Tremor
Teju ColeLife 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 & others through the eyes & 1ears 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 & epic; stories of friends, family, & strangers; stories found in books & films. Together these stories make up his days. In aggregate these days comprise a life.
Tremor is a startling work of realism & invention that engages brilliantly with literature, music, race, & history as it examines the passage of time & how we mark it. It is a reckoning with human survival amidst “history’s own brutality, which refuses symmetries & 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 & deeply essential work from a beacon of contemporary literature.