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Tremor
A powerful, intimate novel that masterfully explores what constitutes a meaningful life in a violent world—from the award-winning author of Open City
Life is hopeless but it is not serious. We have to have danced while we could and, later, to have danced again in the telling.
A weekend spent antiquing is shadowed by the colonial atrocities that occurred on that land. A walk at dusk is interrupted by casual racism. A loving marriage is riven by mysterious tensions. And a remarkable cascade of voices speaks out from a pulsing metropolis.
We’re invited to experience these events and others through the eyes and ears of Tunde, a West African man working as a teacher of photography on a renowned New England campus. He is a reader, a listener, a traveler, drawn to many different kinds of stories from history and epic; stories of friends, family, and strangers; stories found in books and films. Together these stories make up his days. In aggregate these days comprise a life.
Tremor is a startling work of realism and invention that engages brilliantly with literature, music, race, and history as it examines the passage of time and how we mark it. It is a reckoning with human survival amidst “history’s own brutality, which refuses symmetries and seldom consoles,” but it is also a testament to the possibility of joy. As he did in his magnificent debut Open City, Teju Cole once again offers narration with all its senses alert, a surprising and deeply essential work from a beacon of contemporary literature.
Life is hopeless but it is not serious. We have to have danced while we could and, later, to have danced again in the telling.
A weekend spent antiquing is shadowed by the colonial atrocities that occurred on that land. A walk at dusk is interrupted by casual racism. A loving marriage is riven by mysterious tensions. And a remarkable cascade of voices speaks out from a pulsing metropolis.
We’re invited to experience these events and others through the eyes and ears of Tunde, a West African man working as a teacher of photography on a renowned New England campus. He is a reader, a listener, a traveler, drawn to many different kinds of stories from history and epic; stories of friends, family, and strangers; stories found in books and films. Together these stories make up his days. In aggregate these days comprise a life.
Tremor is a startling work of realism and invention that engages brilliantly with literature, music, race, and history as it examines the passage of time and how we mark it. It is a reckoning with human survival amidst “history’s own brutality, which refuses symmetries and seldom consoles,” but it is also a testament to the possibility of joy. As he did in his magnificent debut Open City, Teju Cole once again offers narration with all its senses alert, a surprising and deeply essential work from a beacon of contemporary literature.
229 pages, Hardcover
First published October 17, 2023
About the author
Teju Cole
39 books1,240 followersI was born to Nigerian parents and grew up in Lagos. My mother taught French. My father was a business executive who exported chocolate. The first book I read (I was six) was an abridgment of Tom Sawyer. At fifteen I published cartoons regularly in Prime People, Nigeria’s version of Vanity Fair. Two years later I moved to the United States.
Since then, I’ve spent most of my time studying art history, except for an unhappy year in medical school. I currently live in Brooklyn.
Since then, I’ve spent most of my time studying art history, except for an unhappy year in medical school. I currently live in Brooklyn.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 343 reviews
November 17, 2023
me and this book have the same birthday :)
and that's not the only pro!
on top of that gift from the universe, i found this to be so thoughtful and internal. i love the pleasant surprise of spending a couple of hundred pages inside the head of a protagonist i find clever and interesting. there is almost nothing i enjoy more than reading fictional thoughts and pausing occasionally to google the art that passes through them!
this does a weird thing with perspective, spends time switching POVs without warning or explanation for a couple paragraphs at a time, that i could have done without, but otherwise i had a great time.
bottom line: i predict more teju cole in my future.
(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)
and that's not the only pro!
on top of that gift from the universe, i found this to be so thoughtful and internal. i love the pleasant surprise of spending a couple of hundred pages inside the head of a protagonist i find clever and interesting. there is almost nothing i enjoy more than reading fictional thoughts and pausing occasionally to google the art that passes through them!
this does a weird thing with perspective, spends time switching POVs without warning or explanation for a couple paragraphs at a time, that i could have done without, but otherwise i had a great time.
bottom line: i predict more teju cole in my future.
(thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)
October 15, 2023
Not unlike OPEN CITY, Teju Cole’s latest, TREMOR, reads less like a novel than a narrative of different voices and encounters. The main protagonist, Tunde, originally from Lagos, Nigeria, is a professor at a prestigious university in Boston (Harvard, likely). We don’t stay with Tunde at all times. Instead, we take scholarly and urgent strolls into other voices, persons, perspectives. It didn’t matter if I kept up with who was speaking, because it inevitably coalesces into a human ecosystem that demonstrates the connectivity between all our disparate lives.
Novels contain (to varying degrees) an assembled story within the pages. Cole inverts the definition, and turns the narrative outward in conversation with the reader. The story isn’t contained within the pages alone. The author experiments with form, and while reading, I am crossing borders between fiction; non-fiction; storytelling; academia; chronicling; history; the Arts; and travel. It moves with a tight meandering that is loosely connected and pulling from all directions of life. We watch time slip away and get distilled within the same space. Cole’s brilliant mind keeps the reader fascinated by his journey through mortality.
Novels have a separate life from the reader, they can exist on their own, logically. A book is an inanimate object that yet is a distinctly alive organism. Cole’s book, to me, actively relies on a third party, another human, to be a witness to his prosecutions (I mean that in a good way). TREMOR is less a novelistic novel as it is a meaningful interrogation of all manner of life.
In a novel, there’s a conclusion, or at least a closing, perhaps a closing argument. What makes Cole a departure from my (albeit, limited) idea of a novel is that he often turns to the reader to be the other half of the story, rather than an outsider or limited insider. He inspires me to challenge my private assertions.
Don’t read this for a story. There are multiple stories, multiple voices, like a curious wanderer walking through cities and countries, a series of holograms blended together. The style is enigmatic. “You” prefaces the main character’s entrances on the page. So it sets out as second person. But it changes as it becomes a collection of voices. Sometimes I didn’t realize we had left the character who refers to Tunde as “you.” After a while, it ceased to matter. This narrative has its own energy and force.
The back cover offers up my favorite quote as if it read my mind. The author has a central thesis, which on page 14 is summed up regarding “history’s own brutality, which refuses symmetries and seldom consoles.” He illuminates how history doesn’t balance the scales. Invasions, colonializations, and wars aren’t symmetrically decided based on the last outcome.
TREMOR is also like a series of irruptions, edifications, images. It took me longer to read than the average novel because Google and Wikipedia were often my friends. Don’t shy away from looking things up---it adds to the pleasure of reading. West African music, specific paintings, the art and culture of the ci wara are a few of the many ingredients that make up this masterwork. The book is reflective and explorative, with an ongoing examination into cultural priorities. For example:
“We are all obsessed with preservation and we revere scholarship and curation. But we have not been concurrently taught to value the life-worlds of others, their autonomy, their ancestral rights. Particularly if the people in question are from the African continent, their ingenuity can be appreciated, their artifacts can be acquired and subjected to analysis, but their actual lives cannot be valued. What does it mean to care about art but not about the people that made that art?”
Teju Cole will make you pay attention and observe and, hopefully, care about the people he talks about. He discusses so many points between the West (Europe, America) and West Africa. I was particularly intrigued by him raising the topic of the American obsession with captivity narratives, which largely began in colonial times, a tradition that saw its main task as protecting white women from dark-skinned invaders. He isn’t admonishing, but rather provoking us to think. The heroic rescue combined with these narratives made us ripe for films like the 1956 John Wayne vehicle, The Searchers.
TREMOR is a rambling, but measured and well controlled and genre-defying novel that opened my mind and heart to history’s brutalities, yes, but also to a tender mortality that we can’t escape. Teju Cole has a vast and intriguing intellect. Thank you to Random House for providing me an ARC for review.
Novels contain (to varying degrees) an assembled story within the pages. Cole inverts the definition, and turns the narrative outward in conversation with the reader. The story isn’t contained within the pages alone. The author experiments with form, and while reading, I am crossing borders between fiction; non-fiction; storytelling; academia; chronicling; history; the Arts; and travel. It moves with a tight meandering that is loosely connected and pulling from all directions of life. We watch time slip away and get distilled within the same space. Cole’s brilliant mind keeps the reader fascinated by his journey through mortality.
Novels have a separate life from the reader, they can exist on their own, logically. A book is an inanimate object that yet is a distinctly alive organism. Cole’s book, to me, actively relies on a third party, another human, to be a witness to his prosecutions (I mean that in a good way). TREMOR is less a novelistic novel as it is a meaningful interrogation of all manner of life.
In a novel, there’s a conclusion, or at least a closing, perhaps a closing argument. What makes Cole a departure from my (albeit, limited) idea of a novel is that he often turns to the reader to be the other half of the story, rather than an outsider or limited insider. He inspires me to challenge my private assertions.
Don’t read this for a story. There are multiple stories, multiple voices, like a curious wanderer walking through cities and countries, a series of holograms blended together. The style is enigmatic. “You” prefaces the main character’s entrances on the page. So it sets out as second person. But it changes as it becomes a collection of voices. Sometimes I didn’t realize we had left the character who refers to Tunde as “you.” After a while, it ceased to matter. This narrative has its own energy and force.
The back cover offers up my favorite quote as if it read my mind. The author has a central thesis, which on page 14 is summed up regarding “history’s own brutality, which refuses symmetries and seldom consoles.” He illuminates how history doesn’t balance the scales. Invasions, colonializations, and wars aren’t symmetrically decided based on the last outcome.
