It's lovely, but not really a novel - more a compilation of voices forming an interconnected series of vignettes rather than one narrative. A meditation both on black joy and pain. I enjoyed the writing, but overall this book was not really for me.

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 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.

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for the free ARC in exchange for my honest review. All opinions expressed herein are my own.

An excellent, somewhat mercurial novel brimming with compassion and dignity. Tremor follows Tunde, a writer and photographer who teaches at Harvard, and recounts his thoughts and observations across eight sections, mostly about art, music, the violence that underlies so much western art, and racism. (This is about as plotless as a novel can get, something I enjoy.) The most exciting part of the novel is the structural twists and turns it takes—nominally in third person, the novel switches perspectives to that of Tunde’s wife, Sadako, a few times; the first sections of the novel are also haunted by a friend of Tunde’s who recently passed away, referred to sometimes as “you,” as if the text is written as a letter. In the middle, the structure starts to fracture—one of the sections is the content of a talk Tunde gives at a museum as heard by the audience, and a virtuoso polyphonic section that follows that one, one that I don’t want to say too much about because I think it’s an incredible experience. The way subtle connections pile up in the background seems haunted by Sebald and has a bit of the Rachel Cusk of Outline in it, but Tremor is a thoroughly unique novel. One of my favorites this year. I haven’t read Cole before and am very eager to read his other novels.

**Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing for the eARC of this beautiful title**

I thought Tremor was beautifully written and it started out so very strong for me. It took a turn almost immediately and became too "artistic" for my taste. I found the tenses to be confusing from one section to the other as the author tried to break down the fourth wall and have the reader be a part of the story.

I went outside of my comfort zone with this one so I don't want to fault Cole too much. I'm sure for the right audience, this will be a well-loved book. With that being said, it is also described as a novel and it was way too loosely put together for that to be the case. It is definitely more of a collection of short stories.

All that being said, you may be the right audience for this one if you like literary fiction, art, and more subjective writing!

All they know of me is my voice. A Review of Tremor by Teju Cole.
By Jay Innis Murray

Many contemporary critics fail to understand that the term autofiction suggests slipperiness, an estrangement of the I-narrator, who may or may not have the same name as the author, so that the space of the work can become a space of freedom.

– Kate Zambreno

WG Sebald insisted his narrative works were prose rather than novels, a distinction that makes sense except to the marketers of books who have the instincts of taxidermists. I believe in the claim of a space of freedom. The Zambreno quote comes from her book To Write as if Already Dead, published a year after her autofictional Drifts, which has the words a novel on its cover. To Write as if Already Dead is more of a true hybrid than Drifts and covers some of the same subject matter. It combines a compelling novella (its first half) with a thrilling close reading of the life of Hervé Guibert and his book To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. The freedom on display in the form, the connected subject matter and the style made it resonate and succeed for me in ways Drifts did not consistently achieve.

Teju Cole’s new novel Tremor is likewise stirring in its strangeness and wide range. As it explores problems of 21st century storytelling (“How is one to live,” the character Tunde asks, “in a way that does not cannibalize the lives of others, that does not reduce them to mascots, objects of fascination, mere terms in the logic of a dominant culture?”) and offers some solutions to these problems, it also highlights the type of book that can simultaneously compete with straight-up realist novels, history books, essays, podcasts, and social media like tweets and TikTok videos. How much do you trust a fragmentary structure? As Donald Barthelme wrote, fragments are among the only forms I trust.

The book opens in territory familiar to readers of Cole’s previous fiction. Third-person narration introduces a character like Open City’s Julius who is a Nigerian American living in a northeastern US city. Here, the city is Cambridge, MA in greater Boston, the environs of Harvard University. We follow his activities for several pages before we learn his name is Tunde. Like the real-life person Teju Cole, he is a professor and photographer. In the way that Julius has a Sebaldian interest in the history of New York, Tunde looks closely at the colonial history of Massachusetts and the traces of the history of slavery that can be seen around him. An aura of threat hangs over the opening paragraph, and thus over Tunde’s first act in the chronology of the book. He tries to capture a photograph of a hedge he has wanted to photograph for a while.

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.

The narrator does not dwell on the interaction. The story immediately moves on to another episode, but the unease hangs over Tunde for the sections of the book that are set in the United States. There is the threat of aggression and violence everywhere. Past and future violence. Details of Tunde’s personal life are somewhat sparse, but there is a separation, what Tunde calls a “brief separation” with its implication of return and repair, between himself and his wife Sadako. Although marriage and family life are not the focus of the book, they are part of the unsteady ground, contributing to the tremors underfoot.

