KNOWN AND STRANGE THINGS: Essays
TEJU COLE
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$5.99 ebook, available now
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: A blazingly intelligent first book of essays from the award-winning author of Open City and Every Day Is for the Thief
With this collection of more than fifty pieces on politics, photography, travel, history, and literature, Teju Cole solidifies his place as one of today’s most powerful and original voices. On page after page, deploying prose dense with beauty and ideas, he finds fresh and potent ways to interpret art, people, and historical moments, taking in subjects from Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and W. G. Sebald to Instagram, Barack Obama, and Boko Haram. Cole brings us new considerations of James Baldwin in the age of Black Lives Matter; the African American photographer Roy DeCarava, who, forced to shoot with film calibrated exclusively for white skin tones, found his way to a startling and true depiction of black subjects; and (in an essay that inspired both praise and pushback when it first appeared) the White Savior Industrial Complex, the system by which African nations are sentimentally aided by an America “developed on pillage.”
Persuasive and provocative, erudite yet accessible, Known and Strange Things is an opportunity to live within Teju Cole’s wide-ranging enthusiasms, curiosities, and passions, and a chance to see the world in surprising and affecting new frames.
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My Review: Teju Cole says clearly and distinctly: "I am a novelist, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point." This is true; though he does not say a word about a novel not being pointed. All of his very much are; so are his essays collected here.
Fragments might be a better term for the shrapnel in this collection. None of them dig into their topic, develop a theme to a conclusion. It's more postmodern than that. I was "treated" to the horrors of mob justice in Nigeria; the fact of colorism, a strain of racism, in Brazil; the shame that's missing from the US's reckoning with its sin of racism and its ugly consequences; the horrors of Israeli apartheid (pre-2025):
The reality is that, as a Palestinian Arab, in order to defend yourself against the persecution you face, not only do you have to be an expert in Israeli law, you also have to be a Jewish Israeli and have the force of the Israeli state as your guarantor…Israel uses an extremely complex legal and bureaucratic apparatus to dispossess Palestinians of their land, hoping perhaps to forestall accusations of a brutal land grab.An unsparing gaze, always roving, roaming wherever he is. Quite a bit of the shards are centered on the photographic, framed for visual images, moments and techniques. He is making himself Isherwood's camera: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking," only adding the thinking back, more in the vein of James Baldwin.
It is, I suppose, unsurprising that Author Cole expends a lot of his energy on thinking about race in the US, as the Obama years were recent as this collection was taking shape. As those years radicalized the lowest of the low into the actions whose disgusting fruits we're being served now, his meditations on Obama's shortcomings as president feel...true, but not really the point. (He was, in my estimation, the best Republican president since Eisenhower. Measured as a Democrat, he was abysmal.) The fact that Author Cole lived half his life in Nigeria (at the point he was writing these pieces) meant he was looking at the US reaction to a Black man as our president with detached, slightly bemused, incomprehension.
More to my own personal taste was the selection of literarians Author Cole engaged with, eg Naipaul and Walcott. Both men were still living, both were being fêted, and both are now receding from the popular literary conversation into more academic renown. It is the course things take, so I can't say "boo hoo" very convincingly. It was a pleasure to re-engage with them through the author's intense, admiring (on balance) gaze.
I'm not that confident this is a collection of enough enduring insight to survive the long test of time. It was enjoyable to me, an adult in the Aughties, an Obama voter, a reader of Naipaul; it might not reach too much lower on the age ladder to find a large audience.
Erudite, pleasant reading, in a vein of early-internet pieces that don't go as deep as the old-fashioned word "essay" implies. Solidly four stars for me; maybe different for younger folk.
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EVERY DAY IS FOR THE THIEF
TEJU COLE
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$5.99 ebook, available now
Rating: 3.75* of five
The Publisher Says: A young Nigerian writer living in New York City returns to Lagos in search of a subject—and himself.
Visiting Lagos after many years away, Teju Cole's unnamed narrator rediscovers his hometown as both a foreigner and a local. A young writer uncertain of what he wants to say, the man moves through tableaus of life in one of the most dynamic cities in the world: he hears the muezzin's call to prayer in the early morning light, and listens to John Coltrane during the late afternoon heat. He witnesses teenagers diligently perpetrating e-mail frauds from internet cafes, longs after a woman reading Michael Ondaatje on a public bus, and visits the impoverished National Museum. Along the way, he reconnects with old school friends and his family, who force him to ask himself profound questions of personal and national history.
Over long, wandering days, the narrator compares present-day Lagos to the Lagos of his memory, and in doing so reveals changes that have taken place in himself.
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My Review: A personal story of alienation, of reckoning with social and societal change, and the shifting bonds of family, we're in Lagos in the Aughties. We're following an unnamed narrator as reacclimates to life in Lagos after years spent in New York City.
It's autobiographical, or I'll eat my hat. Details have likely been massaged...reality doesn't often lend itself to this level of dramatic tension...but it's a roman à clef for his scoobygroup and autofiction for us on the outside. The level of social critique involved in observing his homeland, for it still very much is that to him, is all-consuming. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is done in Lagos to benefit anyone but the self. It's a prescient, if unintentional, alarm klaxon for the world of 2026's kakistocratic enshittification of the US: "What the trip back from the airport makes me think, and what is confirmed over the course of the following days, is the extent to which Lagos has become a patronage society". Everything old is new again....