TREMOR is also like a series of irruptions, edifications, images. It took me longer to read than the average novel because Google and Wikipedia were often my friends. Don’t shy away from looking things up---it adds to the pleasure of reading. West African music, specific paintings, the art and culture of the ci wara are a few of the many ingredients that make up this masterwork. The book is reflective and explorative, with an ongoing examination into cultural priorities. For example:
“We are all obsessed with preservation and we revere scholarship and curation. But we have not been concurrently taught to value the life-worlds of others, their autonomy, their ancestral rights. Particularly if the people in question are from the African continent, their ingenuity can be appreciated, their artifacts can be acquired and subjected to analysis, but their actual lives cannot be valued. What does it mean to care about art but not about the people that made that art?”
Teju Cole will make you pay attention and observe and, hopefully, care about the people he talks about. He discusses so many points between the West (Europe, America) and West Africa. I was particularly intrigued by him raising the topic of the American obsession with captivity narratives, which largely began in colonial times, a tradition that saw its main task as protecting white women from dark-skinned invaders. He isn’t admonishing, but rather provoking us to think. The heroic rescue combined with these narratives made us ripe for films like the 1956 John Wayne vehicle, The Searchers.
TREMOR is a rambling, but measured and well controlled and genre-defying novel that opened my mind and heart to history’s brutalities, yes, but also to a tender mortality that we can’t escape. Teju Cole has a vast and intriguing intellect. Thank you to Random House for providing me an ARC for review.
October 15, 2023
Exaggerated rumors about the death of the novel have been spreading for at least a century, but I’m not concerned about its imminent demise. As a form for capturing the meaning and matter of our lives, novels still feel wholly up to the task. And anyone who doubts how effectively this elderly literary genre might survive and evolve to reflect an impossibly complicated world would do well to read Teju Cole’s involute new book, “Tremor.”
A dozen years have passed since Cole published his first novel, “Open City,” and so powerful was the impact of that evocative story of New York that “Tremor” lands this month in a nest of eager anticipation. It does not disappoint. Cole continues to demonstrate just how elastic a novel can be and how trenchant he is. His book crosses national boundaries just as confidently as it crosses literary ones. The eclectic structure may be challenging, but, given the continuity of Cole’s vision, it’s never baffling.
The story opens in the fall. Tunde, like Cole, is a professor in Cambridge, Mass., “in the center of white learning,” where he thrives — “not without some doubt, not without some shame.” We meet him as he contemplates the deaths of past and current colleagues.
That macabre introduction gives way to an antiquing trip in Maine. At a shop run by two jovial octogenarians, Tunde notices a card behind the counter signed by Laura Bush, matron of a family descended from the Mayflower pilgrims. Near it is posted a flier about the site’s historical background. “This homestead was settled in 1657 by Dr. Thomas Wells,” the flier declares before breezily describing how Indians axed their way into the original house, massacred the doctor’s wife and children and burned down the building. “After this terrible tragedy Mr. Wells left for Ipswich, Massachusetts, returning sometime after 1718 with a new family to reclaim the homestead.”
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/...
A dozen years have passed since Cole published his first novel, “Open City,” and so powerful was the impact of that evocative story of New York that “Tremor” lands this month in a nest of eager anticipation. It does not disappoint. Cole continues to demonstrate just how elastic a novel can be and how trenchant he is. His book crosses national boundaries just as confidently as it crosses literary ones. The eclectic structure may be challenging, but, given the continuity of Cole’s vision, it’s never baffling.
The story opens in the fall. Tunde, like Cole, is a professor in Cambridge, Mass., “in the center of white learning,” where he thrives — “not without some doubt, not without some shame.” We meet him as he contemplates the deaths of past and current colleagues.
That macabre introduction gives way to an antiquing trip in Maine. At a shop run by two jovial octogenarians, Tunde notices a card behind the counter signed by Laura Bush, matron of a family descended from the Mayflower pilgrims. Near it is posted a flier about the site’s historical background. “This homestead was settled in 1657 by Dr. Thomas Wells,” the flier declares before breezily describing how Indians axed their way into the original house, massacred the doctor’s wife and children and burned down the building. “After this terrible tragedy Mr. Wells left for Ipswich, Massachusetts, returning sometime after 1718 with a new family to reclaim the homestead.”
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/...
Shelved as 'abandoned'
December 8, 2023At page 146, I’ve completely lost the thread of this fragmentary “novel” and am throwing in the towel. I admired Cole’s Open City and I can’t wait to look at his book of photography I have on the end table, but this work is for someone more grounded than I am at the moment, apparently!
November 24, 2023
There were parts in this novel that were beautifully ugly and disturbingly thought-provoking and among the best things I read this year. There were other parts that felt muddled to me, and I was bored and cranky and I wanted Cole to hold my hand a little more tightly and to lead me through some fairly dense stuff where I just felt left to flounder and find my own way. There were parts where I felt overexplained to, and other parts where I felt Teju Cole left me at a loss and didn’t provide me with enough context to feel confident I knew what the heck was going on.
I suspect a lot of my crankiness is because I was in the wrong mood and wasn’t patient enough to slow down and let the story tell itself. Parts 1-4 eventually settled into a magnificent whole where each sentence and scene exhilarated me but I could not fully make the leap to what came next.
If the novel were more deliberately fragmentary from the beginning, then I would have managed this book’s challenges better, I think. I just finished reading The Book of All Loves byAgustín Fernández Mallo for example, and it’s in every way possible a more fragmentary, more challenging novel than Tremor is, but it was consistently challenging in the same way, and I adapted and knew what to expect.
The challenge of Tremor is that the narrative voice at its center is unstable. It shifts and upends and questions its own validity. That’s a very tricky thing to put a reader through.
It’s not the kind of book that I personally can read confidently in ebook format, either, which is what I had access to on this first encounter with it. I need to read this again soon, with a live book in my hands. In spite of these cranky complaints this is a terrific read that gave me many new thoughts.
I suspect a lot of my crankiness is because I was in the wrong mood and wasn’t patient enough to slow down and let the story tell itself. Parts 1-4 eventually settled into a magnificent whole where each sentence and scene exhilarated me but I could not fully make the leap to what came next.
If the novel were more deliberately fragmentary from the beginning, then I would have managed this book’s challenges better, I think. I just finished reading The Book of All Loves byAgustín Fernández Mallo for example, and it’s in every way possible a more fragmentary, more challenging novel than Tremor is, but it was consistently challenging in the same way, and I adapted and knew what to expect.
The challenge of Tremor is that the narrative voice at its center is unstable. It shifts and upends and questions its own validity. That’s a very tricky thing to put a reader through.
It’s not the kind of book that I personally can read confidently in ebook format, either, which is what I had access to on this first encounter with it. I need to read this again soon, with a live book in my hands. In spite of these cranky complaints this is a terrific read that gave me many new thoughts.
January 5, 2024
One of my favorite novels of the 2010s, Cole's debut Open City was Sebaldian in its probing, cerebral descriptions of a single consciousness stimulated by his wanderings through New York, spiraling from one meditative rumination to another about art and architecture, music, and literature, empathy and alienation.
I was simply stunned by the brilliance of Tremor, his long-awaited follow-up, in which Cole is working on a much broader and expansive canvas, and experimenting with form with wild ambition. This is a short novel, only 230 pages or so, but I read it over an entire week, savoring it at the sentence-by-sentence level.
Cole assembles a collage that shifts from one subjectivity to another, destabilizing the narratological boundaries between I and you. We begin with the domestic life of Tunde, a Nigerian-born professor of photography at Harvard, hobnobbing with other hyperarticulate haut-bourgeois academics, and weathering a period of emotional disconnection and foreboding silences in his marriage. He devotes his time and attention to closely observing the world, lecturing about art in museums, traveling to photography exhibitions in Africa, and capturing images with his camera, haunted by occasional ocular migraines that temporarily blind him in one eye.
Tunde's narrative voice tracks with the vague outlines of Cole's own super-successful professional life, but Tremor is so much more than autofictional, engaging deeply with the history of slavery, violence, capitalism, and colonialism in Boston and Nigeria, Haiti and Mali. A major theme is the appropriation of African artifacts and Black bodies into canonical works of European art and literature, and the moral blindness of White privilege, but Cole is exploring these issues deftly and obliquely.
I don't want you to get the mistaken impression that this book is an emotionally dour and intellectually arid affair: it's filled with music and dancing, and I would highly recommend listening to the book's Spotify playlist while you read: Malian tunes from Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabaté, but also Bach's Cello Suites, and John Coltrane's "Blue World."
One remarkable chapter moves far beyond Tunde's consciousness to encompass a series of short first-person narratives of unnamed people from all walks of life who are observing the uncertainty of contemporary Lagos. The action of the novel takes place in 2019, just before the pandemic shattered our world, and it vibrates with the anticipation of massive earthquakes that hadn't happened yet.
I am grateful to Random House and Netgalley for sharing an ARC in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.
I was simply stunned by the brilliance of Tremor, his long-awaited follow-up, in which Cole is working on a much broader and expansive canvas, and experimenting with form with wild ambition. This is a short novel, only 230 pages or so, but I read it over an entire week, savoring it at the sentence-by-sentence level.
