In his first novel in 12 years, Teju Cole is at odds with himself.
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Imagine a younger version of the wandering, ruminative narrator in the books of W.G.
And while Cole adopts Sebalds detached, melancholy affect, Julius is edgier, livelier, more worldly.
The narrators of Sebalds books never hankered for Goan fish curry.
It is, I think, a problem of politics.
The central emotion of the earlier book is ambivalence.
Julius is unsure whether hes Nigerian or German or even a New Yorker.
Tunde is also a cosmopolitan.
He lives in Cambridge, teaches photography at Harvard, travels the world.
Whether such a figure makes for good reading is another matter.
From the opening sentences, we know exactly what sort of novel were going to get.
Cole proceeds with great solemnity to fulfill those expectations.
All those freewheeling associations now circle the same drain to deadening effect.
This passage inaugurates a series of pastiches that comprise the central portion of the book.
The lecture borrows from J.M.
This might be because the central tension in Tundes life is his wish to be good.
He is having problems with Sadako he is reticent, remote but diligently works to solve them.
He is a conscientious teacher, a loyal friend, an ally of the downtrodden and the oppressed.
It also has the effect of implicating the reader who has been in his thrall.
Tunde is also a character who implicates the reader, though in ways that enlarge the gap between them.
Cole makes a decisive break with him: This is where I part ways with Baldwin.
I disagree not with his particular sorrow but with the self-abnegation that pinned him to it.
Bach, so profoundly human, is my heritage.
I am not an interloper when I look at a Rembrandt portrait.
I remember loving this sentiment when I read it the first time Istilllove it.
Coles evolution, if thats what it is, is understandable.
(His material world is set in the center of white learning, Cole writes of Tunde.
Still, there is something of Baldwins self-abnegation that has crept into Coles work.
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