A review by tessaays
In the Light of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahman

1.0

I generally save one-star reviews for books I can’t finish. I did finish this one but wish I hadn’t wasted my time, so it seems fair to apply the same metric. What a pretentious, plotless, boring waste. The glowing reviews really threw me off - I was expecting to be dazzled and instead I got a rambling, incoherent, completely self-absorbed mess with a protagonist who had his head so far up his own ass that he became irredeemably irritating only a few pages into the book. Zafar was interesting and explosive at times, but never became quite believable. Ultimately he felt more like a way for the author to show off his pretentious, vacuous, pseudo-intellectual internal monologues, rather than a fully-formed character. I wish I had stopped reading earlier.