Teju Cole

A powerful, intimate novel that masterfully explores what constitutes a meaningful life in a violent world—from the award-winning author of Open City “A remarkable performance from one of the most brilliant and singular minds at work today.”—Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies 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: 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.

A Novel

Tremor

Marion

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 mystically confers monetary value to the object and the importance of the object is boosted by the story that can be told about its role in the history of modern European art.

EVERY IMAGE OF A human being proposes a question to the viewer: why am I being shown this? Sometimes, perhaps often, the answer arrives so swiftly that the question is not even noticed: this is a family album, this is a selfie taken on

vacation, this is a stock photo for an advertising campaign.

But sometimes the question is proposed and the answer is slow in arriving and into this delayed arrival enter unsettling feelings not dissimilar to those one experiences when the camera lingers a little too long on a character's face in a film.

The observer thinks and is meant to think: why?

The drums of war are beating in a distant place and we begin to think about art and culture, we begin to connect what we enjoy to what is being destroyed or what is at risk of being destroyed. We respond to geopolitics with a kind of automated humanism, with consoling but suspect appeals to "our shared humanity." I remember how my neighbors dragged me out to dine at an Afghan restaurant in October 2001 on the weekend the American invasion began, I remember the uniquely American stupidity of dining out on Afghan food on a night when Afghans were being incinerated by our government.

'The world is tense. On social media are those who cheer for war. Reading these experts and those who only believe themselves to be experts I can see the blitheness of their tone, their detachment from the real consequences of war and the casual cruelty their detachment allows for. When these people declare that the important thing now is war with Iran they say it not at all caring how many people are already suffering in Iran or how many people are likely to suffer in the case of a war. What they seem to care about is not having to change their essential faith in American superiority, a superiority which can only imagine other people as disposable terms in the search for power and wealth. The political solipsism is harder to bear with every passing year. It is even more painful to witness the cruelty to distant others that passes for international politics in this country. What they think of as foreign is not foreign to me. Foreign is my people, every city looks like Lagos to me, any act of violence towards such places is easy to imagine as violence towards people I love. To see devastation visited on some defiant and doomed population out there is to imagine that same devastation on the people I think of as mine.

 When I listen to Coltrane and when I think of listening to him I remember one of the central glimmering facts of his life: that both his grandfathers were preachers in the AME Zion Church. The keening so evident in his playing sounds like an outflow of that heritage received from two black men preaching the Word of God in North Carolina in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Coltrane enfolded into his sheets of sound the eloquence of the AME Zior Church but also the wilder and weirder dissonances of Holi ness practices. His choices are musically driven but in hi spirit is a consistent preference for ecstasy over entertair nent. Every note he plays is air from his body, every song o these albums a transcript of his breath.

Tremor quotes

Join the club