Book review: Tremor

Teju Cole, Tremor, London: Faber & Faber Ltd, 2023; 239 pp.: ISBN: 9780571283361, £9.99 (pbk); ISBN: 9780571283354, £18.99 (hbk); ISBN: 9780571283378 (eBook)

Tremor is a portrait of perambulation, encapsulating a multitude of ideas and experiences that explore diasporic conditions in the Global North. The term ‘tremor’ refers to a tremulous state that constantly shifts within the narrative due to its fragmented structure. Teju Cole drafts an innovative journey that resonates with Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981) idea of the chronotope, where ‘time–space’ represents the intrinsic connectedness of historical and geographical relationships, reflecting the world’s actions in literature. Similar to W.G. Sebald and J.M. Coetzee, Cole’s narrator Tunde as an ambler mediates the art and histories as acts of restitution across various eras and sites. The narrative of this novel starts in the third person and then turns to the first person at Tunde’s lecture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; it also adds monologues from inhabitants to unfold the condition in Lagos. Tunde, an art historian, brings a diverse perspective throughout his excursions, offering an opportunity for reflection and recalibration.

In urban studies, the exclusion of women’s lived experience asserts the inherently gendered nature of rights to everyday life within cities, reflected in urban narratives (see Beebeejaun, 2017). Cole’s Open City (2011) and Every Day is for the Thief (2007; 2014) reject the female equivalent to streetwise flaneur; instead they forefront male narrators – Julius, a Nigerian migrant navigating post-9/11 Manhattan, and an anonymous narrator, revisiting Lagos from NYC after 15 years. Twelve years later, Tremor, with a close resemblance to its predecessors, features Tunde – a Nigerian professor of photography at Harvard, Massachusetts, reflecting as an anecdote of Cole’s life. This interplay between ‘human environmental relation in geography and the interface with literature’ forms a triad of people, plots and places to explicate the human condition (Pocock, 1988: 87). Through an active exploration of art, history, music, culture, landscapes and memories, this book captures readers’ attention, allowing them to know the world around them in an immersive narrative. The eight chapters, framed as movements through different realms, appear to transition seamlessly from the real world to the textual.

In the first chapter, an aura of threat and aggression, reinforced by the assertion of ‘private property’, disrupts Tunde’s photography session at the hedge (p.3). This incident establishes a restriction that suggests racial segregation, setting the tone for the novel. The social boundaries of Africans in ‘white’ housing highlight the persistent discrimination in American urban residential places. Then, Tunde and his wife Sadako acquire a ci-wara antelope headdress of Bambara provenance while shopping for antiques in Maine, and he takes responsibility for its preservation. Throughout the novel, Tunde takes the readers to Santiago, Paris, Maine, and Bamako in Mali, and then to Lagos, evoking the idea of a ‘strolling spectator’ in Baudelaire’s conception of a ‘flaneur’, a fictional observer.

Chapter II typifies Lagos milieu in memory of the narrator. The appreciation for Micronesian Pius-Mau-Piailug’s sailing prowess from Hawaii to Tahiti in a small wooden boat (1976) resembles Ahab’s journey in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) with the knowledge of survival. These experiences are valuable for understanding the world, not to plunder it, but to navigate and enrich contemporary urban lives. Chapter III demonstrates that the higher concentration of crime rates in cities is a characteristic of the structure and social organisation of American urban areas (Vogel and Messner, 2019). Nevertheless, as an allegory, this book confirms this through the story of Samuel Little, the ‘most prolific serial killer in American history’ (p.36). The piecing together of crowded places and more murderers targeting Los Angeles perpetrates non-normative behaviour and crime risks in urbanism. Chapter IV explores idiosyncratic musical allusion references. The actual landscape instils authenticity and curiosity in Tunde, leading him to become an enthusiast who travels for photography and music. It evocatively resonates with his soul to move from ‘Mali to Mauritania, to Algeria, Morocco, and Spain’ (p.67).

In Chapter V, the collection of paintings displayed in museums provides an opportunity to witness the past and delve into the realms of history, violence, and inequity across various contexts, notably, J.M.W. Turner’s Slave Ship (Slaver’s Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) and Herri Met de Bles’s Landscape with Burning City, alongside other canvases and artefacts describe the scenes and objects as a form of ekphrasis. Museums, art galleries, and cultural centres serve as ‘central sites in cities for gathering visual production and public viewership’ (Jonas et al., 2015: 246). In Every Day is for the Thief, Cole’s narrator visits the National Museum of Lagos, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, The British Museum, and the Museum fur VolkerKunde in Berlin, which fosters an appetite to see their ancestral art in its origin rather than in other cities. Here, the colonial invasion intended to loot the art from Benin City in 1897 raises the question: ‘What does it mean to care about art but not about the people who made that art?’ (p. 111).

