In the autumn of 2020, while stargazing on his balcony in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Teju Cole was inspired to start taking photos of his kitchen counter. He decided that the daily migrations of his pots, pans, spoons, and graters paralleled the revolutions of celestial bodies, and began to track them in a “counter history.” A year later, he published the results as “Golden Apple of the Sun” (2021), a book-length photo essay that magnifies his solitary domestic experiment until it seems to encompass the world. Cole writes about the hunger he suffered as a boarding-school student in Nigeria, Dutch Golden Age still-lifes, slavery and the sugary recipes in an eighteenth-century cookbook, and why “the later a photograph is in a given sequence, the heavier it is.” Somehow, from this kitchen sink of memoir, art history, and observant boredom emerges a spectral portrait of the pandemic’s collective solitude, “this year of feeling buried in the dark earth like bulbs.”
Cole’s work makes an art—and a necessary virtue—of close looking. Across his fiction, photography, and criticism, he combines forensic rigor with a flâneur’s faith in style and sensibility, aligning aestheticism and ethical vigilance. “Open City” (2011), his début novel, won acclaim for its portrayal of post-9/11 New York, whose buried histories of violence and displacement resurface in the course of a medical student’s wanderings. In Cole’s essays, tranquil Vermeers reveal traces of empire—silver from the hellish mines of Bolivia, pearls from Dutch-ruled Ceylon—and stormy Caravaggios prefigure the precarious journeys of twenty-first-century migrants. “Looking at paintings this way doesn’t spoil them,” Cole insists. “On the contrary, it opens them up, and what used to be mere surface becomes a portal.”
His great theme is the limits of vision, and the way that these limits, when imaginatively confronted, can serve as the basis for a kind of second sight. “Among the human rights is the right to remain obscure, unseen, and dark,” he writes in “Black Paper” (2021), a recent essay collection, which investigates subjects such as colonialism’s weaponization of the camera and the depiction of nuclear disaster. In his own pictures, people seldom appear directly, but their presence is everywhere implied. “Blind Spot” (2017), an experimental photo book chronicling his travels, gathers images of hotel rooms, border fences, ships, and cemeteries into an ethereal atlas. Cole shuttles between sinister systems—forced migration, the arms trade—and chance moments when beauty, briefly, slips from the shadows. “Darkness is not empty,” he writes. “It is information at rest.”
“Tremor” (Random House), Cole’s first novel in twelve years, also wrestles with what falls beyond the frame—and it begins, aptly enough, with a photograph deferred. Tunde, a Nigerian artist who teaches at Harvard, is out walking in Cambridge when he decides to set up his tripod in front of a blossoming honeysuckle hedge. The first sentence finds him in mid-rapture: “The leaves are glossy and dark and from the dying blooms rises a fragrance that might be jasmine.” But the spell is broken by an aggressive voice warning him away from the property. It could be racism, or at least the fortress mentality of American homeowners. Whatever the reason, Tunde packs up his tripod, and, with it, any expectation of innocent reverie. What follows, instead, is an elegant and unsettling prose still-life, which reflects on art’s relationship to theft and violence, to privacy and togetherness, and to the way we mark time.
The novel spans the autumn just before the pandemic. Tunde, internationally recognized for his “portraits of unpeopled scenarios”—which, like Cole’s, are “suggestive of human presence, charged with human absence”—is selecting photographs for a new exhibition. We follow him to Bamako, for the photography biennial, and to Lagos, his home town, but mostly remain in Cambridge, where he teaches a weekly seminar and enjoys a cozy domestic life. Tunde is married to a woman named Sadako, a Massachusetts native who works in pharmaceuticals. Childless, they spend their free time buying antiques and cooking for their circle of noteworthy friends, which includes an astronomer, a scholar working to revive spoken Wampanoag, and a Pulitzer finalist. Even their toiletries are pedigreed: Tunde bathes with natural black soap made by an artist for Documenta 14, and its swirling suds elicit visions of nebulae, along with the “paradoxical thought of a blackness that wicks filth away.”
Amid this tranquillity, inner troubles reverberate. Sadako abruptly leaves home to stay with her sister. Tunde grieves a dead confidant, who is hauntingly addressed as “you.” Older agitations loom at a distance: the dissolution of a gay relationship in Tunde’s twenties, his precipitous departure from Lagos at seventeen. Cole, who grew up there, left at the same age; he also lends Tunde his celebrity, his intellectual interests, his ophthalmological problems—papillophlebitis, which causes temporary episodes of blindness—and his university post. (Cole teaches creative writing at Harvard.) If “Open City” was a bellwether of the last decade’s autofictional turn, “Tremor” occasionally sounds like a defense of the now-beleaguered genre. “Firsthand experience is what matters,” Cole writes. “It is by being grounded in what we know and what we have experienced that we can move out into greater complexities.”