Cole assembles a collage that shifts from one subjectivity to another, destabilizing the narratological boundaries between I and you. We begin with the domestic life of Tunde, a Nigerian-born professor of photography at Harvard, hobnobbing with other hyperarticulate haut-bourgeois academics, and weathering a period of emotional disconnection and foreboding silences in his marriage. He devotes his time and attention to closely observing the world, lecturing about art in museums, traveling to photography exhibitions in Africa, and capturing images with his camera, haunted by occasional ocular migraines that temporarily blind him in one eye.
Tunde's narrative voice tracks with the vague outlines of Cole's own super-successful professional life, but Tremor is so much more than autofictional, engaging deeply with the history of slavery, violence, capitalism, and colonialism in Boston and Nigeria, Haiti and Mali. A major theme is the appropriation of African artifacts and Black bodies into canonical works of European art and literature, and the moral blindness of White privilege, but Cole is exploring these issues deftly and obliquely.
I don't want you to get the mistaken impression that this book is an emotionally dour and intellectually arid affair: it's filled with music and dancing, and I would highly recommend listening to the book's Spotify playlist while you read: Malian tunes from Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabaté, but also Bach's Cello Suites, and John Coltrane's "Blue World."
One remarkable chapter moves far beyond Tunde's consciousness to encompass a series of short first-person narratives of unnamed people from all walks of life who are observing the uncertainty of contemporary Lagos. The action of the novel takes place in 2019, just before the pandemic shattered our world, and it vibrates with the anticipation of massive earthquakes that hadn't happened yet.
I am grateful to Random House and Netgalley for sharing an ARC in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.
February 19, 2024
'It’s rough out there. What can I say but “eeya.” The word contains multitudes.'
RTC later. I'm weak for this (seemingly?) 'plotless' writing. Whether if it's about Lagos, Tehran, Ingmar Bergman, or just about anything, Cole's prose, crafted with such a deep sense of tenderness shines so brilliantly. Still not able to forget that (albeit small, and not sure how significant) bit about Caravaggio in Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time. I just adore his writing (esp. stylistically).
'I’m talking about J. M. W. Turner’s Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On). No encounter with this painting can be pleasant. Its details are terrible and its full title directs our looking, telling us to focus first on the grisly foreground and then on the roiling weather in the background. The title volunteers a great deal of information as though it were speaking itself out of a state of alarm or frenzy. In fact both the painting and its title are excessive, they overspill. And perhaps it is this feeling of excess, this feeling of obscene overmuchness, that makes one repeatedly forget that it is indeed right here just around the corner, just in the distance. We forget the Slave Ship, we must forget the Slave Ship in the way we must forget many difficult things with the kind of forgetfulness that allows us to keep on living our lives.'
'In Turner’s painting the sky is a riot of reds and yellows, stippled with orange, pink, purple, blue, and white. The painting depicts a sunset in a tempest though it’s unlikely that the mass murder on the real Zong took place during a tempest. The sky in Turner’s painting looks as though it is on fire. His seascapes often depict a natural world in a state of wildness beyond human control. The oncoming typhoon as imagined by Turner in this painting will compound the miseries of those in the water. The lurid colors of this sky are not denotative, they are simply atmospheric effects of the kind Turner frequently employed and part of what drew the critic John Ruskin to his work.'
'Sowande’s influence on Nigerian church music was transformative but hardly anyone is aware that he had an influence that extended far beyond Africa. He had an influence even on John Coltrane. We don’t know these things. How many of the younger generation know that Herbert Macaulay himself, when he wasn’t transforming the political landscape, was an avid violinist? Stepping out of the Lagos heat into his own house in the cool of the evening to play Beethoven sonatas.'
'You know, you’ve found me at my happiest. It is a Tuesday afternoon and I am filling this basilica with my own improvisations. What I was playing when you walked in was based on a theme by Handel. The only audience was myself, at least until you arrived. I get a lot of happiness when the unexpected happens in that way, when I can share my passion with someone who also knows something about this music. Because the other thing this city can do is dull your sensitivity. Maybe because you’re visiting it is easier for you to remain sensitive. But for those of us who live here staying sensitive is a daily battle. When I sit at the organ it is an opportunity for my entire body to manifest the music in my head. My spirit expands, my very being expands to fill this entire space and every note I sound out is for the glory of God. There’s nothing else like it in the world.'
'I talked to Iya Ramota about it and she advised me to go to Celina Pharmacy and ask for the formalin. She said the bigger pharmacies would not agree to sell it to me because it is against the law. So I went and I paid the five thousand and they gave me the syringe and the formalin. That was how I managed to preserve the body for some days before I could make the funeral arrangements. The man at the pharmacy had said if I couldn’t find the blood vessel to put the syringe into I should pour the formalin into my daughter’s mouth, nose, and privates and block everything with cotton wool. But I knew I would find the blood vessel. I took this girl to hospital so many times. I knew her body like I know my own. Sometimes I was the one who put the drip on her. I was the one who gave her injections. The only thing that changed was that when I inserted the needle for the last time she did not feel any pain. My daughter’s name was Durotola. It means “stay with glory.”'
'I mean there’s something about Macbeth that always works well in an African context, all those witches, all that blood and struggle for power. It’s like reading the metro section of the Punch or the Sun. But there was the added layer of staging it in a hearing-impaired context. I always say there’s ability in disability and when you see youngsters like Bright signing Shakespeare it transforms you. “Out, out, brief candle, life’s but a walking shadow.'
'And then there are their own voices. Four nights a week I find myself inside this forest of accents and I absolutely love it. There are numerous varieties of Lagos accent from the posh to the unvarnished and there are accents inflected with the residue of various native languages and there are also British and American accents from people who have never even left Nigeria.'
“But I still laugh when I’m supposed to laugh and I smile when I am supposed to smile.”
November 6, 2023
***1/2
Teju Cole noemt zijn nieuwe roman ‘Trilling’ ‘een herstel van zijn geloof in fictie’. Wellicht verklaart dat voorafgaande geloofsverlies waarom de nieuwe roman van de Nigeriaanse Amerikaan pas twaalf jaar na het megasucces ‘Open stad’ komt. Daarin vertelt een Nigeriaanse psychiatriestudent over wie hij tegenkomt en wat hij denkt tijdens zijn wandelingen in New York. Vanwege de afwezigheid van een plot en de biografische overeenkomsten met de schrijver leunt ‘Trilling’ nog meer dan zijn voorganger aan bij autofictie.
Tunde, de protagonist, is een in Nigeria geboren professor fotografie. We komen hem tegen in een antiekwinkel in Maine. Terwijl hij naar Afrikaanse maskers kijkt, spinnen zijn gedachten zich rond het vermarkten en teruggeven van roofkunst. Wanneer hij leest over een wit gezin dat door indianen uitgemoord werd, verbaast hij zich over de onverschilligheid die hij, na drie decennia in de VS, tegenover die voorstelling van zaken ervaart. Zijn gedachten dwalen af naar de ergste Amerikaanse seriemoordenaar aller tijden. Maar wat betekent de term ‘seriemoordenaar’ in een land dat gegrondvest is op volkerenmoord? Een land, bovendien, waar je er zeker van kunt zijn dat de uitdrukking ‘een gruwelijke tragedie’ alleen gebruikt wordt als de slachtoffers wit zijn?
‘Trilling’ is een ketting van aaneengesloten waarnemingen, herinneringen, anekdotes en kritische analyses. ‘Alle tijd valt in het nu’ staat er ergens, maar het beschreven heden zit vol kijkgaatjes naar elders en verborgen deuren naar vroeger. Elk moment lijkt op een breuklijn te liggen tussen verleden en toekomst. Wie om zich heen kijkt, ziet zijn zekerheden uitgedaagd. Tunde stelt scherp op heel diverse artiesten en kunstwerken. De films van Abbas Kiarostami passeren de revue, de ‘persoonlijke onpersoonlijkheid’ van Bachs cellosuites, de schilderijen van William Turner en Luc Tuymans, de – waanzinnig knap beschreven – Nigeriaanse grootstad Lagos, de slavernij, en de achteloze vergeetachtigheid van de witte medemens. In een heldere en sensitieve gedachtestroom onderzoekt Tunde zijn verhouding tot schoonheid in een wereld vol leed en beladen verleden. Het zelfinzicht groeit. Mettertijd doorprikt Tunde zijn eigen vooroordelen over andermans vooroordelen. Een verademing in deze tijden van het grote gelijk.
Veel onderwerpen die in Tundes gedachtestroom passeren, hijgen in de nek van de actualiteit: woke (zonder de term te benoemen), het wij-zij-denken, het gevoel murw geslagen te zijn door ellende en de noodzaak dat gevoel te negeren om gewoon voort te kunnen leven. Of Cole je aandacht vastgrijpt, hangt sterk af van je eigen interessegebied. Kunstliefhebbers zullen smullen van Tundes gespecialiseerde uiteenzettingen. Als muziekfan vond ik het inspirerend hoe Tundes hoofd gelukzalig toevlucht zoekt bij John Coltrane, West-Afrikaanse troubadoursliedjes en Fela Kuti, Nigeria’s grootste muzikale (anti)held.
