Teju Cole
Teju Cole
Teju Coleis a Nigerian-American writer, photographer, and art historian...
NationalityNigerian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth27 June 1975
CityKalamazoo, MI
CountryNigeria
war sight california
The novelist loses, every time. Politics is insidious, the modern conduct of war (from shoulder-launched rockets to drone strikes) is insidious. Someone presses a button in California and twenty people are incinerated at a wedding in Pakistan. The killer is spared the sight of the corpses.
art reality australia
The Australian Gerald Murnane, a genius on the level of Beckett, is known in Australia and Sweden but almost nowhere else. And I loved Reality Hunger, David Shields' recent novel take on the art of the novel.
grateful book facts
I'm grateful for the likes of Kundera, Murnane, Markson, Berger, and, in his recent work, Coetzee. But no matter how celebrated they are, critics still consider them askance. Elizabeth Costello, for example, is a great novel, but it got quite a critical panning when it was published. The complaint was that it was simply a book of speeches, without the machinery of conventional fiction. Markson's books are compilations of facts and alleged facts, very artfully.
going-away forget you-choose
Things don't go away just because you choose to forget them.
photography difficulty explicit
One of the difficulties of photography is that it is much better at being explicit than at being reticent.
glasses water delay
The content of Saul Leiter's photographs arrives on a sort of delay: it takes a moment after the first glance to know what the picture is about. You don't so much see the image as let it dissolve into your consciousness, like a tablet in a glass of water.
book smartphones cities
So, for a book set in 2006, Open City evades certain markers, while it embraces certain others. Julius doesn't use a smartphone, and he doesn't discuss contemporary US politics in any fine detail.
said mindless
A MOB is not, as is so often said, mindless. A MOB is single-minded.
boston schooled areas
I schooled in the Boston area.
too-short score anxious
Life's too short for anxious score-keeping
writing potatoes environment
Not explicitly, no. Compared to this enormous, relentless evolutionary activity in the built environment, writing is small potatoes.
deception lovers
It wasn't a deception: all lovers live on partial knowledge.
cities palimpsest site
The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten.
real monsters adore
I adore imaginary monsters, but I am terrified of real ones.