At least half of the novel, which hews rather closely to its protagonist’s consciousness, consists of ideas about how to live, listen, think, and see well. Tunde never crosses Harvard Yard without remembering those enslaved by the university. His marital problems—“complacency,” “fear of abandonment”—are unpacked in cruelty-free sessions of couples counselling. So keen is his conscience that even the sight of preschoolers led via a walking rope reminds him of “prisoners being transferred . . . a forced march to the unending tune of ‘The Wheels on the Bus.’ ” It’s tempting to characterize the novel as what the critic Becca Rothfeld calls “sanctimony literature,” a mode of fiction designed to showcase the author’s ethical awareness. But there’s more going on than virtue signalling. Tunde’s worries over various moral problems—art restitution, the portrayal of the dead, artificial intelligence—converge on a dilemma that bedevils both him and his creator: Is there a way to represent the world and not “cannibalize the lives of others”?
“Tremor” begins to read like a renunciation of the soul-stealing that’s latent in fiction and photography. “I fear the demands that portraits of people make,” Tunde confesses. “For portraiture not to be a theft I would have to be even more patient and intent than I am now.” Yet the novel’s subtle shifts in perspective—including a section that leaves Tunde behind for the streets of Lagos—also strive to reconcile this humility with the world beyond the “I.” Cole hints at his ambition through his protagonist’s reverence for the Micronesian navigator Pius Mau Piailug, who crossed from Hawaii to Tahiti without maps or instruments, in 1976:
Cole moved into fiction “sideways” from art history. He was studying early Netherlandish painting in a doctoral program at Columbia when he began his first book—almost by accident, during a trip to Lagos in 2005. Cole hadn’t been in the Nigerian metropolis since he left to study in the United States, in 1992. He was so struck by the city’s deeply familiar but swiftly changing face that he wrote daily vignettes about it for the next month, adopting the persona of a young man who, like him, had returned to Nigeria after years in America. Cole paired each installment with a photograph online, where the series attracted enough interest that a newly founded Nigerian publisher, Cassava Republic, persuaded him to publish it as a novella, “Every Day Is for the Thief.” Cole’s narrator wanders through the streets of a city as varied and surprising as a Bruegel tableau. Corruption is everywhere, from the national museum, where derelict exhibits airbrush the legacies of dictators, to lawless markets where crowds film the lynching of suspected thieves. (Cole has described the novella as “a guidebook in the negative.”) But it isn’t crime that draws the young man’s attention. He seeks out the city’s deeper rhythms on side streets and in the faces of strangers, caught between the aspiration to exploit its “wealth of stories” in writing and a discretion that restrains him. “I want to take the little camera out of my pocket and capture the scene,” he muses while watching coffin-makers at work on a quiet lane. “But I am afraid. Afraid that the carpenters, rapt in their meditative task, will look up at me; afraid that I will bind to film what is intended only for the memory.”
Most readers came to know Cole from “Open City” (2011), which turned his talent for psychoanalyzing cities on a wounded Manhattan. Julius, its cultured and evasive Nigerian narrator, takes refuge from stressful shifts as a fellow in psychiatry at New York-Presbyterian Hospital by wandering the streets. His mind is as restlessly crowded as his personal life is desolate; estranged from his mother, and recently separated from a girlfriend, he fills his free time with books, classical music, and people-watching. The city that emerges from his perambulations is haunted by its previous incarnations: a Levantine neighborhood bulldozed to make way for the World Trade Center, a Haitian shoeshine man who speaks like a refugee from nineteenth-century wars. “What Lenape paths lay buried beneath the rubble?” Julius wonders. “The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten. . . . Generations rushed through the eye of the needle, and I, one of the still legible crowd, entered the subway.”
With its cool voice, slashing erudition, and existentially vexed outlook, “Open City” quickly entered the contemporary canon of New York novels. Critics favorably compared Julius, Cole’s Afropolitan Gen X Hamlet, to the narrators of W. G. Sebald, and identified his opacity as a rejection of the self-revelation expected from immigrant narratives. More controversial was the novel’s twist ending, which dramatically undermined the idea that imaginative sympathy is any proof of integrity. Julius is revealed to have likely raped a girl in his youth; his lingering over violent neighborhood histories and Mahler’s late style is suddenly recast as an evasion of his submerged conscience. The novel’s title, too, has a shadow side, alluding to the wartime strategy of giving enemy troops free access to a city in exchange for a promise to leave it intact. The flâneur, coolly assessing a world that doesn’t look back, might be the occupier’s twin.