‘Trilling’ is boeiend en contemplatief, maar ook grillig en ongrijpbaar. Het lijkt alsof John Berger, W.G. Sebald en Judith Schalansky samen een boek hebben geschreven onder het mentorschap van James Baldwin, maar het mist zijn vuur en urgentie. Het verhaal blijft ondergeschikt aan de analyses over kunst, dekolonisatie, geweld en racisme. De losse delen naast elkaar zijn interessant, maar Cole had er een meeslepender geheel van kunnen smeden.
Teju Cole noemt zijn nieuwe roman ‘Trilling’ ‘een herstel van zijn geloof in fictie’. Wellicht verklaart dat voorafgaande geloofsverlies waarom de nieuwe roman van de Nigeriaanse Amerikaan pas twaalf jaar na het megasucces ‘Open stad’ komt. Daarin vertelt een Nigeriaanse psychiatriestudent over wie hij tegenkomt en wat hij denkt tijdens zijn wandelingen in New York. Vanwege de afwezigheid van een plot en de biografische overeenkomsten met de schrijver leunt ‘Trilling’ nog meer dan zijn voorganger aan bij autofictie.
Tunde, de protagonist, is een in Nigeria geboren professor fotografie. We komen hem tegen in een antiekwinkel in Maine. Terwijl hij naar Afrikaanse maskers kijkt, spinnen zijn gedachten zich rond het vermarkten en teruggeven van roofkunst. Wanneer hij leest over een wit gezin dat door indianen uitgemoord werd, verbaast hij zich over de onverschilligheid die hij, na drie decennia in de VS, tegenover die voorstelling van zaken ervaart. Zijn gedachten dwalen af naar de ergste Amerikaanse seriemoordenaar aller tijden. Maar wat betekent de term ‘seriemoordenaar’ in een land dat gegrondvest is op volkerenmoord? Een land, bovendien, waar je er zeker van kunt zijn dat de uitdrukking ‘een gruwelijke tragedie’ alleen gebruikt wordt als de slachtoffers wit zijn?
‘Trilling’ is een ketting van aaneengesloten waarnemingen, herinneringen, anekdotes en kritische analyses. ‘Alle tijd valt in het nu’ staat er ergens, maar het beschreven heden zit vol kijkgaatjes naar elders en verborgen deuren naar vroeger. Elk moment lijkt op een breuklijn te liggen tussen verleden en toekomst. Wie om zich heen kijkt, ziet zijn zekerheden uitgedaagd. Tunde stelt scherp op heel diverse artiesten en kunstwerken. De films van Abbas Kiarostami passeren de revue, de ‘persoonlijke onpersoonlijkheid’ van Bachs cellosuites, de schilderijen van William Turner en Luc Tuymans, de – waanzinnig knap beschreven – Nigeriaanse grootstad Lagos, de slavernij, en de achteloze vergeetachtigheid van de witte medemens. In een heldere en sensitieve gedachtestroom onderzoekt Tunde zijn verhouding tot schoonheid in een wereld vol leed en beladen verleden. Het zelfinzicht groeit. Mettertijd doorprikt Tunde zijn eigen vooroordelen over andermans vooroordelen. Een verademing in deze tijden van het grote gelijk.
Veel onderwerpen die in Tundes gedachtestroom passeren, hijgen in de nek van de actualiteit: woke (zonder de term te benoemen), het wij-zij-denken, het gevoel murw geslagen te zijn door ellende en de noodzaak dat gevoel te negeren om gewoon voort te kunnen leven. Of Cole je aandacht vastgrijpt, hangt sterk af van je eigen interessegebied. Kunstliefhebbers zullen smullen van Tundes gespecialiseerde uiteenzettingen. Als muziekfan vond ik het inspirerend hoe Tundes hoofd gelukzalig toevlucht zoekt bij John Coltrane, West-Afrikaanse troubadoursliedjes en Fela Kuti, Nigeria’s grootste muzikale (anti)held.
‘Trilling’ is boeiend en contemplatief, maar ook grillig en ongrijpbaar. Het lijkt alsof John Berger, W.G. Sebald en Judith Schalansky samen een boek hebben geschreven onder het mentorschap van James Baldwin, maar het mist zijn vuur en urgentie. Het verhaal blijft ondergeschikt aan de analyses over kunst, dekolonisatie, geweld en racisme. De losse delen naast elkaar zijn interessant, maar Cole had er een meeslepender geheel van kunnen smeden.
December 13, 2023
The twin's face was his, the min's gait was his, the twin began to speak and when he spoke the voice was a perfect copy of his. This harsh confrontation with the possibility of his own replaceability was too much to bear and that very evening before darkness had fallen he left the city.
Teju Cole’s first novel was Every Day is for the Thief published by the wonderful Nigerian/London small press Cassava Republic “founded in Abuja, Nigeria, 2006 with the aim of bringing high quality fiction and non-fiction for adults and children alike to a global audience.”
His second novel was the heavily Sebaldian Open City, with its peripatetic erudite narrator Jules - and a story with a real sting in the tale.
Discussing the form of Tremor, his third novel, in the Guardian Cole said:
On his return he thought he was thinking of a photograph but he realized that he was thinking of a photographic negative, the colors inverted and left and right flipped. But it became clear to him that what he was actually thinking of was a photographic negative that had been made but had gone missing before it could be printed. And finally he realized that no, the negative had not even ever existed, it was all in the imagination or it was all in the future and he was thinking of a picture that existed only in the mind of the one who was thinking it. The more he tried to describe it the more elusive it was. It was there but it could not be looked at directly. At best it could only be seen out of the corner of the mind's eye and this was the way one might begin to speak of the city.
The weakest parts of the novel are those that are closest to the conventional novel, although this could still be seen as part of Cole’s welcome challenge to the 19th century form that still seems to dominate conventional literary fiction.
The narrative voice could either be considered a mess, or ambitiously defiant of convention, switching blithely for the main character Tunde from 3rd to 1st person (and towards the end mid-chapter, without warning and briefly to another 1st person voice, who seems to narrate a different reality), and with some parts addressed to a “you” (who we come to realise is a close companion of Tunde’s, now deceased).
The story of Tunde’s own life and close family never really develops - with walk off and on characters, and Tunde’s wife Sadako serving only as a framing device for his musings [1].
Although one could take this as cleverly indicative of the self-centred nature of the narrator, who eloquently and powerfully exposes white American/European privilege [2] while seemingly unaware of his middle-class academically-insulated internationally-mobile own.
The novel is most successful when it shrugs of the shackles completely, even the Sebaldian ones that bound Open City. One chapter is explicitly a transcript of a lecture, another a story of Lagos in a series of first person vignettes from a cross-section of society [3] and, my favourite, a description of a city in a sustained flight of fantasy [4], a direct homage to Calvino’s Invisible Cities (name-checked more than once in other parts of the text).
Music infuses the novel, some the dead-white-Europeans of so-called classical music but alongside that contemporary 20th and 21st century music from Africa - a sample playlist here enhances the reading experience:
Overall - flawed but in a good way.
Extracts
[1]
TUNDE IS STARTLED OUT Of these thoughts by Sadako's return from work. They talk for a moment. She remains downstairs. He moves upstairs to her study. The room is lit by a single lamp and he continues reading.
[2]
It was in a shop among the unrelated treasures white people had collected by fair means or foul from across the globe. In the West a love of the "authentic" means that art collectors prefer their African objects to be alienated so that only what has been extracted from its context becomes real. Better that the artist not be named, better that the artist be long dead. The dispossession of the object's makers mysti-cally confers monetary value to the object.
[3]
I WORK UNDER THE bridges. I find a section of concrete that hasn't been taken over by advertising bills and use that for my mural. Of course this being Lagos I have to get clearance. The father of a close friend works at LASAA, the state's signage and advertisement agency, and he arranges the necessary permissions for me. At the moment I'm working at Falomo Roundabout. I only use organic pigments. The white comes from crushed kaolin chalk, the black from charcoal mixed with anunu leaf, the lemon yellow from local river clay, the dark red from ground camwood. I am inspired by the tradition of uli so I sought out people from my mother's family in Anambra who knew the preparation techniques.
[4]
When the citizens are asked whether their city runs from east to west or from north to south they seize on one and only one of those from north to south they seize on one and only one of those descriptions and do not entertain the other as anything but superstition.
For those for whom the city is hemmed between lagoon and ocean the city has always existed and is of stable size and population. For those for whom it is oriented in a north-south direction the city was a village barely worth the name until the nineteenth century, a village that experienced explosive growth in the twentieth century and keeps on growing in the twenty-first century, farther and farther north, hardly getting wider but each day flourishing upward like a sapling into the heart of the continent.
The north-southers emboldened by new wealth say that it was precisely this disagreement with the east-westers that led to the internecine war of the late nineteenth century during which multitudes who shared a language and lineage slaughtered each other and at the end of which the ruling family of the city changed for good. The east-westers betraying only the faintest trace of bitterness sit in their living rooms which are full of ornate inherited furniture and say there was never any such war. When you examine any of the maps in those east-west homes you find that there are only two cardinal points represented, east and west. For them north and south do not exist and anything beyond the bounds of the lagoon is a fiction.
Teju Cole’s first novel was Every Day is for the Thief published by the wonderful Nigerian/London small press Cassava Republic “founded in Abuja, Nigeria, 2006 with the aim of bringing high quality fiction and non-fiction for adults and children alike to a global audience.”
