I cannot believe it has been over a decade since I found my way to Teju Cole's Open City. I can't recall how I found it, only that it knocked my socks off and set me off annoying everybody to read it. "Guy walks around urban landscape and thinks about stuff" was, admittedly, in the wheelhouse of my wheelhouse, and Cole's cool, literate spin on that was catnip. As Ryu Speth puts it over at Vulture:

This sort of plotless, discursive writing, in which a swirl of associations and memories and ideas are held together by the centripetal force of an impeccably educated flaneur, is exceedingly difficult to pull off without sounding like a colossal bore — and Cole did pull it off, with great lyricism and sensitivity, his sentences strolling majestically through Julius’s neighborhood in Morningside Heights.

I just loved it.

And then I cold water was thrown on me when someone I respected (a writer of very, very good fiction of great intricacy and volume, published by a major publisher) chastised my friend and I for "falling for" Cole's schtick. I recall him dismissing it as pure self-congratulatory intellectual masturbation, and I think I felt stung because I could feel some truth in that.

Tremor, Cole's first novel since then, shows just how right we both were.

The protagonist of this multilayered novel is, like Cole, a Nigerian-born Harvard professor, photographer, and critic, but the strands of this novel incorporate different voices and perspectives to explore a wider world than the New York of Open City. There is a focus on the uses and abuses of art in our individual and collective cultural imagination, but the range of subject matter here is extraordinary: music, art, friendship, literature, geography, history, grief.

Yeah, the ghost of Sebald is here. SFJ says people compare Cole to W.G. Sebald "in the same way that any thrash band will be formally indebted to Slayer and Metallica." I think that understates the superficiality of the comparison. Sebald's plundering and erasure of his source material is exactly the sort of artistic appropriation he is shining a light on, even in himself.

Cole shows extraordinary attention to the world but can also keep the limits and qualities of his own attention within the frame without breaking the spell. And with discernment of a photographer accustomed to leaving nearly all the negatives unprinted, and almost all the prints out of the exhibition, he says just enough to hit his mark.