‘Tremor’ — A Novel by Teju Cole

“Tremor” is a lesson in learning how to see in a new way.

Tunde and Sadako appear much like average urban professionals in their 40s except that they are not white people, and so experience life from a different perspective.

Sadako works in pharmaceuticals; she is of Japanese and African American descent, born and raised in Massachusetts. Tunde teaches photography at an elite university in Boston; he grew up in Nigeria and came to the U.S. as a teenager. A strain in their marriage anchors a story that reaches across oceans and time without ever leaving the reader behind. Tunde is the principal vehicle, but the narrator inhabits different characters, places, and ideas, illuminating the sometimes dubious frames supporting the structures of our lives.

The couple visits an antique store in conservative Kennebunkport, Maine, run by two men in their eighties who say they are brothers-in-law. But there is some- thing in their practiced banter suggesting they are more, hiding in plain sight. “One jokes about the other being too old, the other jokes about the other not being handsome enough to be related to him.” Tunde spots a traditional ci wara mask from Mali, “possibly authentic,” as one of the men puts it, meaning taken from where it belongs, as Tunde believes, also hiding in plain sight. It is the first step of exploration into displacement, appropriation, and erasure of culture, peoples, and individuals.

Later, Tunde sits in the lobby of the library of the university where he teaches to kill time reading a magazine. An employee hurries toward him. “She wants to know if she can ‘help’ him with anything. It is said in a tone he recognizes,” and he leaves. He crosses Harvard Yard on the days he goes to lecture and passes a small plaque acknowledging the enslaved people who built it, but not their grisly fates when they tried to escape.

But such episodes are not the point of this novel: they are thresholds for the reader to cross as Tunde explores perception. His work as a photographer and a teacher allows him to move from the demands of making a photograph — he tries not to “take” photos, or anything else, from anyone — to descriptions of famous artworks with bloody, but hidden, provenance and meaning.

Again, specific crimes are not the point. Instead, restoring a lost context to a historical work stolen by a colonial army, for example, restores its place in history, and its meaning. The same is harder for human beings, who may never be able to go home.

But this book is not a reprimand or anti-racist screed. It is a story about learning to recognize what is hidden in plain sight, whether that is injustice or love, by experiencing it through different lenses, and in different lights, between artists and their work, or husband and wife.

“It is by being grounded in what we know and what we have experienced that we can move out into greater complexities,” Tunde thinks, in first person. Later, on a business trip to Lagos, he grapples with being a stranger in his home country, though less so than in his adopted one. In that discomfort, the author depicts him in third person, outside of himself. “But why should he wish to translate to others the thought that something untranslatable is happening to him? Let the untranslatable remain untranslatable.”

The author seems to effortlessly move the narrator from one character to another like this, telling the story in first, second, and third person. But Tunde also reminds us that “To say someone is doing something effortlessly is to betray ignorance of the effort they put into it.”

That skill is on display as the narrator inhabits different characters speaking directly to the reader, or sometimes indirectly through Tunde. A dying friend reveals she cannot face more chemotherapy, and cannot face telling her loved ones. “Anguish is really hard to talk about when people only expect you to talk about discomfort.” A cloth merchant in Lagos seems to answer, while telling her own story. “No matter what happens to you in life, no matter how great your happiness or deep your grief, you have to dress for the occasion and that is why people come to me.”

There are so many tremors in this novel, in people’s lives and bodies, in history, and in the earth itself. The title doesn’t represent events, but a continuous sensation of both instability and potential the characters experience, in some cases literally. The effects are felt but only understood by those willing to study them, as the narrator does, with those different angles and lenses. It is a practice Tunde illustrates himself attempting to create a single photograph, returning to the same subject, just a hedge on his street, again and again over the course of the novel.

Sadako and Tunde survive their tremor, when life returns to their relationship as if on its own. Of course, that is not the reality. Behavior sustains relationships, even behavior that goes unrecognized. The author, a creative writing professor at Harvard, seems to tell us this himself near the end, through Tunde:

“The work I do takes me to places where I am received as a guest of honor, places where I try to think and speak and where I try to avoid speechifying. All of this is true but none of it is where reality is. There is another reality, the personal one. And then there’s the secret one that is as dark as the blood beating in my veins, a cold river flowing undetected far from view, a place of uncertainty and premonition. Something is moving there that does not need me for its movement and that is taking me where I cannot imagine. A darkness to which the eyes can never become adjusted.”