There are two truly accomplished sections of this book that I wish to highlight. As Teju Cole assembles Tremor from experiences, pieces of scholarship, and meditations on the ethical implications of his role as the assembler, he makes a strong claim in defense of this hybrid poetics. By implication, it approves and defends the freedom of autofiction.

The Lecture

The fifth chapter of Tremor comes in the form of a public talk at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. It occurs a bit over a third of the way into the novel. There is no framing of the text. It opens with: Are we recording now? Yes? OK. Due to the lecture form, this chapter is not given in third-person narration. The speaker uses “I” many times, as you would expect, and, for all I know, this could be the insertion of a real talk in the real museum by the real Teju Cole. It is a tour de force of public education and, I’d add, searching accusation.

The speaker begins his talk with JMW Turner’s painting The Slave Ship, which is on display at the museum. He writes:

Depending on which of the entrances I’m using I either see it in the distance or suddenly to my left and only on seeing it do I remember: this is here. The painting grabs hold of me in an unpleasant way. I’m talking about J. M. W. Turner’s Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On). No encounter with this painting can be pleasant. Its details are terrible and its full title directs our looking, telling us to focus first on the grisly foreground and then on the roiling weather in the background.

The speaker discusses the troubling title of the painting (and the way the word slave itself “strikes the ear like a lash”), the completion by Turner of the painting and his sources for it, Ruskin’s praise for the painting, which contributed to its fame, Turner’s technical limitations, and finally, before changing subjects to another painting, the comparison to a book-length poem called Zong! by Marlene NourbeSe Philip, which is about the same subject, the same slave ship, the legal case around it, the horrendous, dehumanizing legal language, “a story which cannot be told,” which Philip manages to tell. The speaker says:

Philip wails out the lives of the people massacred on the Zong. Like Turner she paints a picture of a creaking ship beset by heaving waves. But out of that ragged material she has made something far more personal and holy. We get a sense of actual persons destroyed. We are spattered by history’s bitter spray. It is not the spectacle of loss that Philip foregrounds but rather the interwoven hurt of these people, not impossible limbs as painted by Turner but possible lives taken from people for whom, in the absence of records, she has conjured credible names: Muru, Kakra, Kolawole, Kibibi, Olabisi, Usi, Kenyatta, Mesi, Nayo, Yooku, Ngena, Wale, Sade, Ade.

The contrast between the ways of making art about the same history returns us to Tunde’s concerns I quoted above. How is one to live in a way that does not cannibalize the lives of others, that does not reduce them to mascots, objects of fascination, mere terms in the logic of a dominant culture? Turner’s painting fails this ethical test, born as it is deep in the logic of the dominant culture of 1840. Philip’s poem does not fail. It is holy.

The Voices from Lagos

The lecture gives an ethical grounding for what will be received as the most important chapter in Tremor. It comes immediately after the lecture. The reader has been primed and should be alert to ask if we witness a trespass in Chapter Six. Do we sense anything like identity theft since what comes are 24 distinct voices, nothing less than a tapestry of social life in present day Lagos? Again there is no framing for these texts. They are short, fragmentary, first-person accounts, as if somebody is changing from station to station on a radio of oral histories. They depart entirely from Tunde’s presence in the third-person storytelling and his or Cole’s voice in the museum lecture.

The experiences written here (and regardless of the arguably ethical superiority of oral history, this is writing) include the experience of waiting in line for water or wasting time in Lagos traffic. Family battles over inheritance. Fraud in the contracting business. The illness and death of a child. Living through an armed home invasion. Women selling cloth (You can’t fool a Nigerian woman when it comes to cloth). The account of a mudslide below the homes of the rich that kills a poor child. Bullying. A man testing out his own coffin. Church music. A painter of murals under bridges. (It doesn’t matter how the image is erased, whether by rain or by human hands, whether by nature or by culture. What matters is that I was there, that I spent those hours, that it was there, that it existed and flourished for however long it did). In a sort of summing up, a woman who works in radio says, The people who call in are not calling to talk to me. What do they really know of me? They are calling to be heard and to hear a sympathetic voice. All they know of me is my voice.

Throughout this long chapter, we get a sense of actual persons, and of social life in a megalopolis. Tremor is an important book. It moves Cole out of the shadow of his predecessor Sebald, and it moves with a freedom of form that will contribute to our future discussions of the successes of autofiction. The novel is nowhere near an exhausted mode.

