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Tremor: A Novel
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Synopsis
An “extraordinary, ambitious” (The Times UK) novel that masterfully explores what constitutes a meaningful life in a violent world—from the award-winning author of Open City
New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • “Cole’s mind is so agile that it’s easy to follow him anywhere.”—The New Yorker
A PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
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: 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.
Release date: October 17, 2023
Publisher: Random House
Print pages: 229
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Tremor: A Novel
Teju Cole
he leaves are glossy and dark and From the dying blooms rises a fragrance that might be jasmine. He sets up the tripod and begins to focus the camera. He has pressed the shutter twice when an aggressive voice calls out from the house on the right. This isn’t the first time this kind of thing has happened to him but still he is startled. He takes on a friendly tone and says he is an artist, just photographing a hedge. You can’t do that here, the voice says, this is private property. The muscles of his back are tense. He folds the tripod, stows the camera in its bag, and walks away.
on monday he goes to the department where packages and other mail await him, among them a white envelope with a quarter-inch-thick black line along its flap. Two or three envelopes of this kind arrive each month, official announcements of the passing of past or current members of the faculty. The envelope is almost square. He sits in his office and opens it. The card inside is also trimmed in black. An emeritus professor of microbiology, not someone he knows, has died. The cards don’t deviate from a formula: the dean expresses regret at the death of the professor in question in antiquated language. A death that “occurred on the sixth instant” is one that happened on the sixth of this month; “the fifteenth ultimo” is the fifteenth of last month. He has begun to collect the cards, thinking of them in their high-toned formality as an echo of the mourning dress worn in previous times, the silks and grenadines of widows’ gowns in the Civil War era, the black veils, black gloves, and black jewelry that let society know a grief was being observed. That symbolic order of colors is gone now, that tracking of heavy, full, or partial mourning in the language of black, gray, purple, lavender.
There are two books on his desk: Calvino’s Invisible Citiesand a translation of the Epic of Sundiata. The latter contains versions of the epic by two different djeli, Bamba Suso and Banna Kanute, and he has recently finished reading Bamba Suso’s version. On one of the bookcases is a bottle of dark ink sent to him by Paul Lanier. The ink is made from wild grapes collected around railway tracks in St. Louis and because it is homemade, the color has shifted. In the bottle it still looks deep, close to violet, but brushed on paper it has now taken on a pale color reminiscent of the sea. But “the sea” how? When we say the sea is blue we are thinking of a light or pale blue, a color close to sky blue. The sea is sometimes one of those blues and sometimes a darker version of them but the sea is also often not blue at all: it is sometimes orange, sometimes gray, sometimes purple with the iridescence of Homer’s , sometimes nothing, transparent, water. At dusk it goes from silvery to pewter. On a moonless night it is black.
He picks up the bottle of ink, an aged lavender, a purple haunted in its lower registers by indigo. The African violet is where the name comes from but he also loves the false web of etymologies the name summons: the tenderness of a viol, the strain of a violin, the hint of violence. Not the violet of medieval bishops and university professors but rather the violet of darkest African skin. Paintings by Mark Rothko, Agnes Martin, Lorna Simpson, but above all Chris Ofili in the lower register of whose Mary Magdalene is a violet so deep it could drown the eyes, in whose Raising of Lazarus there is a violet so base it could raise the dead. The hand-dyed, hand-spun cloth that he took from his grandmother’s wardrobe a few months after her death. Gray for loss, violet for love.
they go up to Maine to shop for antiques. The trip takes an hour and a half and during the brief crossing into New Hampshire they switch places and she drives. The plan is to do a small stretch of southern Maine up to Kennebunk, visiting several shops. They have set aside the entire afternoon. At a large emporium in York he looks at a nineteenth-century map of North America hand-drawn by a child. On the outskirts of Ogunquit are yard signs saying “Blue Lives Matter” which in town give way to rainbow flags. Finally they come to Wells where they find a large shop set in a building that might once have been a barn. The shop, on two levels, is crammed with furniture, paintings, glassware, and porcelain, many of them from the early or mid-nineteenth century and quite a few older. They wander separately. She looks at a maple colonial-style drop-front desk. He is surprised to find a section with an assortment of wooden masks and sculptures, three of them recognizably African, the others possibly Pacific, Asian, or Native American. He is immediately drawn to an elegant antelope headdress with a soaring pair of horns, a ci wara. It stands around four feet tall and appears to be old, its wood stained dark, the information on the label imprecise. The sinuous lines and open-work carving depict a female antelope with a baby antelope carved onto her back, the fawn a miniature of the mother, their main difference being that its horns are not as proportionally long. Ci wara, credited by Bambara people with having brought agriculture to humanity, is danced in its male and female forms as headdresses for young men during sowing and harvesting festivals.
