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Tremor

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Tremor

A Novel

de Teju Cole

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An “extraordinary, ambitious” (The Times UK) novel that masterfully explores what constitutes a meaningful life in a violent world—from the award-winning author of Open City
New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • “Cole’s mind is so agile that it’s easy to follow him anywhere.”—The New Yorker

WINNER OF THE ANISFIELD-WOLF BOOK AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Vulture, Chicago Public Library, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal
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.

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From the cover The leaves are glossy and dark and From the dying blooms rises a fragrance that might be jasmine. He sets up the tripod and begins to focus the camera. He has pressed the shutter twice when an aggressive voice calls out from the house on the right. This isn’t the first time this kind of thing has happened to him but still he is startled. He takes on a friendly tone and says he is an artist, just photographing a hedge. You can’t do that here, the voice says, this is private property. The muscles of his back are tense. He folds the tripod, stows the camera in its bag, and walks away.

On Monday he goes to the department where packages and other mail await him, among them a white envelope with a quarter-inch-thick black line along its flap. Two or three envelopes of this kind arrive each month, official announcements of the passing of past or current members of the faculty. The envelope is almost square. He sits in his office and opens it. The card inside is also trimmed in black. An emeritus professor of microbiology, not someone he knows, has died. The cards don’t deviate from a formula: the dean expresses regret at the death of the professor in question in antiquated language. A death that “occurred on the sixth instant” is one that happened on the sixth of this month; “the fifteenth ultimo” is the fifteenth of last month. He has begun to collect the cards, thinking of them in their high-toned formality as an echo of the mourning dress worn in previous times, the silks and grenadines of widows’ gowns in the Civil War era, the black veils, black gloves, and black jewelry that let society know a grief was being observed. That symbolic order of colors is gone now, that tracking of heavy, full, or partial mourning in the language of black, gray, purple, lavender.

There are two books on his desk: Calvino’s Invisible Cities and a translation of the Epic of Sundiata. The latter contains versions of the epic by two different djeli, Bamba Suso and Banna Kanute, and he has recently finished reading Bamba Suso’s version. On one of the bookcases is a bottle of dark ink sent to him by Paul Lanier. The ink is made from wild grapes collected around railway tracks in St. Louis and because it is homemade, the color has shifted. In the bottle it still looks deep, close to violet, but brushed on paper it has now taken on a pale color reminiscent of the sea. But “the sea” how? When we say the sea is blue we are thinking of a light or pale blue, a color close to sky blue. The sea is sometimes one of those blues and sometimes a darker version of them but the sea is also often not blue at all: it is sometimes orange, sometimes gray, sometimes purple with the iridescence of Homer’s πορφύρεος, sometimes nothing, transparent, water. At dusk it goes from silvery to pewter. On a moonless night it is black.

He picks up the bottle of ink, an aged lavender, a purple haunted in its lower registers by indigo. The African violet is where the name comes from but he also loves the false web of etymologies the name summons: the tenderness of a viol, the strain of a violin, the hint of violence. Not the violet of medieval bishops and university professors but rather the violet of darkest African skin. Paintings by Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin, Lorna Simpson, but above all Chris Ofili in the lower register of whose Mary Magdalene is a violet so deep it could drown the eyes, in whose Raising of Lazarus there is a violet so base it could raise the dead. The hand-dyed, hand-spun cloth that he took from his grandmother’s wardrobe a few months after her death. Gray for...

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Starred review from August 21, 2023
Critic and novelist Cole (Open City) explores such philosophical questions as, “How is one to live without owning others? Who is this world for?” in his remarkable and experimental latest. It begins like autofiction; a 40-something photographer and Harvard art history professor named Tunde, who is of Nigerian descent, meditates on authenticity and colonialism while shopping for antiques with his wife in Maine, where he buys a ci wara headdress from West Africa for $250, its only difference from those that go for six figures being its lack of “provenance.” Cole then takes a thrilling point-of-view swerve by addressing a mysterious “you” character, an unnamed friend of Tunde’s who died three years earlier. Another turn comes in the form of a lecture Tunde gives at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he poses discomfiting questions about the white art world’s paternalistic attitudes toward African art. Tunde also interrogates his own classism, remembering how as a young man he photographed African street vendors in Paris and incurred their rage, and explores his passion for what Americans call “world music,” including desert blues and Malian pop. Elsewhere, the narrative departs from Tunde and gives voice, successively, to 24 residents of contemporary Lagos, their vignettes depicting a taxi driver’s capricious client, a woman’s legal battle with her sexist siblings over their family estate, and a breathtaking description of a painter making public and ephemeral art on a bridge. Everything hangs together brilliantly, due to Cole’s subtle provocations and his passion for art and music. It’s a splendid feast for the senses.
Atta Otigba and Yetide Badaki give outstanding performances of this imagistic, nonlinear novel. They are grand guides to a world of art, history, and criticism. Badaki has precise diction and a lovely artistic tone with a slight Nigerian lilt. Otigba, also Nigerian, delivers his parts in a powerful and authoritative voice. The narrative switches from one to the other seamlessly. Badaki introduces the protagonist, a photographer and professor of art, who, like the author, teaches at Harvard. The peripatetic novel includes riffs on music and a powerful lecture on J.M.W. Turner's painting SLAVE SHIP. Cole also captures the complexity of love and marriage in this distinctly postmodern work. A.D.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

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de Teju Cole

Teju Cole

Atta Otigba

Yetide Badaki

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de Teju Cole

Teju Cole

Atta Otigba

Yetide Badaki

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