Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Oct 2023
256 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
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: 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.
"A master class in the morality of art ... a novel of ideas but also of voices, of different perspectives claiming the first-person narrative I. The precision of detail stresses the importance of seeing, but identity, perspective, and context determine who is seeing what... . A provocative and profound meditation on art and life in a world of terror." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Critic and novelist Cole (Open City) explores such philosophical questions as, "How is one to live without owning others? Who is this world for?" in his remarkable and experimenal latest...Everything hangs together brilliantly, due to Cole's subtle provocations and his passion for art and music. It's a splendid feast for the senses." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Unique and important fiction following 2007's Open City and several significant nonfiction volumes; highly recommended." —Library Journal (starred review)
This information about Tremor was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Teju Cole was born in the United States in 1975 to Nigerian parents and grew up in Lagos. His books include the novel Open City, the essay collections Known and Strange Things and Black Paper, and the experimental photo book Blind Spot. He has been honored with the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, the Windham-Campbell Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other accolades. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Cole is currently a professor of the practice of creative writing at Harvard University and a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine.
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