haider Rahman’s novel, not my autobiography.

Smart is what Rahman is – first class honours at Balliol Oxford, then on to Munich and back to finish at Cambridge and Yale, sort of the academic grand slam.

This is his first novel and as one would suspect for a guy that smart – did I say he also worked as a investment banker at Goldman Sachs in New York – that would likely make him rich as well as smart.

Back to the novel, his first one, it’s a huge hit. Well, what would you expect from a super rich, super smart guy except his first novel would be a best seller?

In Rahman’s novel, the protagonist has an unexpected visit from an old friend, Zafar. It’s been a long time with no contact. The guy’s a wreck, obviously been through a lot. Our hero naturally takes him in and as Zafar recovers over the next few weeks he tells him what he’s been up to.

Pretty ordinary set up, certainly not what I’d call a dramatic hook, but then like I said I’m not very smart and Rahman, well…

The title of Rahman’s book’s appropriate since In Light of What We Know tells the reader everything there is to know about Zafar; how the narrator and he met and their college days, Zafar’s upbringing in the UK, his return to his homeland of Bangladesh for a few years when he was a boy, how he met his wife, the social status of his wife’s family, plus a whole lot more with only the occasional, very slight nudge to move the plot forward.

The reader also learns similar information about the protagonist including lots of philosophical and mathematical ramblings with a few pages thrown in on how maps of the globe misrepresent the size and proximity of the continents.

All I wanted was more details about Zafar’s journey, but no, Rahman is stingy with plot details and even a hint of his friend’s story is burdened with pages of personal, philosophical and cultural perspectives.

I get it that this information may be necessary for context, but of the one hundred and sixteen pages I managed to struggle through ninety percent of it was backstory. Because I didn’t persevere beyond this point I’m in the dark as to whether all this history was necessary, but in light of what I read I decided to abandon In Light of What We Know.

This, of course, cannot be the novel’s fault after all it was awarded the James Tait Memorial Prize, Britian's oldest literary award. Perhaps if I would have finished my education I might have enjoyed Rahman’s novel more, or even a little bit, but who am I kidding. Obviously someone who dropped out of community college can’t begin to comprehend the subtleties and nuances of a novel written by a guy with honors from Oxford, Yale, and Cambridge.

I’m hoping he’ll dumb down his next novel for the likes of me.

Irritating on many levels.

A long tedious novel of two friends talking about race, racism, class, classism, love, relationships and mathematics.

read before... don't remember it, except that every page brought back the feeling that I have read this before.

Two reviews in one--comparing In the Light of What We Know to The Goldfinch. Not because there's profound meaning in the comparison, but because I read them close together and they differ in some interesting ways. Each has an interesting, fallible narrator, but the narrator of the Goldfinch changes (growing up), while the narrator of In the Light is doing the whole thing in retrospect, so his flaws are fairly evident at the outset with only the details becoming more clear. The Goldfinch has a greater wealth of well-formed secondary characters, while In the Light reveals its secondary characters what seems very deliberately through the eyes of its two main pro(an)tagonists. More happens in the Goldfinch; i.e. there's a lot more plot. In the Light has more setting. It is set in a number of familiar, or less familiar, datetimes of recent history, juxtaposing what the reader might know about those datetimes with what the narrators see in their novel's real time. Both structures for the respective novels work very well for me. The Goldfinch is, in the end, very personal, an exposition of one person's unique circumstances. In the Light, while communicated from the worldviews of a privileged Pakistani and an unprivileged East Pakistani, both English, is much more universal--there is a wealth of ideas to mull in this novel. The foreshadowing of In the Light (the overabundance of which the author blames on a character) is a little tiresome, and there are parts of The Goldfinch in which the narrator winds down into himself, but both are clearly worth the read.

this is a excellent novel, a novel that explores many ideas. at the core of the story is Godel's incompleteness theorem. it explores class, race, self, what is self and relationships. it explores how we know. I highly recommend it

In the light of what we know by Zia Haider Rahman is a novel of a Bangladeshi boy who becomes an Oxford graduate, international human rights lawyer and eventually an all round rightfully grumpy, disillusioned and deservingly guilt-tripped human being. His amanuensis is a wealthy merchant banker of a Pakistani family with his own ambivalence and guilty secrets. The post colonial repercussions from Bangladesh and Pakistan reverberate even into the lives of these intelligent, empathetic human beings who have participated in the GFC and reconstruction of Afghanistan.

The novel contains mathematical musings, the derivatives fiasco of the global financial crisis and lots of literary references. But it's all about class, clash of culture, wealth, greed and oppression and personal responsibility. I learned a lot, loved so much of it, but the twining of personal guilt to make a point about post-colonial human rights abuses made me grumpy and I feel a bit guilty for thinking the novel's structure was too ambitious. Because wow! There is so much to appreciate.

I haven't read W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn but I have read Middlemarch and Midnight's Children and that is very much what the novel is like, except so much more contemporary. At times though, I was wondering what Rahman would have thought of the buzz around Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Read it, read it, read it.

I wish I could rate this higher. There are aspects of this novel that are incredibly smart and intriguing. However, there is no strong story line to propel this forward. Ultimately it is a long novel of two friends talking about race, class, love, relationships and mathematics.

I picked up this book because someone mentioned it had similarities to Sebald's Austerlitz. This turns out to be untrue - the only similarities are in a few surface details. The book is more Le Carre or perhaps Graham Greene. The recent review in the New Yorker by James Wood (which I read only after finishing the book) does more for this book than I could write here. I must say, I found it oddly disappointing to learn how close much of the plot follows the author's own life. I don't know enough to comment, but I am guessing that this book may also be taken as a retort of sorts to VS Naipaul's harsh reactions to India and to Islam. It is certainly more nuanced and more humane.