“Tremor” is even more haunted by the idea that the artist’s work is a kind of trespass. Tunde recalls the fury of a vender in Paris whose merchandise he photographed without offering compensation. A Maine shopkeeper sells him a possibly “authentic” Malian ci wara figure—not made for the tourist trade, in other words—and he wonders why Western collectors of African art prefer “alienated” works, “so that only what has been extracted from its context becomes real.” Later, at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, he delivers a stirring chapter-length lecture on plundered art—an homage to J. M. Coetzee’s “Elizabeth Costello”—which decries the hypocrisy of institutions that for too long have “loved other people’s objects with a death grip.” At home, he watches interviews with Samuel Little, a prolific strangler who sketched his victims “with an unnerving softness.” Those drawings become the first item in a triptych about the perversions of portraiture, joined by forensic photos of unidentified corpses and A.I.-generated images of unreal individuals: “the remembered dead, the remembered undead, the imaginary never-liveds.”
We begin to understand why there aren’t people in Tunde’s pictures, or fully realized characters in “Tremor” besides him. Yet his wariness about representation is countered by an equally strong desire for connection—a yearning, in his words, “to be integral and to be peopled in balance.” Tunde broods over his distance from Sadako, the inexorably fading memory of his late friend, and the “paradoxical” emptiness of his forthcoming exhibition on urban life. Are there only two paths for photography—vampirism and solipsism? Or can Tunde find a way to make the lives of others manifest in his portraits of “planks, tires, culverts, basins, stones, ships, plants”? In the studio, he struggles to create a sequence of images greater than the sum of its parts. “The slowness of the accretion itself guarantees nothing,” he reflects. “Most of these photographs will fail.”
His gambit is also Cole’s. “Tremor” is a work of autofiction with the ambition of a systems novel, aspiring to illustrate the world’s interconnectedness without recourse to the fictional conventions of plot and psychological portraiture. Instead, it moves like an essay, interweaving slices of life with musings on Malian guitar virtuosos, astronomical phenomena, films by Ingmar Bergman and Abbas Kiarostami. Cole’s mind is so agile that it’s easy to follow him anywhere. But—as with Olga Tokarczuk’s “Flights” or László Kraznahorkai’s “Seiobo There Below”—there is a method to the meandering. Cole uses the resonance between fragments to imply a dimly apprehended totality, like a seismologist integrating measurements from different sites to map an earthquake.
“Tremor” returns again and again to motifs of doubling and coincidence—duets, twins, binary stars. A flute-playing soldier from a Bruegel painting reappears in a contemporaneous Benin plaque: “In such mysterious ways do synchronicities occur across vast distances,” Tunde observes, “as though one person’s two hands were simultaneously drawing two images from a single model.” Cole suggests that being sensitive to such invisible intimacies is a form of solidarity that doesn’t require interpersonal connection. In “Golden Apple of the Sun,” he quotes the poet and cultural theorist Édouard Glissant, who believed that respect for opacity was the foundation of ethics: “Although you are alone in this suffering you share in the unknown with those you have yet to know.”
The climax of “Tremor” arrives following a moment when Tunde briefly loses sight in one eye during his museum lecture. Soon after, in lieu of an account of his trip to Lagos, Cole presents twenty-four vignettes of life in the city, one for each hour in the day. The ex-principal of a private school recounts outwitting a troublesome parent—her state’s martinet governor, Brigadier (Hitler) Okon. A wealthy man lies in a casket during an annual party to rehearse his own funeral; someone else tells of the exhumation of a long-dead relative for the construction of a new road. “I’m not a doctor or therapist or priest, but I think people are consoled by the mere fact of being able to call a stranger in the night,” a radio host who lets listeners vent on the air reflects. “My show is a space for softness in a city that doesn’t have too much of it.”
Here are the missing crowds of Tunde’s “depopulated” photographs; a book about one solitude opens to encompass many. In a parallel section, which pays homage to the allegorical style of Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities,” Cole describes “a city of doubles, a pluripotential city of echoing selves and settings,” whose choreography “would be amazing could it be seen in a single encompassing moment.” His evocation of Lagos is all the more powerful for arriving as an interruption of Tunde’s narrative—which resumes in the first person, as if the cascade of anonymous voices had restored his own. “Epiphany,” Cole said in a lecture on the dense city writing of Joyce, Woolf, Pamuk, and others, is “not only revelation or insight, it is also the reassembly of the self through the senses.”
Fiction takes the transparency of other minds so much for granted that it can obscure the rarity of true communion—which doesn’t always require explanation, or even the exchange of words. “Tremor,” with its vision of separateness and synchronicity, is obliquely about the pandemic, much in the way that “Open City” revolved around 9/11. In January, 2020, Tunde and Sadako throw a dinner party that reads like a still-life—a tableau of abundance shadowed by the losses to come. “The pleasure of having the house full of people is exceeded perhaps only by the pleasure of seeing the last few leave,” Tunde muses. It’s once they’re gone that he remembers to return to the hedge, where—in the frost and the silence, no blossoms to be seen—he takes a photograph that is now much heavier than the one we imagined before. ♦