KNOWN AND STRANGE THINGS
By Teju Cole. Random House,
416 pp., paperback, $17
Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole’s brilliant debut novel, “Open City,’’ defied most conventional notions of how fiction should operate. For long stretches of the book, its narrator, a psychiatrist-in-training, simply wandered the streets of New York. Alert, restless, and memory laden, he drank in the city while letting glimpses of his personal history slip into view.
It hardly mattered where he went. His prickly, eclectic, roaming mind was the attraction.
“Open City’’ whetted the appetite for more from that mind. And “Known and Strange Things’’ goes some way toward satisfying it.
In nearly 400 pages of reviews and prose meditations, Cole touches on literature, photography, politics, terrorism, “the supreme waste of time that is racism,’’ and plenty more. A few passages shed light on his approach to fiction. (“I am a novelist . . . and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think.’’) Other pieces offer peeks at his private life.
Cole admits to being “cool on the page and animated in person, except when it is the other way around.’’ He’s a former medical student and a one-time “fervid teenage preacher’’ still suffering from a “hunger for miracle speech.’’
In “Home Strange Home,’’ he gives a brisk account of his unusual background. Born in 1975 in Michigan, where his parents were visiting academics, he was raised in Lagos and returned to the United States to attend college. He has lived here ever since.
“I was born American,’’ he explains, “but I also had to learn to become American.’’
He takes his right to dissent as a serious duty, and his critiques of Obama’s drone wars and American immigration policy are both trenchant and nimble. “[N]o generation is free of the demands of conscience,’’ he declares as he takes on issue after issue.
This may seem unexpectedly forthright coming from a writer as subtle and elusive as Cole is in “Open City.’’ But the meditative qualities of the novel turn up in the essays, too.
His insights on what motivated the rebel group Ansar Dine to destroy Sufi shrines in Timbuktu, for example, go beyond standard-issue op-ed speak.
“There is in iconoclasm an emotional content that is directly linked to the iconoclasts’ own psychology,’’ he notes. “The theological pretext for image destruction is that images are powerless, less than God, uneffective as a source of succor, and therefore disposable. But in reality, iconoclasm is motivated by the iconoclast’s profound belief in the power of the image being destroyed. The love iconoclasts have for icons is a love that dare not speak its name.’’
The book’s scene-setting personal essays are more roomy and satisfying than its critiques of books, movies, and exhibits. Cole’s openness to paradox is a constant, whether he’s speaking for himself (“I was most at home in Switzerland precisely because I wasn’t’’) or citing a kindred spirit like Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu (“To make things make sense, I have to make things up’’).
Cole sees himself as a photographer as much as a writer (his Nigeria-set novel, “Every Day Is for the Thief,’’ mixed photographs with text), and his camera obsessions can get a tad esoteric. Still, the book includes quality reproductions of photographs he admires, along with samples of his own work, so readers can examine them for themselves.
He can be an uncanny mimic. The way he evokes an English cab driver’s speech when he’s in Norfolk paying homage to novelist W.G. Sebald is a treat. The essays work best when there’s a strong story element or sense of place to them.
The volume’s closer, “Blind Spot’’ — about waking up with “a grey veil right across the visual field of my left eye’’ — is quintessential Cole.
It’s an oddly calm account of a writer wondering whether he’s going blind. He did indeed have a medical problem: papillophlebitis, which was treated with laser surgery. But the essay also probes the shortcomings of perception in a more general way. (“Open City,’’ he acknowledges almost in passing, was “in part an examination of the limits of sensitivity and of knowledge.’’)
There’s almost no subject Cole can’t come at from a startling angle. The one worry this collection prompts is that he may be scattering his energies too broadly rather than concentrating on a new boundary-pushing novel that any fan of “Open City’’ will hope is in the works.
KNOWN AND STRANGE THINGS
By Teju Cole
Random House, 416 pp., paperback, $17
Novelist Michael Upchurch (www.michaelupchurchauthor.com) is the former Seattle Times book critic.
