Showing posts with label Teju Cole. Show all posts

Sunday, December 24, 2023

2023 / Other Books Highlights From This Year I

Zadie Smith

2023

Other Books Highlights From This Year I

Throughout the year, Vulture maintained a “Best Books of the Year (So Far)” list. Many of those selections appear above in our top-ten. Below, the rest of the books that stood out to them this year, presented in order of release date.

Tremor, by Teju Cole

Teju Cole’s visual medium is photography, and lately, his written medium is the essay. With Tremor, he returns to the novel after 12 years, threading his tendency toward analysis and explication with scenes from the life of the protagonist, Tunde, who, like Cole, is a Harvard professor. At the start of the book, he is separated — hopefully, not for good — from his wife, Sadako. He is also considering the ethics of the roles he inhabits: lecturer, workshop leader, photographer, traveler, and viewer. How can one make or even behold art without assuming a dominant position? Cole considers this question alongside close readings of pastel drawings made by “the most prolific serial killer in American history”; the painting of a lesser-known Flemish master, Landscape With Burning City; Ingmar Bergman’s film Winter Light; the garden Sadako carefully maintains; and Tunde’s own photographs capturing someone else’s “private property.” Fans of other essayistic novels, including J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello and Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, will appreciate Cole’s vision. —Maddie Crum

Tremor by Teju Cole review / Art, history and violence

Intellectual agility … Teju Cole. Photograph: Kayana Szymczak

Review

The best fiction of 2023

Tremor by Teju Cole review – art, history and violence

Cole’s third novel packs in centuries of artworks and continents of human experiences, in a dazzling reflection on colonialism, aesthetics and contemporary life

Kit Fan

Friday 20 October 2023

s our understanding of history changes, how do we re-evaluate, interact with and enjoy art? How do we create new art that remembers but is unburdened by the past? These aesthetic questions quiver at the heart of Teju Cole’s mesmerising third novel, a feat of narrative invention about literature, painting, music, photography, race, the passage of time and human survival amid “history’s own brutality, which refuses symmetries and seldom consoles”.

My hero: Michael Ondaatje by Teju Cole

Michael Ondaatje: ‘shadowed and prismatic prose’.
Photograph: Murdo Macleod

My hero:

Michael Ondaatje by Teju Cole

Here’s a celebrated writer who can’t stop taking risks on the page

Teju Cole
Friday 17 February 2012

hen you are starting out, each great writer gives you specific forms of permission. Michael Ondaatje's work taught me how to be at home in fragments, and how to think about a big story in carefully curated vignettes. All his books were odd, all of them "unfinished" the way Chopin's Études are unfinished: no wasted gestures, no unnecessary notes.

In Coming Through Slaughter, I encountered the use of photographs in a text in a non-straightforwardly illustrative way, long before WG Sebald did the same thing. Running in the Family was an exhilarating confusion of genres that I read and reread, and loved each time, and still couldn't decode. The English Patient was like a fine film by Chris Marker (quite different from the fine film Anthony Minghella made of the same book). And the latest, The Cat's Table, is fleet and gently magical, a book full of love.

For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with apt words. Ondaatje makes language translucent – the exact word, the exact placement of a comma – and the reader has the uncanny feeling of encountering ideas directly. His work is about the things I care most about: memory, threshholds, solitude, work (usually the work of hands), dangerous loves, half-remembered songs and scars of all kinds. It is a particular constellation of thoughts and experiences, so particular to me, I sometimes feel, that I'm unsure if I'm reading or if I'm the one being read.

The kind of hushed attention that Ondaatje brings to his work isn't to everyone's taste. His lyricism leaves some sceptical. The shadowed and prismatic prose regularly runs into unsympathetic critics. But that is precisely what I value about it. Here's a celebrated writer, celebrated and loved by many, who can't stop taking risks on the page, who can't stop making one-of-a-kind books. To read him is to understand that he's very good at being free. No noisy certainties here. His ambiguities are quiet and precise. I want to be like that when I grow up.

• Teju Cole's Open City has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award.

THE GUARDIAN