Teju Cole’s Tremors review: The most interesting book I’ve read this year

Teju Cole is an author who loves more than just working in the comfortable publishing genre. He is also an art historian, photographer, curator, occasional photo critic, essayist, and professor of creative writing at Harvard University, who included all of these versions of himself in his new book: tremor.

Cole’s breakthrough Open CityThe book, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award for its debut in 2012, was the freewheeling, stream-of-consciousness of a young Nigerian doctor wandering the streets of post-9/11 Manhattan. Other books followed, including a 2017 book. Blind area, a mix of texts and photographs from 25 countries.

tremorHis Third Novel is another beast. Using the main character, Tunde, with whom Cole shares similarities (both are experts in art history, both grew up in Lagos and now live in America, both are photographers), Cole constructs the story of the last peaceful months before the pandemic. beaten. Unless you look at it with Tunde’s searching eyes, nothing will be peaceful.

A fall weekend antiques tour in Maine with Tunde’s Japanese wife, Sadako, prompts reflections on colonialism after he sees an antelope headdress with a tall pair of horns. chi waraamong a selection of wooden masks and sculptures.

While in an antique store that was once the Wells family homestead, Tunde also sees a note about a “terrible tragedy” in 1703 when “Indians… killed Mrs. Wells and her two children.” Tunde later reflects on how nearly three decades in the United States taught him that a “horrible tragedy” meant that the victims were white.

An undercurrent of violence permeates the book and shakes the very form of the novel, eschewing anything conventional as a plot and presenting eight fragments as chapters. Cole plays with form, switching between third-person narration by Tunde and, incidentally, Sadako, and inserting a polyphonic chapter that jumps back and forth between different Lagos residents.

The effect is stunning and revealing, and in retrospect it seems such an obvious way to revitalize a city that it’s surprising it’s not used more often.

Cole also uses a second personality to convey a sense of mystery by addressing a man who appears to have died three years ago, one of Tunde’s friends. The violence is particularly rampant in the middle chapter, which features Tunde’s lecture using an 1840 painting by J. M. W. Turner. Slave ship and a relief copper alloy panel from Benin (known as “Benin Bronzes”) meant to challenge the word “slave” and what it means to care more about art than the people who created it.

tremor explores questions such as: How can we live moral lives? How should we appreciate the art of others? During a trip to Mali, Tunde wonders, “How can one live without owning others?” For whom was this world created? …. How can one live in a way that does not cannibalize the lives of others, without reducing them to talismans, objects of admiration, mere concepts in the logic of the dominant culture?”

Passages about the effects of real earthquakes, especially in Haiti, metaphorically highlight Cole’s main ideas. Tremor: to shock readers and make them look at everything we see differently.

This brilliant book – not a novel but rather a philosophy – is the most interesting thing I’ve read this year. I would be shocked if anyone had a different opinion.