May 1, 2023

A West African man who teaches photography at a prestigious school in New England, Tunde loves ferreting out stories yet finds everything he encounters rimmed with pain. A simple walk might summon up colonial atrocities or casual racism, and even a happy marriage has its tensions. From the PEN/Hemingway and Windham-Campbell acknowledged Cole, his first novel since 2011's Open City after numerous nonfiction titles. Prepub Alert.

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Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2023
Cole's first novel in 12 years provides a master class in the morality of art as an Ivy League professor revisits his Nigerian homeland and confronts his doubleness. Like his protagonist, Tunde, the novelist is a Harvard professor, raised in Lagos, a photographer and writer and cultural critic with a seemingly omnivorous appetite for artistic expression. (They even share an occasional vision problem in one eye.) But this thematically multilayered novel has much higher ambitions than fictionalized memoir. It's a novel of ideas but also of voices, of different perspectives claiming the first-person narrative I. The precision of detail stresses the importance of seeing, but identity, perspective, and context determine who is seeing what. Tunde experiences push back over what and whom he shoots in his photos. He raises questions in the classroom and public lectures about who determines the value of a work and who profits from it, as he lives within a realm of white privilege that plunders and dehumanizes so much of the globe. "After nearly three decades in the U.S. his sympathies have been tutored in certain directions," Cole writes. "He learned early that a 'terrible tragedy' meant the victims were white." Tensions in Tunde's marriage to a woman of Japanese descent send him to revisit Lagos, which he sees with fresh eyes. Always looming is the possibility in the title, the tremor of an earthquake, another natural disaster, or a medical diagnosis. He lives in a world where everything seemingly solid shifts but where the richness of Coltrane and Calvino, Bergman and Monk not only persists but illuminates. "How great is what surrounds us," he feels, in a shift of perspective, "how insubstantial what preoccupies us." A provocative and profound meditation on art and life in a world of terror.

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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.

Starred review from July 1, 2023

At the heart of Cole's remarkable new novel is Tunde, a Nigerian American man teaching photography at Harvard who reflects deeply on the past brutality of white Westerners, its continuing resonance and enactment, cultural theft and the need for restitution, the artist's responsibility not to objectify, music as his shield in a white-centered world, and the imagery, ritual, and import of death while clarifying throughout the importance of the personal. It's a novel of ideas, then, but whether Tunde is presented in first or third person, lecturing students, conducting a gallery talk about J.M.W. Turner's profoundly unsettling painting Slave Ship, or recalling past passion and the love and complications of his marriage, the protagonist emerges as assuredly "like life"--not merely lifelike, a distinction he makes as a photographer. Meanwhile, several chapters in the middle of the narrative switch from Tunde's personal viewpoint to multiple stories about the residents of Lagos, a city depicted in all its vibrancy and wastage as being like a film shot from a moving car. These stories add color and context to Tunde's perceptions without taking readers far from his intriguing story. VERDICT Unique and important fiction following 2007's Open City and several significant nonfiction volumes; highly recommended.--Barbara Hoffert

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September 1, 2023
Highly lauded writer and photographer Cole returns to fiction after nearly a decade with a novel that reflects the penetrating imagination and lives of characters who are affected by racism, colonialism, and unbearable loss yet are also lifted by love and nourished by art, affirming memories, and the salve of time. The protagonist, Tunde, evokes the power of images and artifacts as antidotes to cultural dissonance. His piercing observations help him and readers frame and interpret a chaotic, scarred world. Originally from West Africa, Tunde teaches photography at a campus in New England. As he considers historical accounts, like that of the Abenaki people, who were "dispersed by colonial settlers," or paintings, such as J. M. W. Turner's Slave Ship, Tunde offers acute perceptions of art, photography, literature, music, and film. Together, his insights form a mournful yet lyrical and beautiful tapestry that guides readers through a deeply authentic worldview. The metaphorical lens encompassing Tunde's experiences expands throughout the novel to include varying voices and viewpoints, including that of his wife, Sadako, who intensify and augment his contemplative disposition and introspective discoveries.

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