As 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 second 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”.
Tunde, a Nigeria-born Harvard professor of photography, walks into an antiques shop in Maine and sees “an assortment of wooden masks and sculptures, three recognisably African”. He notices “a small photocopied note” about a colonial estate being “attacked by Indians” and later reclaimed by the Wells family. As Tunde’s mind excavates the complex colonial history, he links Bach’s Cello Suites with the cowboy epic The Searchers, starring John Wayne as a civil war veteran; the Micronesian navigator Pius Mau Piailug’s non-instrument wayfinding skills with the Hollywood blockbuster Ad Astra. These connections are not random and ask us to rethink the hierarchy of fine and popular art, the centrality of western aesthetic values, and the problematic representation of truth and history.