The monologues of 24 voices from a vibrant metropolis in Chapter VI reveal Lagos as a city of silent anguish. In Chapter VII, the concept of urbanism – the city as a product of continuous growth – broadens daily, ‘illuminating’ its inherent dynamism, reflecting human nature within society, and revealing the structures of societal order (see Wirth, 1938). Cole personifies Tunde, who ‘found himself contradicted at every turn’, to illustrate that ‘every day is new in the city’ (p. 177). This also resonates with the author’s reflections and underscores nonconformity and a sense of nostalgia, portraying present Lagos as a ‘pluripotential city.’

Memories, as a state of recollection in the final chapter through Ikeja GRA, a childhood residential area, and photographs from Lagos, convey the underlying truths within the narrative. Thus, ‘stories and remnants of the past’ become cues to comprehend present-day geopolitics (De Nardi et al., 2020). Every place in the world holds layers of memories sedimented over time, with histories often more defined than those of its inhabitants. The author highlights the idea of ‘political solipsism’, as exhibited by dominant nations such as the United States, in their interactions with the global context, through the character of Tunde. The pain and cruelty inflicted by those in positions of power upon the vulnerable are deeply unsettling. ‘What they think of as foreign is not foreign to me; rather, it is my own people who experience estrangement’ (p.203). Each city resembles Lagos, where the violence directed at various places mirrors a sense of devastation that reverberates through his community. Tunde eventually captures the desired photograph of a hedge on Kirkland Street, free from distractions at night – a scene initially denied carries the ‘memory of threat’ (p.238), a potent inference about the underlying tensions. The vivid descriptions of numerous events, including Tunde’s experience of 9/11 in NYC, his wife’s encounter with the Great Kobe Earthquake in Tokyo, acts of violence, inequities, histories, art, and the intersections of past and present, are paired with the disorienting effects of a vertigo attack. These elements draw readers into fragmented narratives, resulting in a plotless yet compelling work. The tremors in Tunde’s marital life come to a resolution by the end of the book, offering a sense of closure.

The reading of the text Tremor foregrounds flight as both a physical and a mental movement, performed by the text and the narrator, depicting an upper-middle-class city lifestyle, including antiques, concerts, museums and excursions, and hosting dinner parties. The narrator’s revisit to native Lagos evades the sense of foreignness; instead, the ‘narrator’s past self, situated in different temporal and spatial milieus, bridges the past and present through autobiographical memory’ (Kumar and Nair, 2024: 1009). In many instances, Cole’s narrator often disappears, while Cole’s voice and personal experiences are deliberately foregrounded for the readers. However, this novel captures the historical and cultural depth of the region, conveying an intimate connection between the knowing and the living culture and further criticising the condition and structure of urban spaces significantly impacting residents’ lives.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Nirmal Kumar M acknowledges the financial support rendered by the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) through the award of a Centrally Administered Full-Term Doctoral Fellowship, granted as a part of his PhD program [File No. RFD/2022-23/GEN/GEOG/296].

References

Bakhtin M (1981) The Dialogic Imaginations: Four Essays, edited and translated by Emerson C, Holquist M, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Google Scholar

Beebeejaun Y (2017) Gender, urban space, and the right to everyday life. Journal of Urban Affairs 39(3): 323–334. Crossref; Web of Science; Google Scholar

Cole T (2007) Every Day is for the Thief. Abuja: Cassava Republic. Google Scholar

Cole T (2011) Open City. London: Faber and Faber Ltd. Google Scholar

Cole T (2014) Every Day is for the Thief. New York: Random House. Google Scholar

De Nardi S, Orange H, High SC, et al. (2020) Introduction. In: De Nardi Orange H, High SC, et al. (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place. New York: Routledge, pp.1–7. Google Scholar

Jonas AE, McCann E, Thomas M (2015) Urban Geography: A Critical Introduction. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell. Google Scholar

Kumar N, Nair LK (2024) Place and memory: Revisiting the past self through autobiographical memory. Integrative Psychological & Behavioural Science 58(3): 1003–1015. Crossref; Web of Science; Google Scholar

Pocock DC (1988) Geography and literature. Progress in Human Geography 12(1): 87–102. Crossref; Web of Science; Google Scholar

Vogel M, Messner SF (2019) Crime and Criminal Justice in Cities. In: Galea S, Etman CK, Valhov D (eds) Urban Health. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.139–147. Crossref; Google Scholar

Wirth L (1938) Urbanism as a Way of Life. American Journal of Sociology 44(1): 1–24. Crossref; Google Scholar

Cite this book review