Tremor by Teju Cole: A good novel shouldn’t have a point. And this is a good novel

Tremor is Teju Cole’s third novel, the first in 12 years following his best-known work, Open City, in 2011 and Every Day Is for the Thief, a hybrid work of travelogue, fiction and photography published in Nigeria in 2007 and updated and republished worldwide in 2014.

In the intervening years he has established himself as a photographer, a critic of photography, art and literature, and an essayist. He has won new fans through innovative use of social media, with Twitter hosting his groundbreaking short story Hafiz, and Instagram the proving ground for 2021′s photobook, Golden Apple of the Sun. He shares his passionate and wide-ranging zeal for music through lovingly curated Spotify playlists. He is professor of creative writing practice at Harvard University.

The plot of Tremor unfurls gently and much of the novel reads as autofiction – save for the fact that the protagonist is not called Teju Cole. The reader needs little knowledge of Cole to sense that his protagonist, Tunde, is a barely fictionalised version of the author: a Nigerian-American who teaches in Harvard and shares his cultural tastes.

In a breathtaking sequence, a polyphony of voices from Lagos emerge to broaden our perspective - 22 deft portraits of figures from the city - each distinctive, charismatic and containing worlds in themselves

Tunde lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, Sadako. Theirs is a loving and respectful marriage, but one also fraught with mysterious tensions that lead to periods of estrangement and separation. Tunde experiences the attritional presence of racism in ways that are both historical and everyday: a neighbour suspicious of his evening photography, a Blue Lives Matter sign in rural Massachusetts, a carelessly sold west African ritual figurine in an antique shop, a wary campus librarian, the enslavement of black people by previous Harvard presidents, anonymous emails that tell him he doesn’t deserve his prestigious job. This amounts to an oppressive, smothering world for Tunde, but not one he is cowed by, as he deals with life’s struggles by holding himself receptive to humanity’s finest fruits, culturally and socially.

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The narrative voice is elegant and philosophical. Remembering a night of music, dancing and conversation on a trip to Mali, Tunde recalls other “nights of desire and satiation” and reflects that “Life is hopeless but it is not serious. We have to have danced while we could and, later, to have danced in the telling.” This declaration is emblematic of the ethos of effervescent pragmatism that guides the novel, and the complex rhythms of Cole’s narrative dance.

Our perspective on Tunde moves nimbly between first- and third-person narration, making space occasionally to address an enigmatic “you”, along with fleeting glimpses of life through Sadako’s eyes. And, in a breathtaking sequence, a polyphony of voices from Lagos emerge to broaden our perspective – 22 deft portraits of figures from the city – each distinctive, charismatic and containing worlds in themselves. 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.

In discussing his previous works of fiction, Cole once stated that “A good novel shouldn’t have a point.” Tremor, certainly, is a novel that contains no heavy-handed lessons

As relationships shift and settle, Tunde suffers brief but alarming periods of sight loss (an affliction detailed by Cole in previous work of memoir). One such episode while delivering an art lecture, the words of which form an intra-text, a codex to what comes before and after. “Strangeness arrives again and again; without end,” Tunde later muses, “we live on the accumulated ruins of experience.”

In discussing his previous works of fiction, Cole once stated that “A good novel shouldn’t have a point”. Tremor, certainly, is a novel that contains no heavy-handed lessons. Written in a time of social upheaval and the aftermath of a divisive presidency, Tremor does not explicitly refer to the big events of the past three years. Instead, it keeps the political intensely personal and in doing so creates a space for the reader to reflect. If we must divine a point to the novel, it surely lies in making the time to read it.

A desire for communion with his audience is the heartbeat of Tremor, as Cole’s deeply sensory descriptions invite participation beyond the snatched 15 minutes here or there or glances at an e-reader between phone notifications that make up so much of the contemporary reading experience.

Where Cole’s previous novels took his readers on soulful, often sombre guided walks around New York and Lagos, this one 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.