Zia Haider Rahman - In The Light Of What We Know

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Not for me

I'm afraid I didn't get on nearly as well with this book as many others seem to have done. In fact, I didn't get on with it at all. It has the Distinctive Style and Grand Sweep Of Important Contemporary Issues And Ideas of a book which expects to be considered for literary prizes. Possibly it will be, but personally I found the style convoluted and overblown, and the analysis and ideas far less deep and penetrating than they think they are.

There is an awful lot of verbiage and reference to historical, mathematical and other sources to draw attention to the author's breadth of knowledge, but I struggled to find much in the way of real new insight. For example, Rahman falls back on the good old Gödel Incompleteness Theorem as an analogy for the frailty of our ability to predict the future, which is hardly original or especially helpful. (Although in fairness, Rahman does know about mathematics so at least he's not just another novelist including hopelessly misunderstood ideas from maths and physics to try to lend their book extra intellectual credibility.)

Some flavour of what I mean can be found in this fairly early paragraph:
"Still. Let's be clear. Zafar is not the natural figure of biography and, in the end, my current enterprise has no footing in proper biographical enquiry. Rather, its basis is in the private and intimate connection between two people so that the field upon which his life has had significance and impact is, egocentrically, the field of my own self. The conclusion seems unavoidable, all the more so when confronted by this question: How far into the consequences of an act does one hold oneself responsible?"

It's fair enough to say that this isn't a biography but a portrait of a friendship, and that it also tries to examine how much responsibility and guilt we bear for the more distant effects of what we do - but what a needlessly convoluted and orotund way to say it! And "the conclusion seems unavoidable"? This is nonsense. It is the narrator's (and author's) free decision to write about Zafar's effect on him personally; it is not an "unavoidable conclusion."

This is just one example, which on its own I could probably excuse. But there's page after page after page of this stuff and I confess that it all got far too much for me. Plenty of others have found this book very good, so please don't be put off on my say-so, but I'm afraid I really, really didn't.