Known and Strange Things

Teju Cole

Faber & Faber, £17.99

Review by Malcolm Forbes

TEJU COLE’S first two books, Open City and Every Day Is for the Thief, managed simultaneously to adhere to and resist the classification “novel”. Each was thin on dialogue, lean on plot and low on character development. Fact became fused with fiction as Cole tracked the wandering feet and meandering thoughts of a peripatetic narrator navigating, in one book, melting-pot New York, and in the other, the hectic hub of Lagos.

Cole’s latest book, Known and Strange Things, comes marketed as a collection of the author’s essays, but once again the appellation feels inaccurate. So broad is the format, style and subject matter of the work here that the simpler, if vaguer, tag of “nonfiction” is more apposite. In an attempt at taxonomy, Cole has arranged his 55 pieces into three sections: Reading Things, Seeing Things and Being There. He encompasses topics as diverse as politics, art, photography, literature and travel (“my most vital enthusiasms”) and impresses with keen-eyed observations, recollections and analysis. The result is a book that is as edifying as it is entertaining.

Black Body, the first piece in the first section on reading, is one of the collection’s highlights. Part-personal history, part-literary history, Cole recounts James Baldwin’s stay in the Swiss village of Leukerbad in the early 1950s, while retracing his steps. Baldwin wrote about his singular status as the first black man to have set foot in the village, and Cole uses this as a springboard to relate the glances and the stares that he as a Nigerian-American suffers (“anywhere I go outside Africa”) and then to expound on the enduring “disposability of black life”.

Other pieces follow a similar structure. Always Returning is another literary pilgrimage, in this case an account of how Cole played truant from a conference in Norwich to visit W.G. Sebald’s grave. As in Sebald’s artful, multifaceted novels, Cole ruminates on war, memory, grief and the English countryside, allowing one subject to spawn, segue into or tease out another.

The book’s middle section comes stocked with film reviews, art reviews and theatre reviews (including one perceptive critique of an all-black RSC production of Julius Caesar), but the main focus is the rich seam of articles on Cole’s other, non-literary love, photography. We get appreciations of photographers, in-depth and up-close studies of their work, and insight into the craft. Two essays show the reader the darker side of this “memorial art”: in Memories of Things Unseen Cole reminds us of the sinister aspect of catalogued images (“Our faces are becoming not only unforgettable but inescapable”); while in Death in the Browser Tab he watches the videoed shooting of unarmed black man Walter Scott by a trigger-happy white police officer – and then tries to make sense of it by reading The Two Drovers by the victim’s namesake.

The series of extended postcards and uneventful travelogues that comprise Cole’s last section make for less captivating reading. Interspersed with them, however, are bolder pieces in which the heading Being There refers not to exploring a foreign location but witnessing a newsworthy moment – from highs such as Obama’s presidential win to the lows of Nigerian mob justice.

There are occasions when the force of a judgement, the weight of an argument or the tone of an anecdote is impaired by an admission that is either pretentious (“For years now, when I cannot sleep, I rise from bed and watch Jacques Derrida talk”) or precious (“I love Sebald to the point of tears”). Fortunately, both instances are kept in short supply. More predominant are Cole’s sustained displays of fierce intelligence, fine-tuned novelistic detail and expert turns of phrase. A portrait is “a visual soliloquy”. His Alpine photographs are “small instalments on a debt to beauty”. Music helps you “create your own internal weather.”

By covering so many bases, Cole ensures that there is something for every reader. As all of these essays were previously published, in print or online, it is likely that only the most ardent devotee craving new material will be disappointed. Graze, cherry-pick, or devour it in one sitting: Known and Strange Things provides ample and stimulating food for thought.