The two men who run the antiques shop seem to be in their mid-to-late eighties and their banter has the feel of a long-practiced comedic act. They tell Tunde that they are brothers-in-law but frequently taken for brothers. One jokes about the other being too old, the other jokes about the other not being handsome enough to be related to him. Tunde asks the slightly younger-looking man about the ci wara but the man has little additional information beyond the notion that the sculpture “might be authentic.”
To himself Tunde wonders what authenticity would mean. That this particular ci wara has been danced in a Bambara agricultural festival? Or that whether or not it was danced it was not made for the tourist trade, that it was made by Bambara people for the use of Bambara people? Whatever its story it had found its way to the coast of New England. 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 and the importance of the object is boosted by the story that can be told about its role in the history of modern European art.
He has seen, in the past, a female ci wara figure comparable to the one he is looking at now sold at auction for $400,000. Those zeros, he knows, have everything to do with the trail of magic words that the auction house brushed over the object: “collected in situ,” “acquired,” “exhibited.” The more extensive this account of ownership the greater the sums that can change hands between sellers and buyers. The ci wara he is looking at in Wells is priced at $250 which seems to settle the question of authenticity: the sculpture has no “provenance” and thus its value is minimal. He feels he ought to rescue it. He wants to bring it closer to home, closer to his own home where it can be seen by kinder eyes, by eyes that place authenticity elsewhere. Why should the labor of the contemporary artist who makes a ci wara to sell to visitors be less deserving of honor than that of the “traditional” artist who makes a ci wara to be danced at a harvest festival? But he doesn’t want to fool himself. Money is still changing hands.
Sadako has decided that she wants the maple desk. It is compact and likely to fit into the back of their rented SUV. At the last minute he has doubts about the ci wara but Sadako insists that they buy it. They go up to the front of the shop where the rafter above the sellers is covered with photographs, cartoons, and clippings from old ads. Behind the counter is a card signed by Laura Bush. This does not surprise him as the Bush family compound is only fifteen minutes away in Kennebunkport and this part of Maine is a venerated area for the genteel wing of the political right. On a wooden post near the counter, among the faded flyers and curling laminated notices, he sees a small photocopied note in all-caps, worn by time and undated:
wells homestead. this homestead was settled in 1657 by dr. thomas wells. in august of 1703 his grandson deacon thomas was away looking for a nurse for his wife sarah (browne) who had given birth the evening before to a daughter. while he was away the town of wells was attacked by indians. they struck at this farm first. axing their way into the house, they massacred mrs. wells, her infant, 4 year old sarah and 2 year old joshua. then they burned the house down. after this terrible tragedy mr. wells left for ipswich, massachusetts, returning sometime after 1718 with a new family to reclaim the homestead. it remained in the wells family until 1906.
The older of the brothers-in-law rings them up. He tries to figure out the sales tax on a calculator with large buttons and gets it wrong the first time. Slowly he repeats the calculation and gets it wrong again, arriving at the correct figure only on his fourth attempt. The equipment in the shop is rudimentary, evidently by design. The card reader into which Tunde’s credit card has been inserted beeps for a few moments before letting out an even tone. The man writes out a receipt on thin yellow paper then the brothers-in-law wrap the ci wara in sheets of soft white paper. Their trembling liver-spotted hands seem to be caressing the sculpture, arraying it in gossamer white robes for a bridal. The antelope horns poke through the soft paper. Thus dressed the ci wara feels light as air. Sadako carefully takes it out to the SUV. Tunde brings the three drawers of the maple desk outside, then the desk itself.
