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.

The densely packed knowledge in this brief novel crawls at a pace of a much longer book. Tunde, consummate professor and globetrotting photographer, seldom without camera, even in the company of his wife, Sadaku, never rests, except when listening to music, his preferred genre, world music. his appreciation of music isn’t casual, having to know the history and place of origin of the musicians does not make for easy listening.

The consummate intellectual trapped in world history, his obsession focused on where he happens to stand. Vacationing in the coastal town of Ogunquit Maine, Tunde and his wife Sadaku stop in a shop and buy a Bambara art mask, a ci wara. For the moment, let’s not overlook the ogun part of Ogunquit, Ogun, a Nigerian deity, Nigeria, the country where Tunde was born. His reflections turn to cultural appropriation. Sometime later in the country of Mali, after he takes photo in an outside marketplace, he’s confronted by a man who insists that he erase the photos believing he may have been photographed against his will. As a Nigerian African and African American and American of an upper economic class, Tunde sees himself guilty of a cultural appropriation. Appropriation is rooted is greed, exploitation, and mass violence, documented in books and in paintings and sculptures in museums. Tunde reflects, often in detail, on documented atrocities. Most demeaning is how massacres and other forms of mass killings neutralize and strip the individual of personal identity, the identity of everyday acts traditionally depicted by artists. As an act of restoration of identity, with shared similarities among different cultures in mind, Tunde, or the book’s narrator, provides a fictional series of activities of daily life enacted by various Nigerian citizens. Back home and at work in Cambridge, without warning we’re in attendance at one of Tunde’s somber lectures we find ourselves sitting through.

These deep studies, and what Tunde calls mysterious synchronicities occurring across vast distances and museums as zones of sustained shock are all very thought-provoking and informative, teaching that no pleasure is simple and can be trusted at face value, that the best one can do is study, become, and expose the past, that no one is on this planet to be happy if we can’t all be happy. What a relief to find a social gathering of friends at the end. I hope.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for an ARC.

I loved the beginning and ending although I felt confused by the middle section when new voices are introduced. A thoughtful and meditative follow up, although sometimes stiff at times.

What a bumpy ride. I don't think novel is the correct word to describe this book. It does start and end following Tunde, a photographer and professor at Harvard, but the majority of the book jumps from one POV to another, leaving me very confused. It feels almost like a collection of short stories but none of them developed enough to reach a conclusion. More like stories felt like memories from different characters that don't contribute to the plot. I'm not even sure that this book has a plot at all.

I gave 3 stars because I enjoyed the writing and I highlighted some very good quotes. Even though Tremor is not my favorite, I enjoyed the philosophical vibes. Also, the cover is minimal and gorgeous.

Thank you Netgalley and the publishers for the e-arc.

What constitutes a life? That is the question that Teju Cole seems to contemplate in this bumpy novel. I’m not entirely sure we should call it a novel. It seems more like connected vignettes that could make up a short story collection. There is a thin thread of a story, but we are inundated with unnamed and unidentified narrators riffing on life in Nigeria, mainly Lagos. Some of these stories are indeed interesting and reasonably engaging but taken overall don’t lead to a cohesive “novel.” The publisher may be doing Mr. Cole a disservice by billing it as such, and perhaps should come up with a term that is more creative in describing this book. What that term is, I know not. But, maybe the book can be marketed as a unconventional novel-like work with beautiful prose existing within beautiful stories framed by art, music, photography and human relations, much to enjoy for readers who have the taste for the unconventional! Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced DRC.

If T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" was a novel, it would probably be something similar to Teju Cole's new book, Tremor. The story is framed as a weekend from the perspective of a West African man named Tunde who works as a professor of photography at a New England college, but to fixate on a "premise" at all is to miss out on the journey of reflection this book offers. It's not a straightforward linear narrative, and there's no dialogue. One chapter is an art history lecture that meditates on the violent legacies of white conquest and colonialism behind the valued collections of artifacts found in museums throughout the Western world. Another chapter gives us a sequence of monologues from various unnamed characters describing facets of their lives in Nigeria. But taken all together, a richly complex portrait of a man's life and all its complicated interactions with the world emerges, and it is a breathtaking accomplishment.

It's difficult to articulate what exactly I loved so much about this book, and even more difficult to recommend. So much of what I enjoyed about it feels personal and not easily generalizable, so in that respect, it reminded me of Ali Smith's Companion Piece. It's comprised of what can be described as vignettes or closeups of a moment of time in a single person's mind. A recent read with a similar texture of prose that comes to mind is Han Kang’s Greek Lessons, but whereas I found Greek Lessons to be abstract and insubstantial, I felt very nourished by this book. This is not an easy one to describe, but if you like Virginia Woolf and James Baldwin, you will probably like it. And if not, it’s still absolutely worth reading if you are willing to take a chance on a unique and unconventional story. This is definitely one I plan on adding to my physical collection because I know I'll get more out of it the more I engage with it.

DNF - I wasn't able to connect to the story due to the writing style. I'm sure this won't be an issue for many other readers. The premise truly sounded promising.

I found this novel confounding/confusing. If there was a through line, I was not able to find it. It seemed that subjects were introduced with no context and the subjects constantly changed. We start out with main character (Tunde) in his office receiving a death notification of someone on his faculty that we don’t know; we see the books he’s reading then he goes to Maine with his wife Sadako. By the next chapter she moves out on him but later comes back. Eventually he goes to Lagos and then comes back. Interspersed in all of this are sharp, prescient narrations about King Phillip’s war, the nature of relationships, the beauty of music and how it is best listened to unadorned by study. There is the death of a friend. Various characters in Lagos telling their own story. Then chapter 7 is a hallucinogenic chapter on a city that is either perceived as north-south or east-west. What? Is this Lagos?
I stopped at the end of chapter 7. I couldn’t tell what was going on. This book seems somewhat like auto-fiction, somewhat like essays and not understandable to me.

We experience life through the eyes of Tunde, a West African man working as a teacher of photography on a renowned New England campus. This seems like it is written for a niche audience and maybe hard to get into for some of the readers. I thoroughly enjoyed it though and look forward to future works from the author.

DNF// I found this book was difficult to get into. I read the first two chapters and decided not to continue reading because it couldn’t capture my interest.

Engrossing - we follow Tunde, An African man who is a professor of photography on a New England College Campus.. Over the weekend he walks about and we experience life through his eyes. the stories are so interesting, almost like short stories connected. The passive racism he experiences as well as the colonializing of his homeland bring a perspective that many of us can only read about.
A surprising journey of a city through one man that will change your life! #RandomHouse #TejuCole #Tremors

An interesting story by a talented author. I stayed mostly engaged, and enjoyed how the author crafted this story and its characters. This may not be a big seller, but those that pick it up will probably enjoy it.

Thanks very much for the free copy for review!!

Teju Cole has done it again with TREMOR. This is a novel in which a man passes through experience after experience---a novel composed almost of vignettes---in which history and literature largely play a part. I was most reminded of Rachel Cusk's Outline Trilogy. Though there's something more intertextual at play here. I was left engrossed by this novel, and can't wait for others to read it so we can get to discussing.

Thanks to the publisher for the e-galley!

Thanks to Netgalley and Random House for the ebook. Tunde, a photography teacher who lives in Boston with his wife, was born in West Africa and travels, listens to modern day tales from his homeland, both inspiring and crushing, and is able to climb into a library and explore any subject or story that piques his interest. It’s wonderful to walk streets and watch people through Tunde’s eyes. A man who has just as many questions for life and himself as he does answers.