Author Cole views this hypercapitalist dystopia with a level of humorous detachment that floats on a deeper pool of disillusionment. In many ways I felt I was reading a journalist's too-long think piece about homegoing, rejected by an editor who wanted 1000 words not 30,000. It's a novella-length work of self-analysis, working through the hurts inflicted by choosing outsiderhood over ill-fitting conformity. In no way is this Manhattanite going to submerge without a ripple back into the pool he climbed out of. Having experienced this myself, I was completely in tune with the narrative's driving force and direction.
I can't offer a fifth star because the double whammy of brevity, lack of space to develop the others in the story beyond foils for narrative reflection and amplification as outlines not rounded people, and an outsider-plus sense of superiority inherent in this return from a wealthier world.
It's an enjoyable story, if not a full novelistic reading experience.
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TREMOR
TEJU COLE
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$6.99 ebook, available now
Rating: 4.75* of five
The Publisher Says: A powerful, intimate novel that masterfully explores what constitutes a meaningful life in a violent world—from the award-winning author of Open City
Life is hopeless but it is not serious. We have to have danced while we could and, later, to have danced again in the telling.
A weekend spent antiquing is shadowed by the colonial atrocities that occurred on that land. A walk at dusk is interrupted by casual racism. A loving marriage is riven by mysterious tensions. And a remarkable cascade of voices speaks out from a pulsing metropolis.
We’re invited to experience these events and others through the eyes and ears of Tunde, a West African man working as a teacher of photography on a renowned New England campus. He is a reader, a listener, a traveler, drawn to many different kinds of stories from history and epic; stories of friends, family, and strangers; stories found in books and films. Together these stories make up his days. In aggregate these days comprise a life.
Tremor is a startling work of realism and invention that engages brilliantly with literature, music, race, and history as it examines the passage of time and how we mark it. It is a reckoning with human survival amidst “history’s own brutality, which refuses symmetries and seldom consoles,” but it is also a testament to the possibility of joy. As he did in his magnificent debut Open City, Teju Cole once again offers narration with all its senses alert, a surprising and deeply essential work from a beacon of contemporary literature.
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My Review: Rejecting tradition..."{I} wanted to give myself a chance to make something that could fail. I don’t know that people are doing enough with their freedom as writers—to keep doing this 19th-century thing bores me"...is often risky, even when you work inside the established alternatives to "the 19th-century thing" like modernism and its cousins. Here Tunde, our PoV character, is followed through a format I'd call braided stories around a stream-of-consciousness heart. Tunde's PoV third-person narrative shifts to fourth-wall-breaking first person at times, then into the satanic-second person as he addresses someone over our shoulder somewhere.
It's a complex read. It does little heavy lifting for you. It's your job as The Reader to supply your own thoughts about the purpose of Tunde's telling us his stories, giving us a story-mooning of his ass as we decide how to feel about that..."Tunde is startled out of these thoughts by {his wife}'s's return from work. They talk for a moment. She remains downstairs. He moves upstairs to her study. The room is lit by a single lamp and he continues reading" tells its own punch of a story about intimacy's failures and his failings in an introductory moment...we're launched into Tunde's trenchant observations: "It was in a shop among the unrelated treasures white people had collected by fair means or foul from across the globe. In the West a love of the "authentic" means that art collectors prefer their African objects to be alienated so that only what has been extracted from its context becomes real. Better that the artist not be named, better that the artist be long dead. The dispossession of the object's makers mystically confers monetary value to the object," on the eternal nexus of culture, cultural appropriation, and colonialism.
Without a guide.
Tunde tells you what's what. From his position inside the colonizer/appropriators' world. Is he aware he's not reckoning with his own foothill of privilege adjacent to and causally connected to the mountains of privilege he's commenting on? I don't know. We're not told.
If you're going to experiment with style, do it interestingly. Build the maze and trust me to find a way out. Notice: A not The. I think this sums up the experience of reading this novel:
On his return he thought he was thinking of a photograph but he realized that he was thinking of a photographic negative, the colors inverted and left and right flipped. But it became clear to him that what he was actually thinking of was a photographic negative that had been made but had gone missing before it could be printed. And finally he realized that no, the negative had not even ever existed, it was all in the imagination or it was all in the future and he was thinking of a picture that existed only in the mind of the one who was thinking it. The more he tried to describe it the more elusive it was. It was there but it could not be looked at directly. At best it could only be seen out of the corner of the mind's eye and this was the way one might begin to speak of the city.You're going to think this is a more interesting read after you've developed the negative, the text on the page, in your mind's developer bath. You're participating in framing the shot, in selecting the size...north-south, east-west, all or nothing on these meanings for a city's future (this only makes sense after reading the book)...and saturation of the print.
It's not easy but it's involving, it's exciting in the right mood, and it's using the 19th-century thing to mold a 21st-century object, a European art to draw an African subject. Did it fail?
Only a little around the middle saggy bits. Overconfidence in the reader leads some parts to feel unsatisfyingly undeveloped; untrusting of the readers' cultural background leaves other a mucky slog through extremely specific details that were not mission critical.
So, no full-five from me; but a half-star above "good" is "very good" and my three-quarters star is "very good indeed." It will be a read you invest in or bounce hard off; make your acquisition decisions carefully, try a sample or use the library; I hope you'll at least give it a try.
