To read Teju Cole is to participate in a wandering of sorts—one that is both meandering and keen. It is to subject oneself to absorption into a stretch of wondering that often outlives the duration it takes to finish a book. Like Cole’s prior fiction, Tremor is a dissident novel that is as Sebaldian (wandering, self-referential) as it is, and if I could be so bold, Colean or “Colesque” (affective narration driven by an unharried social inquiry).
We are introduced to Tunde, a professor who teaches photography at an Ivy League university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as he grapples with a series of questions that plague the navigation of his physical and mental worlds. In the opening passage, we see him trying to photograph a jasmine hedge in a middleclass neighbourhood. He is interrupted by the property owner who tells him, “You can’t do that here. This is private property.”
Tunde is an American in America but also Nigerian, African and Black. Like all of Teju Cole’s protagonists, he is a global citizen with a mind and preoccupation that wander even farther than his globetrotting can take him. We follow him to an antique shop in Maine where he contemplates the history of a 4ft tall ci wara sculpture, which one of the store runners says “might be authentic.” What is the relationship between the object’s extraction from its original West African context and its supposed monetary value? And might Tunde be—now that he’s trying to acquire it—participating in the often-violent history that pervades these extractions?
We witness his relationship with his wife, Sadako, hit a bump. In the entirety of chapter five, he delivers a lecture at the Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig, Germany, about a Turner painting, Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On). In a different passage, a vendor accosts Tunde in front of the Louvre for taking a photo of their items without buying anything, or paying. He visits Mali, and with him, we experience Bamako’s resounding music scene and nightlife. We watch him teach. He discusses history (colonial history to be specific), art, photography, music, books, geopolitics. The list goes on.
Plot is of little use in Tremor. If anything, it is subverted. Time is fragmented and non-linear. The narrative voice changes without notice: from an unknown omniscient narrator recounting to someone occasionally referred to as “you,” to Tunde, to the dozen or so characters who populate the novel’s sixth chapter. Their voices are solemn and fluent in their narration, like an internal monologue, but their accounts reflect an ultimately relatable quiet turmoil that simmers underneath all the chaos of Lagos. Perhaps one of the most succinct passages that capture the crux of the book comes from that chapter:
Imagine yourself out in the city, maybe sitting in traffic and observing everyone around you. What are these people thinking about? This is Lagos so they’re probably thinking about money. That is our common condition. Those who have enough want more, those who don’t have enough need more. But what else? No one knows about anyone else’s inner life. Behind those apparently vacant eyes are problems, plans, and daydreams of all kinds. As for me, on any given day, I’m thinking about music.
Tremor forces you to think about yourself and then about others and what they may be thinking. It makes you think about music—Malian music—presenting you with an opportunity to (re)consider it. It weaves through several perspectives without warning, causing you to feel your way out of it like someone plunged into sudden darkness in a room with distinctly shaped walls. Who is Tunde in this world? Who is his wife Sadako? And who are those tens of characters milling about with barely explained lives? More importantly, how does one go on with life, enjoying as much of it as possible, without ducking the shady tremors of history and the present that intricately contour our daily parleys with the world?
The protagonist, Tunde, is reminiscent of Julius in Open City in the sense that he is curious about the world and wonders about everything. But he appears to be a more grown version of Julius, more aware of his inadequacies and less binary about his judgements. He is old enough to have had a friend whose son is grown up and married. And unlike Julius, Tunde does not run away from conflict (internal or external); he faces it head-on. He deals with his floundering marriage; he confronts his pre-emptive grief when a colleague is diagnosed with cancer. A few times, the similarities seep beyond fiction into one between Cole and Tunde, like the temporary blindness Tunde experienced during his lecture in Germany. Although, the circumstances are different.
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Cole narrates events with a deliberate daintiness that will delight even the most hesitant of readers. His prose is nifty and reflective, resonant with wonder, contemplating every physical, social, and psychological observation with a curious, nomadic and uncertain mind. At its most engaging, Tremor throws questions at the reader; and at its most insightful, it offers what the answers might be, in their stark unsavouriness. The words with which Cole eloquently describes V. S. Naipaul’s novel, A House For Mr. Biswas, in his essay “Housing Mr. Biswas,” are also a befitting description for his own book:
Great in macrocosm, the novel is also flawless in microcosm. It contains many perfect set pieces, strewn like jewels through the book, in which the prose gleams with a kind of secret knowledge. Many are the moments of imaginative sympathy that continue to bloom in the mind long after the page is turned.
Call it a novel if you want. Call it autofiction. Call it a nonfiction novel. Tremor prioritises exploration over genre classification. Do not wander into it in search of a typical story following a typical pattern. Tremor does not promise a destination; it promises a revealing journey. But what it reveals depends on how much the reader is willing to participate in it.♦
Complement this with a review of Teju Cole’s Open City
Carl Terver’s highly-anticipated photobook Glory to the Sky is now available for pre-order. Click image.
SA Sanusi holds a BA in English and Literature from the University of Benin, and an MA in Media and International Development from the University of East Anglia, UK. He is the non-fiction editor at Fortunate Traveller and has been published in The Question Marker, and Native Mag. He writes short stories, poetry, essays, research papers, and policy briefs. He co-edited Government Pikin: An Anthology of NYSC Travels. He lives in Abuja.