A masterful novel by one of America’s finest writers
In February 2014, Teju Cole tweeted: “Please, ‘writer’ is so offensive. I’m a text worker.” By this point, the Nigerian-American was proving a cultural phenomenon, with a string of publications and accolades including two novels (Every Day is for the Thief and Open City) and a wide-ranging portfolio of searing work on everything from death and Caravaggio to Instagram and the “White Saviour Industrial Complex”. He was also about to become The New York Times Magazine’s photo critic, a position he would hold from 2015 to 2019 before moving onto Harvard University as a professor of creative writing.
Just under a decade later, and in the context of his new novel, Tremor, we might ask Cole: what does it mean to “work” a text, as opposed to “write” one? Is it a question of imagination or of philosophy? Do we create worlds, or do we only collaborate with the same world and its various retellings? To paraphrase Audre Lorde, perhaps there are no new texts and no new worlds – just new ways of making them “felt”.
To read Tremor is to engage with these questions, and be greeted by a swathe of astonishing images, formal ingenuity and raw, metamorphic emotion. Across eight parts, we follow Tunde, a man whose biography resembles Cole’s. We trace his movements over the course of a year: to his professorial office at an (unnamed) Boston university; to Maine for antique shopping with his wife of 15 years, Sadako; to Lagos for a photography biennial; to the atria of Harvard Art Museums; and to his home on Ellis Street.
The plot is light-touch, but intentionally and successfully so. As readers, we focus less on linearity – on a series of events linked to a single protagonist – and instead move freely through time and space, floating between USA and Nigeria, between first-, third- and second-person voices, between memories and shared biographies.
In the backs of taxis, seminar rooms and jazz clubs, atop roof terraces or amid clouds on cross-continental flights, Tunde’s discerning eye has us gazing at stars, at images, at people. As readers, and voyeurs, we are invited to contemplate the weight, and responsibility, of looking (“everywhere in contemporary photography is the same old vampirism but now it is smart enough to come with good wall text”). We must consider the colonisation of bodies, languages and landscapes (“how is one to live without owning others? Who is this world for?”). And we explore the dangerous, liminal space between subjectivity and objectivity (“portraits are high risk and require familiarity, vulnerability, and strangeness. I have also developed an aversion to the theft of anyone’s face”).
Yet Tremor is not, as the previous paragraphs might suggest, unstructured. Throughout, violence is an anchor, maybe even the real protagonist. It has been a common theme across Cole’s oeuvre: his final column at The New York Times was titled “When the Camera Was a Weapon of Imperialism. (And When It Still Is.)” Here, it returns again and again, as murder, as infidelity, as an earthquake, as an illness. Sometimes it’s quiet, like the colon cancer growing in Tunde’s colleague, the astronomer, Emily. Sometimes it’s loud, as in the title of JMW Turner’s 1840 painting Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On). In a lecture delivered by Tunde, “the word ‘slave’… still strikes the ear like a lash. There are those who enslave others and there are those who are enslaved by others. But there’s no one whose essence or true description is ‘slave.’”
To return to Lorde, the stories we’re told in Tremor aren’t new. Pain might metamorphose and manifest in different ways, and in different guises, but it is often fuelled by the same fears, the same prejudices, and the same horrific desires. But Cole is not just offering us a novel about art, migration, or marginalisation, rather a new politics of seeing, reading and thinking: of interpreting our time on Earth while our notions of empathy are expanded or torn apart completely. As Tunde notes, towards the novel’s close, “life is not only more terrible than we know, it is more terrible than we can know.” It’s clear that if anyone knows how to work a text, it’s Teju Cole.
Tremor is published by Faber at ￡18.99. To order your copy, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books