In the Light of What We Know

April 14, 2014
In this debut novel of ambitious scope, Rahman crafts a portrait of a post-9/11 world from the perspective of a man who is simultaneously an insider and an outsider among the rich and powerful. When Zafar, an Oxford-educated Bangladeshi mathematician from humble beginnings, shows up at the door of an old friend, an investment banker whose career and marriage are falling apart, he begins a circuitous confession of a mysterious crime, a confession that takes us through Zafar's life from his career in law to his courtship of a woman from old money to his foray into the rebuilding of Afghanistan. Zafar tells his story out of chronological order, in meandering fragments full of digressions about history, mathematics, cartography, and cognitive science; as interesting and thoughtful as these asides are, they create a narrative with an unclear trajectory and stakes that are shadowy and ill-defined for much of the book. Only late does the novel's purpose become clear and Zafar's narrative gain resonance. Beneath it all, Rahman has written a simple human story about the betrayal of friends, the disappointment of lovers, and the pain of class identity, though this story is often lost amid Rahman's intellectual pyrotechnics.

Starred review from March 1, 2014
War can divide friends. But then again, so can peace and all that falls between, the spaces inhabited by this ambitious, elegiac debut novel by Bangladeshi-British writer Rahman. The unnamed protagonist is a brilliant 40-something math whiz-turned-financier who comes from privilege; his father, a Pakistani physicist, is fond of whiskey, his mother scornful of religious pieties ("[n]ot for her such opiates"). The story, though, turns on his mysterious friend Zafar; raised more modestly, he made a fortune as a derivatives trader yet has apparently acquired enough martial skills along the way to thrash a gang of ill-meaning neo-Nazis in a London mews. Now, as the book opens, he is back in London from a harrowing journey both geographical and metaphysical, his talisman being Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem ("the world was foolish to ignore it in an age of dogma"), his life a scatter burst of fragments. Rahman's narrative quickly takes flight, literally, moving from London and New York to Islamabad and Kabul and points beyond as the narrator comes to flourish, oddly, in a post-9/11 world where he and his South Asian compatriots are no longer merely local-color background. Rahman capably mixes a story that threatens to erupt into le Carre-like intrigue with intellectual disquisitions of uncommon breadth, whether touching on the geometry of map projections or the finer points of Dante; the reader will learn about Poggendorf illusions, scads of math and the reason flags fly at half-mast along the way. A betrayal complicates matters, but in the end, Rahman's is a quiet, philosophical novel of ideas, a meditation on memory, friendship and trust: "Such regrets as I have are few," says his narrator; "I am not an old man, but even if there had been time enough to accumulate regrets, I do not think my constitution works that way." Beautifully written evidence that some of the most interesting writing in English is coming from the edges of old empires.

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March 15, 2014
This expansive novel sprawls over the past half-century and has as its primary settings the U.S., the UK, and South Asia. Its nameless narrator is an upper-class Englishman of Pakistani parentage, and its main character and secondary voice is the Bangladeshi-born Zafar, the narrator's brilliant former Oxford classmate. Our narrator gets ensnared in the banking scandals of the early 2000s, and Zafar in the coterminous conflict in Afghanistan. This is, in part, a novel of international geopolitics going back to American involvement (or inaction) in the South Asian wars of 1971; in part, a novel of global finance; in referential detail, a novel of ideas; and, in addition, a novel of personal relationships in which issues of caste and class figure prominently. The narrator (and the book's author) has background on Wall Street, and the complex narrative weaves together the strands of worldwide interconnectedness with which both are familiar. This is a big book with grand themes, and while some readers may enjoy its discursiveness, others might wish for a tighter narrative style.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

Starred review from April 1, 2014

A disillusioned investment banker with marital troubles is being scapegoated for his company's misdeeds preceding the economic crisis of 2008 when an old friend from college reappears on his London doorstep. Brilliant, eccentric Zafar disappeared ages ago, and as he reveals the struggles of the intervening years, his friend considers his own choices as well. From rural Bangladesh, the birthplace Zafar recalls, to war-torn Afghanistan and contemporary New York and London financial circles, we are transported around the globe as Rahman explores themes of friendship, betrayal, class inequity, war, and how we perceive and approach the world. The author's fascination with mathematics and the universe of ideas is contagious, and enriches the complex narrative about how we know the reality around us. VERDICT Despite some obvious plot devices, this ambitious debut novel has considerable depth and scope; it will be a hit with readers who enjoy books jam-packed with insights and observations. [See Prepub Alert, 10/14/13.]--Gwen Vredevoogd, Marymount Univ. Libs., Arlington, VA

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2013

Farrar has a bunch of exciting April novels but puts this debut at the top. In West London, a middle-aged investment banker in free fall encounters a long-lost friend on his doorstep--a South Asian man who was once a mathematics prodigy but suddenly disappeared, finally reemerging with a shattering confession.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.