In contrast to Julius, the medical student and narrator of Teju Cole’s first novel, "Open City," who muses as he wanders through the streets of New York City, Tunde, the man at the center of "Tremor," casts his reflections on a broader canvas. In the opening chapter, Tunde, a lecturer on photography at Harvard, receives a notice about the death of a fellow professor. He ruminates about how frequently he receives such notices. He then describes an antiquing trip in Maine with his wife of fifteen years, Sadako, and ponders whether a sculpture that he fancies was used in a ceremonial dance by natives of Mali or was made for the tourist trade. He considers American’s obsession with captivity narratives whose “main task” was “protecting white women from dark-skinned invaders.” Tunde explains that as many of a third of the hundreds of women who were kidnaped by Native Americans preferred their new lives with their adopted families. He describes his childhood in Lagos where black soot spewed from the roadworks in an area ironically deprived of good roads, filling the air with red dust, and causing the sarcoidosis that killed his father after Tunde had left Nigeria for the United States when he was seventeen.

Tunde’s musings include the Salem witch hunts, bath soap, the serial killer, Samuel Little, the rover, Curiosity, sending pictures back from Mars, and the irate trinket seller he photographed without permission outside the Louvre, causing him the consider: “How is one to live in a way that does not cannibalize the lives of others, does not reduce them to mascots, objects of fascination, mere terms in the logic of a dominant culture?” A lecture that Tunde presents leads him to rethink “the idea that Western understanding surpasses that of the people who made and sacralized these objects, that aesthetic appreciation or critical practice exists only here. It is a plea to take restitution seriously, a plea to reimagine the future of the museum. . . .”

The novel meanders from one seemingly arbitrary event to the next. Midway through the book there is a cacophony of Nigerian voices, including a woman suing her brother to regain her fair share of the value of their father’s property; a single mother whose daughter became ill and died; a sex worker; victims of a brutal home invasion; a man haunted by the humiliation of a childhood nickname; and a woman who hosts a radio show that reveals the “unheard softness in this city.” These characters seem to have no relationship to the protagonist other than to be Nigerian.

Plot is a minor consideration in the stream-of-consciousness meanderings of Tunde’s digressions. If the reader does not engage with Cole’s seemingly aimless narrator, it’s unlikely they will enjoy "Tremors." The reader who wants a carefully constructed plot may find the novel lacking in purpose. But it is Tunde’s examination of his own thoughts and feelings that animates "Tremor" and that makes it a vivid story about a man in constant negotiation with America and its mythologizing impulse.

Thank you Random House and Net Galley for providing me with an advance copy of this intimate novel from an author who has been honored with the PEN/Hemingway Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship among other accolades.

I wanted to like this novel more than I did. It's well written, compelling in parts, but it also panders. The protagonist worries about being arrogant, and there are parts of this book that seem arrogant, proud of themselves. Many of the political ruminations won't hold. The audience question about art and how and whether we should preserve it provide examples, but so do the numerous passages about white people and white dominance and white obliviousness, etc. The book has an axe to grind without wanting to have an axe to grind. Surely, there's a way to deal with the narrator's own youthful devaluation of his heritage and country without harping on whites half the book. Surely, there's a way to celebrate cultures outside of and beyond the West without harping on whites half the book. The book seems to want to celebrate its own fine feeling and because of that it comes off as pretentious and navel-gazing despite its ambition to take on big questions. I wanted more from Cole, but this book is written with a Cambridge audience in mind, and it's already poised for its expected round of applause.

3.5

Teju Cole, such a graceful writer. Only one with his skill could relate such incendiary subjects with enough kindness that the outrage stays at bay. Shifting from style to style, from one POV to another yet maintaining contact with his central character, he never loses the interest of the reader or causes impatience.

I'll be the odd one out and admit I DNF this because it...didn't. There's no real plot there's a lot of stream of consciousness, and it's just so angry. I appreciate that this will no doubt speak to many who will appreciate the language and the philosophical discussions, but it wasn't for me,. Thanks to netgalley for the ARC. For Cole's fans and those who enjoy literary fiction,

be on the lookout for this one coming October 17th! thank you @netgalley and @randomhouse for the advanced copy 🔥

“life is not only more terrible than we know it is more terrible than we can know. if we were aware of the full extent of shipwrecks on the sea floor we would never set out in our boats.”

i don’t even know how to put into words my experience with this novel 🤯 it’s brilliant and moving and strange and beautiful. i didn’t know what was going on half the time but that didn’t really take away from the reading of this novel because it is more of a felt experience than it is anything else

This book purports to be about a life examined. In it a man is reckoning with his life. His job, his culture, his relationship. Though at times the prose is beautifully mesmerising, ultimately this book fell tremendously flat for me. It's incredibly difficult to follow. It moves from story to story, sometimes people to people, thoroughly without clarity. The interludes are often short and it is difficult to imagine what it was supposed to add to the overall story. The plot is virtually no existent. It is not so much a novel as blurbs of stream-of-consciousness ramblings. the whole thing was rather disjointed and I could not for the life of me figure out how one section was supposed to connect to the other thematically. Not at all for me.

The writing was great, it was intriguing being inside the protagonist's head. The ending was a bit hard to follow though.