His second novel was the heavily Sebaldian Open City, with its peripatetic erudite narrator Jules - and a story with a real sting in the tale.
Discussing the form of Tremor, his third novel, in the Guardian Cole said:
”Experimental” isn’t quite the right word – I write perfectly lucid sentences – but I wanted to give myself a chance to make something that could fail. I don’t know that people are doing enough with their freedom as writers – to keep doing this 19th-century thing bores me.
On his return he thought he was thinking of a photograph but he realized that he was thinking of a photographic negative, the colors inverted and left and right flipped. But it became clear to him that what he was actually thinking of was a photographic negative that had been made but had gone missing before it could be printed. And finally he realized that no, the negative had not even ever existed, it was all in the imagination or it was all in the future and he was thinking of a picture that existed only in the mind of the one who was thinking it. The more he tried to describe it the more elusive it was. It was there but it could not be looked at directly. At best it could only be seen out of the corner of the mind's eye and this was the way one might begin to speak of the city.
The weakest parts of the novel are those that are closest to the conventional novel, although this could still be seen as part of Cole’s welcome challenge to the 19th century form that still seems to dominate conventional literary fiction.
The narrative voice could either be considered a mess, or ambitiously defiant of convention, switching blithely for the main character Tunde from 3rd to 1st person (and towards the end mid-chapter, without warning and briefly to another 1st person voice, who seems to narrate a different reality), and with some parts addressed to a “you” (who we come to realise is a close companion of Tunde’s, now deceased).
The story of Tunde’s own life and close family never really develops - with walk off and on characters, and Tunde’s wife Sadako serving only as a framing device for his musings [1].
Although one could take this as cleverly indicative of the self-centred nature of the narrator, who eloquently and powerfully exposes white American/European privilege [2] while seemingly unaware of his middle-class academically-insulated internationally-mobile own.
The novel is most successful when it shrugs of the shackles completely, even the Sebaldian ones that bound Open City. One chapter is explicitly a transcript of a lecture, another a story of Lagos in a series of first person vignettes from a cross-section of society [3] and, my favourite, a description of a city in a sustained flight of fantasy [4], a direct homage to Calvino’s Invisible Cities (name-checked more than once in other parts of the text).
Music infuses the novel, some the dead-white-Europeans of so-called classical music but alongside that contemporary 20th and 21st century music from Africa - a sample playlist here enhances the reading experience:
Overall - flawed but in a good way.
Extracts
[1]
TUNDE IS STARTLED OUT Of these thoughts by Sadako's return from work. They talk for a moment. She remains downstairs. He moves upstairs to her study. The room is lit by a single lamp and he continues reading.
[2]
It was in a shop among the unrelated treasures white people had collected by fair means or foul from across the globe. In the West a love of the "authentic" means that art collectors prefer their African objects to be alienated so that only what has been extracted from its context becomes real. Better that the artist not be named, better that the artist be long dead. The dispossession of the object's makers mysti-cally confers monetary value to the object.
[3]
I WORK UNDER THE bridges. I find a section of concrete that hasn't been taken over by advertising bills and use that for my mural. Of course this being Lagos I have to get clearance. The father of a close friend works at LASAA, the state's signage and advertisement agency, and he arranges the necessary permissions for me. At the moment I'm working at Falomo Roundabout. I only use organic pigments. The white comes from crushed kaolin chalk, the black from charcoal mixed with anunu leaf, the lemon yellow from local river clay, the dark red from ground camwood. I am inspired by the tradition of uli so I sought out people from my mother's family in Anambra who knew the preparation techniques.
[4]
When the citizens are asked whether their city runs from east to west or from north to south they seize on one and only one of those from north to south they seize on one and only one of those descriptions and do not entertain the other as anything but superstition.
For those for whom the city is hemmed between lagoon and ocean the city has always existed and is of stable size and population. For those for whom it is oriented in a north-south direction the city was a village barely worth the name until the nineteenth century, a village that experienced explosive growth in the twentieth century and keeps on growing in the twenty-first century, farther and farther north, hardly getting wider but each day flourishing upward like a sapling into the heart of the continent.
The north-southers emboldened by new wealth say that it was precisely this disagreement with the east-westers that led to the internecine war of the late nineteenth century during which multitudes who shared a language and lineage slaughtered each other and at the end of which the ruling family of the city changed for good. The east-westers betraying only the faintest trace of bitterness sit in their living rooms which are full of ornate inherited furniture and say there was never any such war. When you examine any of the maps in those east-west homes you find that there are only two cardinal points represented, east and west. For them north and south do not exist and anything beyond the bounds of the lagoon is a fiction.
November 17, 2023
Teju Cole schreef opnieuw een intrigerend boek. Ik leerde hem kennen via Vertrouwde en vreemde dingen, een bundeling essays die mij een hele lijst aan boeiende kunstwerken en fotografen opleverde, én op vrij confronterende wijze een kans tot inleving bood in hoe het voelt om een geëngageerde, academisch geschoolde Afro-Amerikaan te zijn. Dat hij ook nog kunsthistoricus en fotograaf is, een liefde-haat-fascinatie heeft voor zijn geboorteland Nigeria en met dat boek de grenzen van het essay wist op te rekken, maakte hem tot een auteur om meer van te lezen. Dat deed ik met zijn originele, enigszins ongrijpbare roman Open City.
'Tremor' voelt als een combinatie van de twee bovengenoemde boeken. Veel ingrediënten komen hier opnieuw samen: de hoofdpersoon is een fotograaf, de westerse kunstgeschiedenis duikt geregeld op, het koloniale verleden van Amerika met de uitbuiting van zowel de Afrikaanse als de oorspronkelijke Amerikaanse volkeren vormt een rode draad en Nigeria, met name de hoofdstad Lagos, speelt een prominente rol in enkele hoofdstukken.
Maar er is meer. 'Tremor' is werkelijk een universele en meerstemmige roman. Net zoals Tunde, de fotograaf (die verdacht veel gelijkenissen vertoont met de auteur), zijn camerastatief verplaatst, wordt er vaak en op intrigerende en ingenieuze wijze van (vertel)perspectief gewisseld, wordt er gezocht naar de juiste invalshoek; of beter: naar meerdere standpunten om de wereld beter te leren begrijpen. De meerstemmigheid bereikt zijn expliciete hoogtepunt in het hoofdstuk met Nigeriaanse levenservaringen en/of getuigenissen van mannen en vrouwen uit de meest uiteenlopende sociale klassen.
Verder is er een prachtig hoofdstuk over de hoofdstad Lagos, waar de ik-persoon (Tunde, veronderstel je) altijd weer naar terugkeert en er telkens zijn visie op moet herzien. De titel is dan weer meerduidig. De variaties van 'Tremor' lopen op van de lastige trilling van een ooglid tot een verwoestende aardbeving. Daartussen zit veel moois. Rimpelingen die het leven tekenen en bepalen. Want doorheen al bovengenoemde thematieken stroomt een fijnzinnige goudader van liefde, vriendschap en dood. Hoe te leven, zowel in deze tijd als in het verleden of de toekomst? Dat voelt voor mij als de kleine essentie en de universele dimensie van deze fascinerende roman die erom smeekt ooit nog eens herlezen te worden.
'Tremor' voelt als een combinatie van de twee bovengenoemde boeken. Veel ingrediënten komen hier opnieuw samen: de hoofdpersoon is een fotograaf, de westerse kunstgeschiedenis duikt geregeld op, het koloniale verleden van Amerika met de uitbuiting van zowel de Afrikaanse als de oorspronkelijke Amerikaanse volkeren vormt een rode draad en Nigeria, met name de hoofdstad Lagos, speelt een prominente rol in enkele hoofdstukken.
Maar er is meer. 'Tremor' is werkelijk een universele en meerstemmige roman. Net zoals Tunde, de fotograaf (die verdacht veel gelijkenissen vertoont met de auteur), zijn camerastatief verplaatst, wordt er vaak en op intrigerende en ingenieuze wijze van (vertel)perspectief gewisseld, wordt er gezocht naar de juiste invalshoek; of beter: naar meerdere standpunten om de wereld beter te leren begrijpen. De meerstemmigheid bereikt zijn expliciete hoogtepunt in het hoofdstuk met Nigeriaanse levenservaringen en/of getuigenissen van mannen en vrouwen uit de meest uiteenlopende sociale klassen.
Verder is er een prachtig hoofdstuk over de hoofdstad Lagos, waar de ik-persoon (Tunde, veronderstel je) altijd weer naar terugkeert en er telkens zijn visie op moet herzien. De titel is dan weer meerduidig. De variaties van 'Tremor' lopen op van de lastige trilling van een ooglid tot een verwoestende aardbeving. Daartussen zit veel moois. Rimpelingen die het leven tekenen en bepalen. Want doorheen al bovengenoemde thematieken stroomt een fijnzinnige goudader van liefde, vriendschap en dood. Hoe te leven, zowel in deze tijd als in het verleden of de toekomst? Dat voelt voor mij als de kleine essentie en de universele dimensie van deze fascinerende roman die erom smeekt ooit nog eens herlezen te worden.
July 1, 2024
A chi ha letto ed apprezzato i libri di Sebald consiglio molto questa opera sospesa tra narrazione, memoir e saggio di questo fotografo e storico dell'arte nigeriano che vive a New York.
