In the Light of What We Know: A Novel by Zia Haider Rahman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
What a difficult, frustrating and exasperating novel, quite lyrical at turns but excessively dense – to the point where the sheer quantity of knowledge here quite overwhelms the book, which feels infinitely longer than what it actually is, and is an interminable read as a result.
It begins promisingly enough, with a down-and-out Zafar arriving on his best friend’s doorstep in London, to recount the story of his life, which runs the gamut of studying mathematics to shenanigans in Afghanistan.
And that is about it for plot, until a too-rushed ending featuring a stock caricature called The Colonel and a Kurtz-Heart-of-Darkness stand-in called Crane. Perhaps the shortest shrift is given to the female characters, of which there are not that many, but of whom all are remarkably unlikeable and/or alarmingly insipid.
The rest of the book is something of a vast smoke-and-mirrors trick, as Rahman chats (at length, and often ad nauseum) about everything that tickles his prodigious fancy: from the Mercator map to Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem to the biology of menstruation to why the sky is blue.
You get the idea: this is one of those great Kitchen Sink novels, so stuffed with the author’s conviction of his Great Project that nobody in the book, let alone the poor reader, has a chance to come up for air (let alone admit his or ignorance about any point or, Allah forbid, offer a whisper of dissent from the rank-and-file).
And it features one of my pet hates about po-mo fiction: no speech marks, which in this case makes for daunting grey slabs of text confronting the poor reader. I have yet to find a plausible validation for this particularly modern literary affectation; this has done nothing at all to win me over to the cause of throwing fundamental punctuation out of the window. And given how painfully pedantic Rahman often is in his writing, it is actually quite a curiosity. Perhaps a signal of the rebel inside?
There is a particularly cogent remark by Zafar at one point that, for me, came to underline Rahman’s philosophy of writing here:
Since when did books ever solve anything? They only raise more questions than they answer, otherwise they’re just fucking entertainment, and I’m not here to fucking entertain you.
This certainly places the reader in an interesting position.
Make no mistake about it, the writing here is crystalline in its elegance, with Rahman paying particular attention to cadence and rhythm in many of the longer sections – this is one of those books where whole chunks just beg to be read out loud, they are so beautiful.
But polemic is not literature. In my book, at least. I was left cold and uninvolved, like a fidgety guest at a business reception he must attend for decorum’s sake, but which he is not enjoying at all.
A much better book about the psychology of exile is Andre Aciman’s luminous and incendiary Harvard Square. Actually, when I started reading this I immediately thought about Aciman.
It seemed to me that the anonymous narrator was secretly in love with Zafar (a platonic, cross-cultural, brotherly, comrades-in-arms kind of love, mind you … though Aciman, of course, is a master of unrequited love and untamed lust).
Yes, Rahman does write at length, and very beautifully, about love and its aftermath. There is even some very perfunctory sex. But there is just so little love to be felt in these cold and perfect pages.
A Book Lover's Discourse 