A novel of and the ethics of art digressions

Teju Cole's first novel in 12 years, 'Tremor' is preoccupied with ethical questions about art, and the murky ethics of art galleries and museums 

- Aditya Manilha

I was introduced to Teju Cole's wide-ranging, multidisciplinary work through his Twitter (now X) account in the mid2010s. Being new to Twitter back then, I found Cole's "flower reports"-crowdsourced arrays of flower images from around the world-among the softer, more whimsical corners of the internet. Tremor, Cole's first novel in 12 years, opens with the protagonist Tunde (a Nigeria-born professor of photography at Harvard) setting up his tripod to photograph a flowering hedge. "The leaves are glossy and dark and from the dying bloom rises a fragrance that might be jasmine."

The spell cast by the opening line's undulating rhythms and percussive power is short-lived, however. A gruff, possibly bigoted security guard, asks Tunde to move away from the building. For a brief, uncomfortable moment it seems violence is in the offing but Tunde exits the situation unscathed.

There is an equal and opposite encounter at the end of the novel, wherein Tunde returns to this spot and gets the photograph he wanted. But this turns out to be a pyrrhic victory, leaving him physically dazed and confused.

In between these two photographic encounters rests Tremor, easily one of the best novels of the year. It is no coincidence that these two bookending scenes are a reflection on the artistic gaze. For much of the novel, Tunde is preoccupied by ethical questions about art-about the Orientalism of so many European painters, the murky ethics of museums and art galleries, the idea that all photography steals a little bit of the subject's soul (have you never wondered why verbs such as "capture" are used so often to describe the photographer's job?).