In The Light Of What We Know: A Novel (2014) - Plot & Excerpts
There is no doubt that this is a very ambitious and though-provoking novel. It reminds me of Diller + Scofidio’s Blur Building (2002) which was nothing else than a suspended platform shrouded in a perpetual cloud of man-made fog. Ephemeral, quite beautiful but it offered scant protection from the elements. In fact you needed a raincoat to enter it. Similarly this novel recounts a life, a coalescence of contemporary lives, in supple, elegant prose. And it takes its time to do so. Yet the somewhat nebulous profusion of voices, ideas, locales, and plot digressions leaves much unsaid. In this diaphanous narrative cloud nothing is as solid as it seems. In fact it seems the unsaid is very much at the core of this story. Which is both an annoyance and explains the suggestive beauty of it. Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem is at the heart of this book. As the narrator confides to us in the final pages, the theorem opens a bifurcation, an intersection between two, for human beings challenging trajectories: one into a realm of irreconcilable and inhabitable inconsistencies, and another into a twilight world of unassailable truths for which however there is no proof. But I would venture that the latter path opens up another bifurcation. It’s up to us, human beings, to see this incompleteness gap as a limitation, or as a inexhaustible wellspring of new possibilities. From this perspective In the Light of What We Know can be read as a coming of age story. Zafar, the uprooted protagonist, stumblingly, reluctantly comes to accept that knowledge will never be able to allow him to find home. He comes to see „that understanding is not what this life has given us, that answers only beget questions, that honesty commands a declaration not of faith but of ignorance, and that the only mission available to us, one laid to our charge, if any hand was in it, is to let unfold the questions, to take to the river knowing not if it runs to the sea, and accept our place of servants to life.” The building does not protect us from the elements. Rather it exposes us to the vagaries of life on this planet. This novel reveals a hard-won glimmer of spirituality in a profoundly unspiritual 21st century. I started out really liking this book which is based on the conversations of two Oxford friends, one from a well-to-do Pakistani family and the other from a working poor Bengladeshi family. The conversations follow the friends' lives since graduation, one having become a derivatives specialitist in a Wall Street firm and the other a successful lawyer in London. The conversations span mathematics, finance, philosophy, history, literature, politics, war, race, family, friendship, love. These friends have endless capacity to talk and detail the finest academic and emotional points. There are many, many wonderful intellectual observations. But I must admit that I lost patience with the bottomless pit of interesting observations and began craving to know what if anything had happened and would happen in their lives. By the end there was some story line, quite difficult to parse. Nevertheless, the high points carried the day, and I liked the book. It is not for all readers.
What do You think about In The Light Of What We Know: A Novel (2014)?
Brilliant--almost impossible to believe it's a first novel--but at times heady.
—toinkzzz
The book was long and meandering. It was enjoyable, despite this.
—Fatima
