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 ... 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 ... 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 ... 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.
As a form for capturing the meaning and matter of our lives, novels still feel wholly up to the task. And anyone who doubts how effectively this elderly literary genre might survive and evolve to reflect an impossibly complicated world would do well to read Teju Cole’s involute new book, Tremor ... t does not disappoint. Cole continues to demonstrate just how elastic a novel can be and how trenchant he is. His book crosses national boundaries just as confidently as it crosses literary ones. The eclectic structure may be challenging, but, given the continuity of Cole’s vision, it’s never baffling ... Has little traditional plot but never lacks for interest or incident ... To read some of these chapters is to see the essay form in its most elegiac, elastic and epiphanic mode.
Cole has taken the nonfiction forms he steeped himself in to create a new authorial presence—one who mixes and is mixed up by autofiction, postcolonial rumination, and political discourse ... Cole’s trademark meditative, descriptive ramblings remain ... The novelistic strength of Tremor lies more in rhetoric like this than its drama ... Cole has taken the tragedy of a transcontinental survivalist to spin a narrative that transcends the conventional perimeters of a novel.
The most sundry and vagrant of Cole’s works to date, with abrupt changes in form, perspective and theme. At times it feels familiar ... This feature of his work is a lure, a formal and ethical trap for the reader who is at first seduced by Cole’s mastery of anecdote before being immersed in rich, sometimes discomfiting ideas ... Also a collection of consolations. Cole the photographer and Cole the essayist are ever-present, casting an eye on evanescent drawings a Lagos artist makes under a bridge, or trying to net in words the nighttime flights of jazz, flamenco and high life. Behind it all is a suspicion that writerly attention to such textures and transports is itself a form of partial sightlessness — but it might also be the best preparation for facing down the worst the light reveals.
What is Cole trying to tell us? At first, it’s hard to say. One possible response is that this novel is simply a catalog of Tunde’s, which is to say Cole’s, obsessions ... Another theme emerges: the joys and challenges of forming a partnership with someone else ... Even as Tunde recognizes the need for narratives—especially in the face of mortality—Cole continually resists them. Tunde might desire a story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end, but Cole is far more interested in constructing a novel that rejects such structures. Just when a story in Tremor seems to be picking up steam, Cole diverts our attention elsewhere ... This is an alluring novel, almost hypnotic in its unstable relationship to narrative.
Cole’s essays and novels are squatters. They quickly, quietly stake a claim to the corners of my mind without my noticing ... The plot in Tremor, such as it exists, is beside the point. The overarching drama is a simple one: for some unnamed reason, Tunde and his wife, Sadako, take a short break from each other and try to come back together ... Friction is one means of redistributing a charge, and if something catches in Tremor it is Tunde’s strange lack of it. His curiosity often leads him somewhere a touch too clean.
Both lifelike and speckled with intimate details; the chapters are all treatises in learning to see and think ... The deliberate absence of narrative impetus becomes oppressive before long ... Even in the midst of unprecedented grief, you occasionally crave light entertainment. There are days when you’d prefer to be just distracted enough to pass the time.
Interior ... It does more telling than showing ... Asks us to remember that context matters. Cole’s images of the people of Lagos reflect stories that are both small and large. In looking at them, the viewer must consider what is in and outside the frame.
It is no insult to say that Tremor is not a novel in the way you expect a novel to behave; there is no plot to speak of and little narrative tension of the traditional kind ... he quality of the author’s prose is itself central to his project, which is to peacefully voice many unpeaceful truths within a single space ... The luscious calm of Cole’s prose echoes the creamy vortices of Delacroix, both of which arrest the brutality of history long enough for us to see that the nameless dead did indeed live.
...this is a far weaker book than Open City, trading the dark complexities of character for po-faced lectures and moral self-regard. The problem is not the craft, even if Tremor is not the flawlessly cut jewel that is Open City. It is, I think, a problem of politics. The central emotion of the earlier book is ambivalence...Cole is no longer interested in ambivalence. Tremor is one of the most politically unobjectionable books I’ve ever read: It is hard to disagree with anything Tunde thinks and feels, making him a perfect representative of a different era, one in which the cosmopolitan ethos of haughty independence has come under suspicion and the claims of group identity have never been stronger. Whether such a figure makes for good reading is another matter ... While I don’t doubt the veracity of this depiction of contemporary Black life, it has specific consequences for the kind of plotless book Cole favors. All those freewheeling associations now circle the same drain to deadening effect. There is, too, an uncharacteristic obviousness to each discovery Tunde makes about 'the obliterative arrogance of Western culture.' The arcane forays of Open City came as revelations, opening the reader up to both the wonder and the brutality of the world. Tremor feels closed off in comparison, laboring across ground that has been trod by so many fellow travelers.
Repetition of ...sorts of sentiments comes to feel performative, even solipsistic, and Cole gives no hint that such solipsism is knowingly drawn. He is not the kind of writer to make jokes at his characters’ expense, to give even a hint of satire, though it would come as a relief ... Vivid.
