Interview with Zia Haider Rahman

James Wood of The New Yorker praises it as “a dazzling debut, unashamed by many varieties of knowledge.” In a New York Times Sunday Book review, Amitava Kumar says it is a “strange and brilliant novel…at ease drawing sharp lessons from subjects as varied as derivatives trading and the role of metaphor in determining the fate of pigeons.” The Journal Sentinel calls it “A cross between Herman Melville and David Foster Wallace as refracted through Graham Greene.” Zia Haider Rahman's debut novel “In the Light of What We Know” has stirred up a great deal of interest within the literary world.
Born in rural Bangladesh, Zia Haider Rahman was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and at Cambridge, Munich, and Yale Universities. He has worked as an investment banker on Wall Street and as an international human-rights lawyer.
One September morning in 2008, an investment banker approaching forty, his career in collapse and his marriage unravelling, receives a surprise visitor at his West London home: a friend from his student days, a brilliant man who disappeared years earlier under mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced to make a confession of unsettling power and seek atonement. As the friends begin to talk, their room becomes a world and they begin an exhilarating journey between Kabul, New York, Oxford, London and Islamabad. Set against the breaking of nations and beneath the clouds of economic crisis, “In the Light of What We Know” tells the story of people wrestling with legacies of class and culture, as they struggle to tame their futures.
In an extraordinary feat of imagination, Rahman capably mixes a story that threatens to erupt into le Carré–like intrigue with intellectual disquisitions of uncommon breadth. It is a quiet, philosophical novel of ideas, a meditation on memory, friendship and trust.
In an exclusive interview with the Saturday Literary Review, Rahman shares his views on his writing influences, giving readers space and the world of madmen.

SLR: Please share with us the process of how or why the story “In the Light of What We Know” became the chosen topic as your debut novel. How long has it been in the making?

ZHR: There was no process at arriving at the story, only a history of circumstances.  A few years ago, I quit my job and began a journey overland across Europe and Asia. Not long after setting off, an idea for a story came into my head, a character, then another, and a story. I scratched down a few thoughts in a notebook and did nothing about them. They were notes of the kind we routinely write and there was no intention to develop them into anything. But they took root in my mind and I found myself often thinking about them.
My journey was interrupted by the death of someone close to me and, finding myself with time on my hands, I took up those notes of a story and starting writing with an urgency not easily accountable. I don't think I dwelt too much on the why but simply yielded to a need—a sense of necessity—to write a story whose shape had quickly evolved in my mind.
When an author is asked how long a novel was in the making, I don't see how she can say anything other than 'the whole of my life until now.' All imaginative work surely draws on ideas percolating in the recesses long before they bubble to the surface.

SLR: Who are some literary influences in your writing?

ZHR: Everything I've read has given me something. I don't think I can say what my literary influences are any more than I can identify particular meals I've had that have been especially nourishing. I've learned a lot from things that haven't quite worked, a paragraph or chapter I've read here or there, in some novel. Trying to figure out why a passage isn't quite successful is enormously rewarding and the lessons learned that way can, I imagine, be the most effective or at least leave a deep impression.
On the other hand, I've definitely felt I've received a license to do certain things of my own when I've seen great writers either attempt the same thing or attempt something else. Sebald, Naipaul, Conrad, Didion, Roth, Coetzee—they've all caused me to reflect on myself and identify something in me that was holding me back in some way. There are also certain qualities of writing that draw me. For instance, I admire writing that trusts readers. The tendency detectable in some fiction today to treat readers as if they have no imaginative life to bring to their reading reflects, I think, a broader social tendency to reach the widest market and treat people as consumers who must be supplied with all the materials for "a good read." To make a novel their own, to inhabit it and vivify it, I think readers need to be allowed space for the furniture of their own experiences and histories. It is the activity of working with the text, as a reader, that enlarges the text. The reason theatre can bite into the skin in a way that TV never can is that the viewer has to do some work to enable the suspension of disbelief; the viewer rolls up  his sleeves and lifts some of the weight, and by so doing invests in the moment. Good writing includes the reader in the cast.

SLR: Between the narrator and his friend Zafar, which character were you as a writer more invested in and why?

ZHR: I imagine all writers feel hugely invested in all their characters. Zafar and the narrator are indeed the most prominent characters of the novel, but I was so deeply invested in both that it's hard—and perhaps unimportant—to figure out which one I was most invested in. It's certainly true—and perhaps this is what you're trying to tempt me into addressing—that Zafar on his face bears some similarities with me. But a CV should not be mistaken for the person. Both the main characters draw on me, either facts about me or fantasies of some kind or other. It's handy to recall that, in the biblical story, the prodigal son was loved the most even before he returned, before, that is, he had atoned. Why we love is a mystery. In other words, I'm not sure I can properly say why I was as invested in the characters as much as I was.

SLR: At the heart of “In the Light of What We Know” is Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, a theorem of mathematical logic about the impossibility of proving certain truths. Please describe the role of Gödel's proof in your novel.

ZHR: Gödel's theorem operates as an overarching metaphor of the limitations of human enquiry, such limitation being a central theme of the novel. The theorem states that there exist mathematical propositions that are true but that cannot be proven to be true. It is an unsettling theorem, unsettling especially to the character of Zafar, who sees it as evidence that even the truths of mathematics cannot be relied upon to be accessible.

SLR: There is a prominent use of epigraphs in your novel and they form an integral part of the story. If you could choose an epigraph for the current chapter of your life as a novelist, what would it be?

ZHR: Literature that aspires to penetrate the soul shows signs of the author's attempts to recover from the ravages of memory and to find in the sanctuary of imagination some vestige of meaning. This is not rewriting the past but the artist's bid for beauty in the interval between remembering and forgetting. The epigraph that I would take from the novel for the current chapter of my life—and perhaps for every chapter--is the excerpt from James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room:
Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget.