Teju Cole, 48, is the author of eight books, including the essay collection Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time, and Blind Spot, a mix of text and photos he took from around the world. In 2012 he won the PEN/Hemingway award for debuts with his first novel, Open City, in which a psychiatrist wanders post-9/11 Manhattan. Praising its subtlety, the New Yorker called it “as close to a diary as a novel can get… what moves the prose forward is not event or contrivance but a steady, accidental inquiry”. His new novel, Tremor, puts us in the mind of an art history lecturer in the weeks before the pandemic. Cole, born in Michigan and raised in Lagos, spoke from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where since 2018 he has been teaching at Harvard.
Where did this book begin?
After Open City, I’d been able to pursue my intellectual interests without making a novel, which wasn’t dissatisfying to me; I was thrilled by the opportunity to have done a lot of thinking with essays and to figure some things out about how words and images sit next to each other in fictional or nonfictional forms. But I knew that when the time was right, I’d want to write another novel. By the summer of 2020, one of the creative ideas motivating me was to capture the moment just before the pandemic. People I knew – or knew of – were dying every week. One of the ways mortality registered for me was wanting to better address what it means to live – to have the multiplicity of life itself be the riposte to death.
What draws you to write fiction propelled by thought, not plot?
I just really wanted to say that this is what the mountain range of the mind feels like: “I’m this, this, this and this, in terms of my experiences, thoughts, sorrows, loves, joys.” But a novel isn’t about its summary; it’s about being inside the flow of what’s happening, its texture.
Tremor’s viewpoint sometimes shifts abruptly, not least in a section that cuts between 21 voices without any kind of framing. Why did you want to write something so formally unsettling?
“Experimental” isn’t quite the right word – I write perfectly lucid sentences – but 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.