Wild geese cross overhead honking in the falling dusk. Sky and sound are one and across from the barn is a house with the obvious modern additions of a third floor and a screened-in porch. Between the house and the barn stands the great old tree under which their SUV is parked. All time is now.
the headlights pool ahead of them on I-95. “If You Don’t Believe” by Deniece Williams is the music that fills the car. A favorite of Sadako’s. Thinking about Wells he can feel something unknotting in his brain. After nearly three decades in the U.S. his sympathies have been tutored in certain directions. He learned early that a “terrible tragedy” meant the victims were white. Later and by bitter experience he came to understand that there is always more to tragedies than is narrated, that the narration is never neutral. But what is happening to him now is stranger: this lack of sympathy for the Wells family, the way he struggles even to imagine them. So great a counterreaction is a new, brutal tone in him. Is it brutal? All he can think about is that in the period of the so-called Third Indian War, Abenaki people were dispersed by the colonial settlers, dispersed by those who took it as their God-given right to seize their lands, who took it as their right to kill them if they resisted.
But the note in the antiques shop was a fever dream of mindless Indian violence against people like “us.” Later Tunde will find the names and birth dates of Deacon Wells’s children in county records: Sarah Wells, March 9, 1699; Joshua Wells, October 9, 1701. The Indians were without names and they had come bearing axes and they had killed and scalped and they had burned the place down. And yet Deacon Wells had returned fifteen years later with his losses restituted to him as Job’s were, bringing with him a new wife, a cousin from Salem who had borne him three children. In time the land was pacified. The Indian problem went away and Deacon Wells lived long, until August 1737 when he committed his soul to the Lord. His will was proved the month after that. “I give and bequeath unto my dearly beloved wife Lydia Wells all my household stuff of every sort and kind, [and] my negro man Jeff.”
the following weekend they have dinner with their friend Emily Brown at her home on Dana Street, a ten-minute stroll from their house on Ellis. A warm night, the feeling more late summer than early fall. At dinner he mentions the excursion to Wells. His recollection of the violent incidents at the homestead prompts Emily’s partner Mariam to tell him about a book published in 2007 by Susan Faludi. The Terror Dream, Mariam says, connects the machismo of the Bush presidency to a long-running American obsession with captivity narratives, a tradition that began in colonial times and saw its main task as protecting white women from dark-skinned invaders. At home that night Tunde looks up the book and sees that there is a copy available at the library of the Kennedy School.
On Tuesday an hour before he is to teach his Digital Color seminar he walks across the Yard through Harvard Square and down John F. Kennedy Street to the brick complex of the Kennedy School. In the library he dawdles. He has just settled down with a handful of magazines when one of the librarians hurries towards him. She wants to know if she can “help” him with anything. It is said in a tone he recognizes. Without a word, he walks away from her. He finds The Terror Dream and uses the self-checkout machine.
while cooking dinner he puts on the recording of Bach’s Cello Suites he had bought on your advice sometime around 2001. In those days you were interested in the way Bach’s written scores showed evidence of having originated in improvisation. You described it as “embodiment”: the multifocal sensitivity an animal would have in a forest but also the alertness and contained intensity of a hunter in a different part of the same forest. Bach was not merely arranging notes, you said to Tunde at the time. He was conveying a living and intentional search, the presence of which could most deeply be felt in his solo works. A listener could follow this movement like a tracker, from one phrase to another, from one argument to another, a listener could inhabit this present tense no matter how festive or solemn the music got. And it was precisely the ability of the cellist Anner Bylsma to draw out these improvised-sounding lines that led you to recommend his recording to Tunde.
At the time of that correspondence Tunde had his own long-nurtured enthusiasm for recordings of Bach’s solo works. He loved the debut on solo violin by Hilary Hahn, the Goldberg Variations played on piano by Chen Pi-hsien, and Jean-Pierre Rampal’s performance of the partita for solo flute. In each of these recordings he found that quality of personal impersonality that made Bach feel less like a composer and more like a philosopher, a counselor, a scientist, an architect, or a prophet; anything but a regional court musician in eighteenth-century Germany.
Your recommendation of Bylsma, whom you described as having the verve of a fencer and the poise of a dancing master, had helped him experience this personal impersonality in a new way. It was almost, you said, as if Bylsma were making a drawing not playing a cello, so precise was his combination of light attack and ample sound. Tunde listened carefully to the recording back then and Bylsma’s playing added much to his experience of works he already knew through several recordings.
The special value you saw in Bylsma’s version and that you conveyed to Tunde was perhaps connected to your own practice in those days of composing free improvisations for piano, an approach that had less to do with the interpretation of preexisting works than with a spirit of discovery that invited the piano to reveal its secrets to you in real time. You said embodiment was not only the animal in the forest and the tracker following that animal but also the forest as a self-aware system, ...
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