This is be on my 2023 favorite books list! I loved the way this book flowed.. It enjoyed this book so much!

I had a tough time with "Tremor" by Teju Cole. Perhaps my white fragility interfered with my appreciation for the continuous stream of hostility toward westerners, the United States, and white people, even though in many instances (maybe most) the criticisms are relevant and sadly earned. There is little subtlety in this book, one that is over-the-top filled with art, music, and culture and lots of deep explanations of all of those. The human travesties and horrors are juxtaposed with the beauty of a painting, or the importance of a pottery style, or the enchantment of a piece of music. The impact of those comparisons, for me, is the most important part of the book but it often gets buried by the vocabulary. "Tremor" also jumps around between major characters, with only some blank space to separated them rather than chapters. I found it hard to figure out, for a short while, whose voice I was 'hearing' every time someone new enters to tell his or her story. I think I will have to read something else by Teju Cole in order to figure out if the problem, for me, lies within this book or Cole's style. The white fragility is totally my problem and one I'll have to work on. (Update: I am currently reading "Known and Strange Things" and finding it enjoyable and thought provoking.)

this was so thoughtful and internal. i love the pleasant surprise of spending a couple of hundred pages inside the head of a protagonist i find clever and interesting. there is almost nothing i enjoy more than reading fictional thoughts and pausing occasionally to google the art that passes through them

this does a weird thing with perspective, spends time switching POVs without warning or explanation for a couple paragraphs at a time, that i could have done without. but otherwise i found this lovely!

"Tremor" by Teju Cole is beautifully written, but it just wasn't for me. I had a difficult time following the story, if it really can be considered a story at all. The beginning and end followed the same character, Tunde, but the middle and majority of the book jumps from one character's (often unnamed) point of view to another with no indication of the character change. I was very confused until I figured out that this was happening. I would call this book more a loosely connected collection of short stories rather than a novel, except most of the "stories" are so short that they lacked the development to be called a "story" and had no conclusions. They were so loosely connected that most of the time I could find no connection at all, except that they all either occurred in Nigeria or had characters from Nigeria. I had so much trouble following the plot that I'm not really sure if there was a plot.

I think this is one of those books that is meant to be viewed as 'art' and those kinds of books typically aren't for me. I appreciate great writing, but I also need a plot that keeps me engaged. Reading this book was a chore for me and I was glad when the last page was finished. Though literary fiction is my preferred genre, this book was too literary for me to enjoy.

DNF at 25%. I was attracted to the academia piece of this, but this is not what I thought it was going to be. I was hoping for something more like Zadie Smith’s On Beauty.

This is about an art history professor and his partner. There’s lots of reflection on their lives, their histories. There are also reflections on race and micro aggressions.

I couldn’t tell you what the first quarter of this was about - very meandering and mundane. There were some moments I thought were excellent, like the thoughts around Little, the serial killer. But I prefer much more focus in my books, and I *always* have a hard time with realism of the slice of life variety.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

This novel is a hard one to pin down. The writing here has moments of poetry. But the plot, inasmuch as there is one, doesn’t seem to be able to hold this together as a novel. However, this is not a collection of short stories, either. A challenging read.

I loved "Open City" and was excited about a new Teju Cole book, but this left me a little cold. The writing itself is incredible; Cole is a masterful wordsmith and the chapters glide along. But at the end, it was confusing -- narrators kept shifting and the book bounced around without any clear sense of why it was occurring. If it had been marketed as a short story collection it would have made more sense, but this book just seemed to drift a bit.

I didn't care for this novel in the slightest. It was boring and not well written. The plot is pretty much nonexistent and pointless. The only positive is the cover art.

A book that blossoms into black joy. There’s a scene near the end of the book where there is food and people and Solange interludes into Frank Ocean, 𝘊𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘦𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘬𝘺 into 𝘕𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘴. And before this, Gladys Knight. It covers art, history, art history, and the art of storytelling.

In its very lean plot, we have a photography professor who at once feels like he is teaching me something, going off on tangents, until the connecting dots connect to his life, his history from Lagos to Boston. How he got to where he is now, how he has made himself. In all of this, you lose sense of story. It feels like one long lecture on black existence with mentions of art, from 𝘐𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘢𝘳 to Kiarostami. The less you are invested in story, the more you are listening. So here, Cole successfully creates the very act of listening rather than reading. I’m listening to a story, a life.

Cole begs us to listen to life.

And now, I am listening.

I’ve read portions of Teju Cole’s work here and there, and what I find is that it’s hard to penetrate his work, to meet with his characters, because there’s a cold wall that separates us from the characters. Even in first person narration here, there’s a stiffness to Cole’s language that makes it difficult to empathize, but a strong piece of work regardless.