In early 2017, when PEN America named the finalists for their array of awards, Teju Cole's essay collection, Known and Strange Things, became the first work in the organization's history to be named a finalist in two categories: the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Cole's collection has probably garnered such distinction because it is, at once, a travel book, a treatise on photography and the visual arts, a collection of literary intellectual commentary, and a memoir. Given this formal variety, Cole claims that no argument frames Known and Strange Things . However, reading the collection's four sections as separate attempts to find the most useful angle for interpreting human experience, Cole's oblique point of view emerges.The Grey Album, "a removed shadow book." It's through that Known and Strange Things finds focus: written during a political era framed by "forever wars," terrorism, our collective traumatization, and now renewed authoritarianism, Cole's essays offer ways of our through the arts' beautiful provocations.Known and Strange Things, the essays he's gathered "favor epiphany" over "argumentative opinion." These encounters might be transporting, but they are likely to be destabilizing: writing of the Swedish poet Tranströmer, Cole notes that the late Nobel laureate's lines contain "a luminous simplicity that expands until it pushes your ego out of the nest, and there you are, alone with Truth."Every Day Is for the Thief and the PEN/Hemingway Award–winning novel Open City are both narrated by a young Nigerian psychiatrist living in Harlem. (Though unnamed in the novella, he is called Julius in Open City .) Working in the space between the past and the present tenses, Cole gives his fiction the feel of ongoingness, often right from the opening sentence: "I wake up late the morning I'm meant to go to the consulate," the narrator announces at the start of Every Day Is for the Thief . Julius begins Open City as though he were demonstrating continuity between the two narratives: "And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city." Readers feel as though they're joining Julius in medias res. Trois Couleurs, specifically Red, that Cole learns "how unforeseen encounters can subtly pile up and determine the course of a person's life."Known and Strange Things, is where Cole deploys those contrast dyes to greatest effect. Writing primarily about photography, still and moving, Cole assays about formal masters like the director Michael Haneke, and the photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson and Saul Leiter. When he takes up Gueorgui Pinkhassov, Cole wants to examine the ramifications of the photographer's use of "digital photography and its children, Instagram among them." Though Cole doesn't dismiss anyone's choice to use cell phone cameras, the associated technologies, and social media (Google, Flickr, Photoshop, Snapchat, Instagram and its filters) to curate their lives, "nevertheless," he writes in a riff on Roland Barthes, "in looking at a great photographic image from the past or the present, we know when blood is drawn. We know that some images, regardless of medium, still have the power to suddenly enliven us. And we know that these images are few." Known and Strange Things as Cole reads Roy DeCarava's use of chiaroscuro while developing his photographs of African Americans: "Instead of trying to brighten blackness, he went against expectation and darkened it further. What is dark is neither blank nor empty. It is in fact full of wise light, which, with patient seeing, can open out into glories."Walton Muyumba is an associate professor of English at Indiana University-Bloomington. He has written for the Oxford American and the Los Angeles Review of Books and is the author of The Shadow and the Act: Black Intellectual Practice, Jazz Improvisation, and Philosophical Pragmatism.
Reviewer: Walton Muyumba
The Barnes & Noble Review
[Cole's] international access as an author, art historian and photographer…shapes not only his obsessions but, in a chicken-and-egg sense, determines his gaze. He takes in news from African countries and American cities; but also, by necessity and interest, Asian, European and Latin American culture and history. In short, the world belongs to Cole and is thornily and gloriously allied with his curiosity and his personhood…With our ever-enlarging global access to the visions and voices and influences of others, Cole attempts to untangle the knot of who or what belongs to us and to whom or what do we belong as artists, thinkers and, finally, human beings…[A] brilliant collection…On every level of engagement and critique, Known and Strange Things is an essential and scintillating journey.
The New York Times Book Review - Claudia Rankine
05/23/2016
On every level of engagement and critique, Known and Strange Things is an essential and scintillating journey.”—Claudia Rankine, The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) —The Atlantic Known and Strange Things ] reveals Cole’s extraordinary talent and his capacious mind.”—Time —LA Times Every Day Is for the Thief and Open City .”—The Guardian —Chicago Tribune —The Boston Globe —San Francisco Chronicle —Vanity Fair —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette —The New Statesman Known and Strange Things possesses] a passion for justice, a deep sympathy for the poor and the powerless around the world, and a fiery moral outrage.”—Poets and Writers —Minneapolis Star Tribune —The Seattle Times Known and Strange Things contains many essays that do this beautifully, combining the thoughtful pause with insistent questioning, tumbling over different terrains, picking up bits of them as they go, taking on the grain and texture of all the places they’ve been.”—Financial Times —Men’s Journal —O: The Oprah Magazine Known and Strange Things ] showcases the magnificent breadth of subjects [Cole] is able to plumb with . . . passion and eloquence.”—Harper’s Bazaar —The Age Known and Strange Things reveals] fascinating aspects of Cole’s searching and unusual mind . . . omnivorously exploring everything from Virginia Woolf to his now-famous essay on the White Savior Industrial Complex.”—The Washington Post —Norman Rush, The New York Review of Books —BookPage —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) —Publishers Weekly —Booklist (starred review) —Vox .”—Chris Abani, author of Graceland and The Face —Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to Me “Absolutely wonderful . . . Teju Cole is so erudite, so laser sharp, that his intelligence shimmers, but best of all, his personality shines through as being kind and generous. I found myself transported and moved deeply.”—Petina Gappah, author of The Book of Memory
03/15/2016
★ 2016-05-04