Cole’s finest novel yet. It reminds us of the best qualities of intensely personal, diaristic fiction. And it boldly moves beyond the limits of that form. After so many chapters—and really, so many books—of Cole’s distinctive narration.
An undercurrent of violence swirls throughout the book, which shakes up the form of the novel itself by eschewing anything as conventional as plot for eight fragments, presented as chapters. Cole plays with form ... The effect is dizzying and illuminating and seems, in retrospect, such an obvious way of bringing a city to life that it’s surprising the technique isn’t used more often ... A brilliant book.
The plot of Tremor unfurls gently and much of the novel reads as autofiction ... The narrative voice is elegant and philosophical ... Effervescent ... A high-wire act of narration that could have become mired in autofictional longueurs instead becomes an invitation to a fuller and more attentive way of seeing ... A novel that contains no heavy-handed lessons ... Dances with the reader, showcasing a lightness of touch previously only seen in his essays. Tremor is a salve for the worn-down, a hymn to the epiphanies of life lived fully through camaraderie, music, and remembrance, a plea to look and listen thoughtfully, and a book to be read with eyes, ears, heart, and hands open.
Works as a labyrinthine history puzzle, a personal collage of memorable artworks, a photo-essay about lives and struggles in Lagos, and a spellbinding lecture on racism, provenance, decolonisation and restitution. At its heart is a deeply moving encounter between Tunde and his partner Sadoko as they drift in and out of each other’s lives. Through the couple’s painful silences and yearning for physical touch, Cole examines the meaning of separation and intimacy, time and mortality, and the many tremulous moments that life triggers in us ... Cole’s prose has a calm, meditative voice that moves forward unobtrusively, as if the narrator only serves and observes, never directs. It has a hypnotic, transportive quality, an intellectual agility more akin to muscle memory than free association ... He curates a masterclass in flash fiction portraitures and creates a buzzing Nigerian metropolis full of risk and allure. Although highly conceptual, Tremor is heartbreakingly tender. The trials and tribulations of Tunde and Sadoko keep us on edge.
Compact but hugely ambitious ... A tightly managed structure. Like a symphony, the various themes Cole establishes in the book’s opening sections resolve in its closing one, and a seemingly incidental detail...proves to be a key that unlocks a later chapter ... Never less than engaging, but little in its opening chapters feels particularly novelistic.
Thematically a diaspora novel with familiar contrasts between former native land and current immigrant land turned way up because of Tunde’s education, position, and refined sensibility ... Much of Tremor is meditation rather than narrative, exposition and description and analysis rather than dialogue ... I have now read Tremor twice and will read it again when I see what other reviewers make of it. Most contemporary novels are not designed to be read carefully even once, so Tremor is an anomalous treat for a reviewer, at least for one who enjoys a challenge. I even think of it as a gift.
The intention behind a photograph, how it is framed, the final image as part construction, part found object: these considerations have permeated Cole’s fiction since his taut, unforgettable novella Every Day Is for the Thief ... Tremor tries for something more radical. Tunde is the protagonist, but the book’s eight sections are presented discretely, almost like essays rather than sections of narrative ... Biography and event are secondary to Tremor’s thematic preoccupations, which include authenticity, the appropriation of African objects and bodies, and the brutality of history. On all these subjects Cole is scrupulously intelligent. His range of musical, artistic and cinematic reference is also formidable. But the extended passages of ekphrasis are one of the book’s turn-offs – into the margins, the stagnant peripheries ... This is not to suggest that these subjects are inherently uninteresting: as an essayist Cole is absolutely worth reading...But packaged as fiction this discursive, ostentatiously scholarly mode makes for aridity and even pretentiousness, as it does in the similarly essayistic 'novels' of Garth Greenwell and Jessie Greengrass ... We have, in short, a pile of artfully artless snapshots, with the onus on the reader to make something of the arbitrary juxtapositions between them ... this book trembles under the weight of its own politesse. There is a lesson that Teju Cole would do well to learn from his fellow New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm, who knew that it is perfectly possible to be both serious and entertaining; to think deeply about difficult subjects – while making room for the occasional, essential bit of horsing around.
To read Tremor is to engage with these questions, and be greeted by a swathe of astonishing images, formal ingenuity and raw, metamorphic emotion ... The plot is light-touch, but intentionally and successfully so. As readers, we focus less on linearity – on a series of events linked to a single protagonist – and instead move freely through time and space, floating between USA and Nigeria, between first-, third- and second-person voices, between memories and shared biographies ... Yet Tremor is not, as the previous paragraphs might suggest, unstructured. Throughout, violence is an anchor, maybe even the real protagonist. It has been a common theme across Cole’s oeuvre: his final column at The New York Times was titled 'When the Camera Was a Weapon of Imperialism. (And When It Still Is.)' Here, it returns again and again, as murder, as infidelity, as an earthquake, as an illness ... Cole is not just offering us a novel about art, migration, or marginalisation, rather a new politics of seeing, reading and thinking: of interpreting our time on Earth while our notions of empathy are expanded or torn apart completely.
Feflects 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 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.
Remarkable and experimental ... 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.