Una lieta sorpresa per il classico acquisto basato esclusivamente sulla copertina.
Una lieta sorpresa per il classico acquisto basato esclusivamente sulla copertina.
October 8, 2023
Teju Cole, such a graceful writer. Only one with his skill could relate such incendiary subjects with enough kindness that the outrage stays at bay. Shifting from style to style, from one POV to another yet maintaining contact with his central character, he never loses the interest of the reader or causes impatience.
July 24, 2023
What constitutes a life? That is the question that Teju Cole seems to contemplate in this bumpy novel. I’m not entirely sure we should call it a novel. It seems more like connected vignettes that could make up a short story collection. There is a thin thread of a story, but we are inundated with unnamed and unidentified narrators riffing on life in Nigeria, mainly Lagos. Some of these stories are indeed interesting and reasonably engaging but taken overall don’t lead to a cohesive “novel.” The publisher may be doing Mr. Cole a disservice by billing it as such, and perhaps should come up with a term that is more creative in describing this book. What that term is, I know not. But, maybe the book can be marketed as a unconventional novel-like work with beautiful prose existing within beautiful stories framed by art, music, photography and human relations, much to enjoy for readers who have the taste for the unconventional! Thanks to Random House and NetGalley for an advanced DRC!
December 27, 2023
Set in 2019, protagonist Tunde, originally from Nigeria, is a Harvard professor, photographer, and art expert. It examines the commercialization of art via colonialist exploitation. It felt to me like a collection of essays on such topics as privilege, the legacy of slavery, violence as “entertainment,” and the inevitability of death. It is intentionally fragmented. Parts of it seem nihilistic. There is little in the way of a storyline. It shifts points of view without warning, such as the several “experimental” (for lack of a better term) chapters comprised of voices from contemporary Lagos. It seems to me to be about life and how we, as individuals, try to lead happy lives while living in a violent and disturbing world. I was drawn to the beauty of the writing and appreciated it as a work of social commentary.
June 27, 2023
Engrossing - we follow Tunde, An African man who is a professor of photography on a New England College Campus.. Over the weekend he walks about and we experience life through his eyes. the stories are so interesting, almost like short stories connected. The passive racism he experiences as well as the colonializing of his homeland bring a perspective that many of us can only read about.
A surprising journey of a city through one man that will change your life! #RandomHouse #TejuCole #Tremors
A surprising journey of a city through one man that will change your life! #RandomHouse #TejuCole #Tremors
November 8, 2023
Wow wow wow! My favourite book of my 2023 reading year! A triumph! Literature is so back!!!!!!
November 18, 2023
Teju Cole’s ambitious and mesmerizing novel Tremor assembles a sequence of narratives that interconnect like images in a collage. The novel’s central figure is Tunde, who similar to Cole himself is an American citizen of West African descent and also a Harvard professor with a passion of study for history, literature, music, photography, painting, and cinema.
Tunde’s life revolves around his investment in teaching and researching, traveling and writing. He and his wife Sadako have a loving relationship interspersed with stretches of quiet tension. Over the course of the narratives that Tunde shares about his personal hardships and more insightfully about atrocities throughout history, he undertakes a duty to unveil haunting revelations about human choice and conscience.
Tunde is driven by a sense of responsibility to expose injustices, whether of the past with colonialism, genocide, and enslavement, or of the present with everyday human violence. Throughout the novel, Tunde offers an array of stories from friends, colleagues, students, and individuals on his travels, each struggling to find purpose in this troubled world. The confluence of their voices functions like an orchestra, where the mood of the music can evoke feelings from sadness to bliss, fear to euphoria.
While the novel possesses an admonishing quality, Cole’s overriding aim challenges us to activate our humanity. He drives us towards our core, an inner place of silence where we might clear our minds and open our hearts so that we can then examine who and what we are as individuals and as a collective citizenry. He challenges us to recognize the impact of history and to reassess our views of others, and if necessary to rebuild our conscience. He asks us to honor victims and understand their suffering at the expense of the brutal, merciless forces of hatred and greed.
Regardless of lacking a substantive plot, Tremor presses us to be vigilant in recognizing unresolved historical forces at deviant play in today’s world. Cole also rejects assumptions, especially our tendency to dismiss the past as not roaring at us, nor burdening us. His curiosity leads to sorrowful discoveries, for he wants to investigate the hurt and shame of both the past and the immediate present and use them as motivation for initiating societal change.
Tremor indeed vibrates with chills of discomfort, yet gorgeously written it resounds like a religious text meditating on life’s purpose. It leaves us vulnerable and wracked, trembling with uneasy questions without easy answers. Cole enables us to feel a yearning for life and concern for others, and his oftentimes unsettling narratives implore us to face our complacencies and hopefully engage our conscience to guide us towards more ethical conduct in how we live.
With complexity and clarity, brashness and eloquence, Tremor seeks to enlighten and unnerve us, to compel us to reflect and reconsider, to unlearn and learn again, to dismantle falsehoods, to illuminate truth, to wake us up. In taking on untold stories from history to reveal the sinister workings of inequality and injustice, Cole reminds us of what often remains concealed, hidden like seismic activity originating beneath the Earth’s surface, only noticeable when tremors act up in varying degrees of impact, benign or catastrophic.
Perhaps the best way to praise Tremor is allowing Cole’s words to speak. Towards the novel’s end, Tunde offers these two existential reflections:
He says, “The work I do takes me to places where I am received as a guest of honor, places where I try to think and speak and where I try to avoid speechifying. All of this is true but none of it is where reality is. There is another reality, the personal one. And then there’s the secret one that is as dark as the blood beating in my veins, a cold river flowing undetected far from view, a place of uncertainty and premonition. Something is moving there that does not need me for its movement and that is taking me where I cannot imagine. A darkness to which the eyes can never become adjusted.”
He also says, “We see people who have come through the impossible and have resigned themselves to the necessity of being practical. Survival is living on, living above the wreckage: survivre, supervivencia. You think you know how hard life can get. Then something else happens, something of a kind different to what you ever allowed yourself to expect and you have to revise your whole picture. This doesn’t stop happening, there is no end of surprise. Strangeness arrives again and again, without end. We live on the accumulated ruins of experience.”
Tunde’s life revolves around his investment in teaching and researching, traveling and writing. He and his wife Sadako have a loving relationship interspersed with stretches of quiet tension. Over the course of the narratives that Tunde shares about his personal hardships and more insightfully about atrocities throughout history, he undertakes a duty to unveil haunting revelations about human choice and conscience.
Tunde is driven by a sense of responsibility to expose injustices, whether of the past with colonialism, genocide, and enslavement, or of the present with everyday human violence. Throughout the novel, Tunde offers an array of stories from friends, colleagues, students, and individuals on his travels, each struggling to find purpose in this troubled world. The confluence of their voices functions like an orchestra, where the mood of the music can evoke feelings from sadness to bliss, fear to euphoria.
While the novel possesses an admonishing quality, Cole’s overriding aim challenges us to activate our humanity. He drives us towards our core, an inner place of silence where we might clear our minds and open our hearts so that we can then examine who and what we are as individuals and as a collective citizenry. He challenges us to recognize the impact of history and to reassess our views of others, and if necessary to rebuild our conscience. He asks us to honor victims and understand their suffering at the expense of the brutal, merciless forces of hatred and greed.
Regardless of lacking a substantive plot, Tremor presses us to be vigilant in recognizing unresolved historical forces at deviant play in today’s world. Cole also rejects assumptions, especially our tendency to dismiss the past as not roaring at us, nor burdening us. His curiosity leads to sorrowful discoveries, for he wants to investigate the hurt and shame of both the past and the immediate present and use them as motivation for initiating societal change.
Tremor indeed vibrates with chills of discomfort, yet gorgeously written it resounds like a religious text meditating on life’s purpose. It leaves us vulnerable and wracked, trembling with uneasy questions without easy answers. Cole enables us to feel a yearning for life and concern for others, and his oftentimes unsettling narratives implore us to face our complacencies and hopefully engage our conscience to guide us towards more ethical conduct in how we live.
With complexity and clarity, brashness and eloquence, Tremor seeks to enlighten and unnerve us, to compel us to reflect and reconsider, to unlearn and learn again, to dismantle falsehoods, to illuminate truth, to wake us up. In taking on untold stories from history to reveal the sinister workings of inequality and injustice, Cole reminds us of what often remains concealed, hidden like seismic activity originating beneath the Earth’s surface, only noticeable when tremors act up in varying degrees of impact, benign or catastrophic.
Perhaps the best way to praise Tremor is allowing Cole’s words to speak. Towards the novel’s end, Tunde offers these two existential reflections:
He says, “The work I do takes me to places where I am received as a guest of honor, places where I try to think and speak and where I try to avoid speechifying. All of this is true but none of it is where reality is. There is another reality, the personal one. And then there’s the secret one that is as dark as the blood beating in my veins, a cold river flowing undetected far from view, a place of uncertainty and premonition. Something is moving there that does not need me for its movement and that is taking me where I cannot imagine. A darkness to which the eyes can never become adjusted.”
