Reviews

• Livre passionnant qui se lit d'un trait. Bien écrit, des personnages attachantes, malgré que mystérieuses. On a des fois du mal à les suivre, à les comprendre. Bien écrit . J'ai des fois trouvé son érudition un peu trop étalé. L'histoire vous happe rapidement. Pas tout est raconté, et les "trous" dans l'histoire vous hanteront encore après avoir refermé le livre. On se rend compte que nous ne connaissons pas grand-chose sur la partie du monde qu'est le Pakistan et le Bangladesh.

• The definitive review is probably James Wood's in the New Yorker, because of which I came to this book. I picked it up at the weekend—why does Amazon wait for the publication date?—and I sat down to read it. It wrecked my weekend and I see what the fuss is about. This is not a novel for anyone who wants a light read. And if at times it makes you work, the effort is worth putting in. It covers an enormous amount of ground—it needs all 576 of its pages—touching on a dizzying array of topics. But what is striking to me is that through the various digressions there is also a powerful storyline. The conclusion is shocking and I'm not sure everyone will feel comfortable with it. I know I did not. Also, it does raise questions about its treatment of women. I think it is a novel that will divide opinion. Nevertheless it is surely a work of art and a breathtaking achievement and consequently I'm now here to buy copies as gifts (and am curious to see what others made of it).

• Probably the best book I have read this year, and one of my favourites ever. The themes of class privilege and modern colonialism are superbly explored.

• This is a great book. Gripping story and very well written.

• Calling Zia Haider Rahman's extraordinary debut novel "the novel of the century" is not necessarily a value judgment, although it is surely one of the best books I have read since the year 2000. But it is a book of immense scope that manages to combine so many of the themes that have dominated public debate in our century: Islam, American neo-imperialism, and the financial recession just for starters. Or, as the narrator puts it at the end of the third paragraph, "the story of the breaking of nations, war in the twenty-first century, marriage into the English aristocracy, and the mathematics of love." He could have said a few hundred other things; never have I read a book that contained so much fascinating information about every subject under the sun, from ancient history and literature, via music, mathematics and nuclear physics, to carpentry and chess. Everything but the kitchen sink -- but If Rahman had thrown that in also, at least you would have got an informative lesson on practical plumbing, shaped into a metaphor that would somehow have illuminated one of the salient problems of our time. You can get a sense of the author's range by noting the authors of the epigraphs that head each chapter: Winston Churchill, Joseph Conrad, Albert Einstein, TS Eliot, AE Housman, John le Carré, Herman Melville, Edward Said, Tayeb Salih, WG Sebald, Saul Smilansky, and the Bible -- and that's only in the first half-dozen chapters. One of these epigraphs, from Italo Calvino, says something that may well be the grand theme of the entire novel: "Since science has begun to distrust general explanations and solutions that are not sectorial and specialized, the grand challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various 'codes,' into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world." It is an audacious ambition, and though Rahman may not totally succeed, he has written one of the most multifaceted novels I have ever read. Allowing for the countless flashbacks and digressions (and digression here is the name of the game), the novel is essentially an extended conversation between a fortyish banker and an old friend who turns up on his South Kensington doorstep one morning in 2008. The two had known each other years before at Oxford, where both were reading mathematics, and kept in sporadic touch in the intervening years in New York and London. In many ways, they are similar: both of South Asian ethnicity, both with a veneer of polished English manners, both with strong academic track records at Oxford and the Ivy Leagues, both involved for a time at least in international finance, and both bruised by unhappy relationships. But in important ways, they are also different. The unnamed narrator is from a background of privilege: his grandparents were landowners in Pakistan, his parents met at Princeton, his father moved from there to take up a professorship at Oxford, and he himself went to Eton, the premier boys' boarding school in England. Zafar, the surprise visitor, was born in a remote village in Bangladesh shortly after its war of independence from Pakistan. His father moved to London in poverty, working first as a bus conductor and then as a waiter. Zafar attended state schools and scraped his way through Oxford on a scholarship. The differences are important because, like most English novels, this one is largely about class -- but class seen in a far from parochial context, with the politics of patronage and exclusion translated to the world stage. Unlike the narrator, Zafar did not remain in finance, but went to Harvard to study law, and then returned to Asia. The slow discovery what what he did in those lost years and how his attitudes slowly change is the main plot thread of the book. I was reminded more than once of Moshin Hamid's THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST , except that Rahman's style of storytelling is a good deal less direct (downright difficult, some might say) and he is attempting something rather less obvious. Also lurking in the background, and eventually acknowledged, are THE GREAT GATSBY and THE QUIET AMERICAN . The Fitzgerald comes into play in the relationship between the two main characters, except they are more nearly equal than Carraway and Gatsby. Indeed Rahman's technique of avoiding quotation marks means that two competing "I's" come into play. Although confused at first, I soon got used to it myself, and appreciated the extraordinary flexibility this gives to the narrative, thought slipping imperceptibly into speech, and one character almost merging with the other. At least at the beginning; this starts as a novel of ideas rather than character, yet before the end, the characters have developed as distinct and three-dimensional, and interact with each other in emotional and often painful ways. Zafar takes the Graham Greene novel with him on a couple of trips to Kabul in 2002, and the parallels to his own situation will be as obvious to him as they are to the reader. On his first evening, he goes to a bar in the UN compound, and is disgusted: "The music was loud, the soles of my feet tingling with the vibrations, a volume to muffle the clamor of sexual gambits unbuckling over the scene. It was a scene of horror. This is the freedom for which war is waged, in the venerable name of which the West sends its working-class heroes to fight and die. If the Afghanis had been asked, would they have allowed this blight on their home? Is this what [we were] fighting for?" Readers who are relieved to find the familiar tropes of political or espionage novel kicking in during the last hundred pages may be disappointed to discover that Rahman has little interest in delivering a simplistic denouement. The novel ends with a photo of Albert Einstein at Princeton walking into the distance with the mathematician Kurt Gödel, whose Incompleteness Theorem is also a talisman for the novel. The inevitable result of a lifetime's search for knowledge is the realization that there is some knowledge we will never possess. For Rahman, the destination is far less important than the journey -- but what a journey!

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