In his LRB winter lecture at the British Museum, the critic James Wood addressed the theme of exile "On Not Going Home". In it he spoke of "tragic homelessness, connected to the ancient sentence of banishment", and of more commonplace, self-chosen exile: "secular homelessness". Seizing on the work of the great Edward Said and Georg Lukács, he sought to define a new mode of postcolonial literature, "that moves between, and powerfully treats, questions of homelessness, displacement, emigration, voluntary or economic migration". He used WG Sebald a Wood favourite as the avatar of this new form of exilic writing, focusing particularly on The Emigrants. He also cited Teju Cole's Open City , a novel whose narrator, Julius, shifts from New York to Nigeria to Belgium, never at home, endlessly pursued by his "sense of being different, being set apart".
Wood hadn't read Zia Haider Rahman's debut novel, In the Light of What We Know, when he made his speech. If he had, he surely would have included it in his survey (he gave the book a stunning write-up in the New Yorker on its US release). Heavily hyped, well over 500 pages long and bristling with ideas about mathematics and politics, history and religion, Rahman's novel also wrestles with the intricacies of the 2008 financial crash. It is encyclopedic in its reach and depth, dazzling in its erudition. Which all makes it sound like hard work, a novel to admire, perhaps, rather than to love. It is, though, in the shattered figure of the novel's protagonist, Zafar, that the book finds its heart. Zafar is reminiscent of a figure from another Sebald novel Jacques Austerlitz a man broken by history. Unlike Austerlitz, though, Zafar is angry, propelled by a boiling intransitive rage that is the engine of the novel's twisting, peripatetic narrative.
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