He also says, “We see people who have come through the impossible and have resigned themselves to the necessity of being practical. Survival is living on, living above the wreckage: survivre, supervivencia. You think you know how hard life can get. Then something else happens, something of a kind different to what you ever allowed yourself to expect and you have to revise your whole picture. This doesn’t stop happening, there is no end of surprise. Strangeness arrives again and again, without end. We live on the accumulated ruins of experience.”
July 14, 2023
If T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" was a novel, it would probably be something similar to Teju Cole's new book, Tremor. The story is framed as a weekend from the perspective of a West African man named Tunde who works as a professor of photography at a New England college, but to fixate on a "premise" at all is to miss out on the journey of reflection this book offers. It's not a straightforward linear narrative, and there's no dialogue. One chapter is an art history lecture that meditates on the violent legacies of white conquest and colonialism behind the valued collections of artifacts found in museums throughout the Western world. Another chapter gives us a sequence of monologues from various unnamed characters describing facets of their lives in Nigeria. But taken all together, a richly complex portrait of a man's life and all its complicated interactions with the world emerges, and it is a breathtaking accomplishment.
It's difficult to articulate what exactly I loved so much about this book, and even more difficult to recommend. So much of what I enjoyed about it feels personal and not easily generalizable, so in that respect, it reminded me of Ali Smith's Companion Piece. It's comprised of what can be described as vignettes or closeups of a moment of time in a single person's mind. A recent read with a similar texture of prose that comes to mind is Han Kang’s Greek Lessons, but whereas I found Greek Lessons to be abstract and insubstantial, I felt very nourished by this book. This is not an easy one to describe, but if you like Virginia Woolf and James Baldwin, you will probably like it. And if not, it’s still absolutely worth reading if you are willing to take a chance on a unique and unconventional story. This is definitely one I plan on adding to my physical collection because I know I'll get more out of it the more I engage with it.
It's difficult to articulate what exactly I loved so much about this book, and even more difficult to recommend. So much of what I enjoyed about it feels personal and not easily generalizable, so in that respect, it reminded me of Ali Smith's Companion Piece. It's comprised of what can be described as vignettes or closeups of a moment of time in a single person's mind. A recent read with a similar texture of prose that comes to mind is Han Kang’s Greek Lessons, but whereas I found Greek Lessons to be abstract and insubstantial, I felt very nourished by this book. This is not an easy one to describe, but if you like Virginia Woolf and James Baldwin, you will probably like it. And if not, it’s still absolutely worth reading if you are willing to take a chance on a unique and unconventional story. This is definitely one I plan on adding to my physical collection because I know I'll get more out of it the more I engage with it.
August 29, 2023
A book that blossoms into black joy. There’s a scene near the end of the book where there is food and people and Solange interludes into Frank Ocean, 𝘊𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘦𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘬𝘺 into 𝘕𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘴. And before this, Gladys Knight. It covers art, history, art history, and the art of storytelling.
In its very lean plot, we have a photography professor who at once feels like he is teaching me something, going off on tangents, until the connecting dots connect to his life, his history from Lagos to Boston. How he got to where he is now, how he has made himself. In all of this, you lose sense of story. It feels like one long lecture on black existence with mentions of art, from 𝘐𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘢𝘳 to Kiarostami. The less you are invested in story, the more you are listening. So here, Cole successfully creates the very act of listening rather than reading. I’m listening to a story, a life.
Cole begs us to listen to life.
And now, I am listening.
I’ve read portions of Teju Cole’s work here and there, and what I find is that it’s hard to penetrate his work, to meet with his characters, because there’s a cold wall that separates us from the characters. Even in first person narration here, there’s a stiffness to Cole’s language that makes it difficult to empathize, but a strong piece of work regardless.
In its very lean plot, we have a photography professor who at once feels like he is teaching me something, going off on tangents, until the connecting dots connect to his life, his history from Lagos to Boston. How he got to where he is now, how he has made himself. In all of this, you lose sense of story. It feels like one long lecture on black existence with mentions of art, from 𝘐𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘢𝘳 to Kiarostami. The less you are invested in story, the more you are listening. So here, Cole successfully creates the very act of listening rather than reading. I’m listening to a story, a life.
Cole begs us to listen to life.
And now, I am listening.
I’ve read portions of Teju Cole’s work here and there, and what I find is that it’s hard to penetrate his work, to meet with his characters, because there’s a cold wall that separates us from the characters. Even in first person narration here, there’s a stiffness to Cole’s language that makes it difficult to empathize, but a strong piece of work regardless.
November 17, 2023
I'm not the right reader for this book, which I appreciated more than enjoyed. It's tone is not pedantic, but still I couldn't help feeling I was listening to a lecture at times. I did like the immersion in Lagosian life, especially section six, where voices from all over Lagos shared their lives, and picked up some great African musicians to add to my music stream. I'm certainly not giving credit to all that is going on in this book - nuanced relationships, philosophies of art, and more - just reflecting my own tastes and biases.
January 8, 2024
This is probably the most relevant and eloquently written novel on the post-colonial world I have read in the last decade and I’m in awe. Teju Cole’s “Tremor” contains macrocosms of human experience - from all-encompassing joy of listening to Malian music (“Another ancestral truth is the way the cells in his body respond when certain music enters him. Everything he would like to say about his experience of the world is encapsulated in certain songs, not popular at the centre where he lives, not known to most of the people around him. When he dies will the person in charge of the arrangements know what music to play?”) to preservation of the memory of racial discrimination and exploitation, from intimacy between two people to the pains of having your agency taken away from you and the dilemmas related to control (“What you want is situations you have chosen for yourself. What looks like control is dangerous and what looks like giving up control can be where you are most powerful.”).
The book resembles a literary, sonic and visual, yet captured with words only, collage. Next to the conventional storyline there are monologues of random ordinary people in Lagos, a lecture on racism and ‘safeguarding’ Benin bronzes and artworks in general, poignant observations on art, politics, history and delicate interpersonal relationships. Vignettes of pulsating life: in Bamako, Lagos, New York, Port-au-Prince, Cambridge (US) and other places. I was swept away with his formidably expressed opinions and linguistic mastery.
What are tremors here? I see them as reverberations of history, of past decisions, whether taken by us or for us, which now shape the world we live. In meandering, elegant prose Cole guides us through the maze of past, present and future and our own mortality - at the individual and the collective level - all at the same time. I couldn’t put this book down and yet it required ample space and time for reflection and feeling. I consider “Tremor” a genuine 21st century masterpiece.
The book resembles a literary, sonic and visual, yet captured with words only, collage. Next to the conventional storyline there are monologues of random ordinary people in Lagos, a lecture on racism and ‘safeguarding’ Benin bronzes and artworks in general, poignant observations on art, politics, history and delicate interpersonal relationships. Vignettes of pulsating life: in Bamako, Lagos, New York, Port-au-Prince, Cambridge (US) and other places. I was swept away with his formidably expressed opinions and linguistic mastery.
What are tremors here? I see them as reverberations of history, of past decisions, whether taken by us or for us, which now shape the world we live. In meandering, elegant prose Cole guides us through the maze of past, present and future and our own mortality - at the individual and the collective level - all at the same time. I couldn’t put this book down and yet it required ample space and time for reflection and feeling. I consider “Tremor” a genuine 21st century masterpiece.
April 3, 2024
‘Wat heeft het eigenlijk te betekenen om van kunst te houden als je niets geeft om de mensen die het gemaakt hebben?’
May 24, 2024
I left my notes in Vancouver.
When I should have been packing i was glued to this book, determined to finish it so i could return it to the library before flying out of Vancouver. There was no way i could leave it unfinished, and when i did get to the end i wanted it to carry on, so compelling is the writing and so urgent the message.
Now i am in Haarlem in the Netherlands with the Camino World Peace Project. If any of my especially delightful GR friends would love to meet up for a drink or a walk, I will be around for 6 months. From here i plan to go to Berlin and then Warsaw. I am open to suggestions.
When I should have been packing i was glued to this book, determined to finish it so i could return it to the library before flying out of Vancouver. There was no way i could leave it unfinished, and when i did get to the end i wanted it to carry on, so compelling is the writing and so urgent the message.
Now i am in Haarlem in the Netherlands with the Camino World Peace Project. If any of my especially delightful GR friends would love to meet up for a drink or a walk, I will be around for 6 months. From here i plan to go to Berlin and then Warsaw. I am open to suggestions.
September 20, 2023
"Tremor" by Teju Cole is beautifully written, but it just wasn't for me. I had a difficult time following the story, if it really can be considered a story at all. The beginning and end followed the same character, Tunde, but the middle and majority of the book jumps from one character's (often unnamed) point of view to another with no indication of the character change. I was very confused until I figured out that this was happening. I would call this book more a loosely connected collection of short stories rather than a novel, except most of the "stories" are so short that they lacked the development to be called a "story" and had no conclusions. They were so loosely connected that most of the time I could find no connection at all, except that they all either occurred in Nigeria or had characters from Nigeria. I had so much trouble following the plot that I'm not really sure if there was a plot.
I think this is one of those books that is meant to be viewed as 'art' and those kinds of books typically aren't for me. I appreciate great writing, but I also need a plot that keeps me engaged. Reading this book was a chore for me and I was glad when the last page was finished. Though literary fiction is my preferred genre, this book was too literary for me to enjoy.
I think this is one of those books that is meant to be viewed as 'art' and those kinds of books typically aren't for me. I appreciate great writing, but I also need a plot that keeps me engaged. Reading this book was a chore for me and I was glad when the last page was finished. Though literary fiction is my preferred genre, this book was too literary for me to enjoy.
December 26, 2023
At the start of this novel, Tunde visits an antiques store in Ogunquit, Maine, with his wife, Sadako, and he comes upon a ci wara, an African antelope headdress with jutting antlers. He asks the owners, two elderly brothers, about it and all they can say is "it's authentic". But, Tunde wonders, what would "authentic" even mean? That it was actually danced in the Bambara agricultural festival? Or simply that it was made by African tribesmen, perhaps just for the tourist trade? Tunde buys the ci wara but he is also troubled by this object—an object that has been made into commercial art, a collector's item, by New England consumers, precisely by extracting it from its cultural and ritual context. And this is the critique that pervades Teju Cole's novel, a meandering meditation on the way in which the art world and the consumption of art divorce artifacts from their histories. When Tunde is invited to give a speech at the Boston MFA, he gives an expansive survey of objects in its collection (Turner's Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, de Bles' Landscape with Burning City, and the Benin plaques)—but his speech does more than just appraise or express appreciation for these works of art; what interests him is the darker histories of how they arrived in Boston. For Tunde, it is the height of Western arrogance that the Benin plaques, which memorialize a gilded vision of West African royalty, are now part of the "Robert Owen Lehman Collection"—the plaques were plundered by British colonizers and then purchased by a wealthy American and it is his name which is attached to them. Whether in an antiques store or in a national museum, Tunde is disturbed by the way in which the acquisition and collection of art, the fetishization of the artifact alone, often elides the painful history and provenance of the object.
As in his earlier works, Teju Cole's novel is a probing analysis of the function and value of art and, especially, of photography. As Tunde thinks to himself, "Every image of a human being proposed a question to the viewer: why am I being shown this?" Sometimes the answer is prosaic: it's a picture of a family member, a friend, an old schoolmate. But it is a question that must be asked of every image—of a portrait in an art installation, of a serial killer's sketch of his own murder victim. It matters, he tells his students, "who made the photograph and what afterlife it has beyond the moment it was made." Australian Aborigines, for example, will not look at the images of the dead. It is taboo. So Tunde argues, the prettiness of a picture is irrelevant; what matters is the cultural community it is embedded in and consumed by. Tunde's mind then turns to the new technology of AI-generated images and he is discomfited by the discovery that all the AI images of faces are white. Even in a fictional world of made-up faces, the default is whiteness. In a way, AI photographs are the antithesis of art—they have no community origin; they are algorithmic hallucinations; they are not an act of representation at all.
Artworks are objects situated in the real world and their value and meaning is derived from their contexts of use and creation. In part, what Teju Cole's novel does is recreate and reimagine the stories, the people, and the histories of objects. One chapter is a series of vignettes about Nigerian citizens and ex-pats. Another, very much inspired by Calvino's Invisible Cities, takes the city of Lagos (but it could almost be any city) and reduces it to pure abstraction, exposing all of its absurd contradictions, its gleaming streets and markets of homemade goods, its day-time luxury and night-time crime, its sex-workers and nurses, a city that is also accurately rendered in its own negative image. There are those who see it as a North-South city and those who see it as an East-West city, and its whole history is defined by these contested cartographies. In different ways, Cole's novel is an attempt to make sense of a city through different modes of storytelling, through different perspectives, or through philosophical abstraction in the style of Calvino.
In 2012, a woman of Asian descent went on tour in a volcanic canyon in Iceland. When the group returned to the bus, she was reported missing. A search was conducted for an entire day, police-bulletins shared a description of her, and additional men were pulled from neighbouring villages to form a larger search operation. As it turned out, however, she hadn't been missing at all. She had simply changed her clothes before getting onto the bus and no one had recognized her. She had even participated in the search herself. But what interests Tunde here is not the bizarre irony of the story; it's the way in which the story was popularized on the internet and global news. The woman had been turned into entertainment and an easy metaphor.
In short, this is a cerebral, Sebald-esque novel. The narrative plot is sparse: its central character experiences a brief moment of marital tension; he buys a ci wara; he meets with the son of his best friend who recently passed away; a colleague undergoes chemotherapy; he gives a house-party and has an episode of vertigo. But in all of this, he reflects on the way in which art and images are enmeshed in places and histories, and he offers a deep critique of the ways in which modern consumers plunder and make culture—whether antiques dealers collecting African art, or students fixating on murder-mystery series, or news agencies picking up zany stories from smaller syndicates. In all these cases, Western viewers reappropriate and decontextualize, removing the artifact from its original context and remaking it into entertainment, an act of debasement.
As in his earlier works, Teju Cole's novel is a probing analysis of the function and value of art and, especially, of photography. As Tunde thinks to himself, "Every image of a human being proposed a question to the viewer: why am I being shown this?" Sometimes the answer is prosaic: it's a picture of a family member, a friend, an old schoolmate. But it is a question that must be asked of every image—of a portrait in an art installation, of a serial killer's sketch of his own murder victim. It matters, he tells his students, "who made the photograph and what afterlife it has beyond the moment it was made." Australian Aborigines, for example, will not look at the images of the dead. It is taboo. So Tunde argues, the prettiness of a picture is irrelevant; what matters is the cultural community it is embedded in and consumed by. Tunde's mind then turns to the new technology of AI-generated images and he is discomfited by the discovery that all the AI images of faces are white. Even in a fictional world of made-up faces, the default is whiteness. In a way, AI photographs are the antithesis of art—they have no community origin; they are algorithmic hallucinations; they are not an act of representation at all.
Artworks are objects situated in the real world and their value and meaning is derived from their contexts of use and creation. In part, what Teju Cole's novel does is recreate and reimagine the stories, the people, and the histories of objects. One chapter is a series of vignettes about Nigerian citizens and ex-pats. Another, very much inspired by Calvino's Invisible Cities, takes the city of Lagos (but it could almost be any city) and reduces it to pure abstraction, exposing all of its absurd contradictions, its gleaming streets and markets of homemade goods, its day-time luxury and night-time crime, its sex-workers and nurses, a city that is also accurately rendered in its own negative image. There are those who see it as a North-South city and those who see it as an East-West city, and its whole history is defined by these contested cartographies. In different ways, Cole's novel is an attempt to make sense of a city through different modes of storytelling, through different perspectives, or through philosophical abstraction in the style of Calvino.
In 2012, a woman of Asian descent went on tour in a volcanic canyon in Iceland. When the group returned to the bus, she was reported missing. A search was conducted for an entire day, police-bulletins shared a description of her, and additional men were pulled from neighbouring villages to form a larger search operation. As it turned out, however, she hadn't been missing at all. She had simply changed her clothes before getting onto the bus and no one had recognized her. She had even participated in the search herself. But what interests Tunde here is not the bizarre irony of the story; it's the way in which the story was popularized on the internet and global news. The woman had been turned into entertainment and an easy metaphor.
In short, this is a cerebral, Sebald-esque novel. The narrative plot is sparse: its central character experiences a brief moment of marital tension; he buys a ci wara; he meets with the son of his best friend who recently passed away; a colleague undergoes chemotherapy; he gives a house-party and has an episode of vertigo. But in all of this, he reflects on the way in which art and images are enmeshed in places and histories, and he offers a deep critique of the ways in which modern consumers plunder and make culture—whether antiques dealers collecting African art, or students fixating on murder-mystery series, or news agencies picking up zany stories from smaller syndicates. In all these cases, Western viewers reappropriate and decontextualize, removing the artifact from its original context and remaking it into entertainment, an act of debasement.
September 4, 2024
I adored the writing and how his book was crafted. It felt like it was taking me all over the place and through multiple different voices and scenarios but it was all so interesting. It had a really interesting blend of non-fiction in how it told real life stories and spoke about fact through the lens of fiction which just make everything a lot more interesting to hear about. I don't know what it was about this novel but it really draws you in and although there isn't really a plot and it jumps about a lot in terms of what it discusses, it always keeps you interested and had a sharp edge to it which never made me feel as though it was getting boring or confusing. Really looking forward to reading more from Cole.
August 7, 2024
***1/2
October 6, 2023
This book purports to be about a life examined. In it a man is reckoning with his life. His job, his culture, his relationship. Though at times the prose is beautifully mesmerising, ultimately this book fell tremendously flat for me. It's incredibly difficult to follow. It moves from story to story, sometimes people to people, thoroughly without clarity. The interludes are often short and it is difficult to imagine what it was supposed to add to the overall story. The plot is virtually no existent. It is not so much a novel as blurbs of stream-of-consciousness ramblings. the whole thing was rather disjointed and I could not for the life of me figure out how one section was supposed to connect to the other thematically. Not at all for me.
October 31, 2023
‘tremor’ is a vital novel about history, art and the meaning of living amongst violence. the writing is eloquent and profound, as we follow the narrator during the beginning and end, and see life through his eyes as well as his thoughts and questions for life. it was beautifully written and it was definitely unlike anything i’ve read this year, but i couldn’t help to be a bit let down by the sudden shift of pov’s halfway through the book, especially since i was invested in tunde’s story. i found it a bit confusing to follow and figure out who was narrating at first. other than that, ‘tremor’ was honestly a refreshing read overall.
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