REVIEW OF TREMOR Teju Cole

By TOM WELLS

Tremor by Teju Cole

 

It may say "A Novel" on the cover, but "Tremor" by Nigerian-born, American-educated, Harvard-employed creative writing professor Teju Cole comes off as a series of essays about myriad topics, including musical and visual arts, spousal relations, casual racism, and horrific Western brutality toward indigenous peoples, all wrapped around 24 snapshots of Nigerian life, appropriately related by the professional and academic photographer Tunde.

 

In a written style not unlike the hypnotic drone of a chant, Cole weaves between the achingly personal and the cataclysmically historical. One of the standout conceits of the book is Tunde's observations on the Turner painting "The Slave Ship," a work the artist originally titled "Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On." Neither title speaks to the pure evil of the incident, which took place 59 years before Turner's painting was first shown at the Royal Academy in 1840. In 1781, the captain of the British ship Zong, on which drinking water had run low, ordered 132 chained slaves—not just the dead and dying--to be thrown into the sea in order to collect insurance money that would not have been forthcoming if they had died of thirst and related maladies.

 

For those of us unfamiliar with the Zong incident, the news of its occurrence is deeply shocking. Yet Tunde/Cole's telling of it is done with such dispassion that the reader reacts more out of historical interest than visceral horror. This tone of academic calm that pervades the various story lines, including the Nigerian "snapshots," acts like a verbal tranquilizer, blunting the reader's emotional response and underscoring "the stubborn gap between what he is able to think and what he is able to do." As Tunde/Cole writes about serial killer Samuel Little, who confessed to 93 murders, "All that the story teaches is that human suffering is a useless mystery," especially when considering that Little became "the most prolific serial career" in an America built on First Nations genocide.

 

If atrocity is abstract and historical, then happiness is personal and fleeting. Nothing illustrates this juxtaposition more than the story of the husband of Tunde's friend Lucas. The husband is on a break from a business trip in Haiti when he invites a young man on a picnic. He described the hours with the boy as some of the happiest of his life. "That's what he and the boy were in the middle of, a happiest day, when they felt a rolling motion underneath them. Looking up they saw in the distance the city from which now a great cloud of dust was rising." The city was Port-au-Prince, the earthquake magnitude was 7.0 and the death toll would exceed 200,000.

 

It is left for Tunde's partner Sadako to give balance to the riot of observations this book contains when she is given a voice in the final pages and describes a gathering at their house. "Bowls are passed around with heaps of white rice on which gumbo is served and it's as though people don't realize how hungry they are until they begin to eat. Drinks are expected at parties but real food isn't.  But we love to feed people. What a gift to get to do this in community.  How great is what surrounds us, how insubstantial what preoccupies us. I make eye contact with my love, the one who keeps me from losing my head, the one I keep from losing his footing."

 

***½ raised to **** after JFDI meeting

 

REVIEW OF HAMNET

BY TOM WELLS

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

 

Open kimono. The reason I didn't rate this book one star is that I didn't want to appear sexist in regard to the winner of the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction. But in the afterglow of the latest JFDI gathering, I've come to regard it as not just bad but contemptible. For here a writer, of all professions, portrays the greatest writer in the language in which she writes as, first, a callow Latin teacher, later, an absentee father and, finally, a canny real estate investor. Forget his other-worldly facility with the written and spoken word. 

 

But then it's the novel's greatest strength that Maggie O'Farrell avoids exposing the weakness of her own prose (rhetorical questions? really?) by going toe-to-toe with The Bard. Instead, she opts for a hackneyed cast of characters--the abusive father, the shrewish mother-in-law, the sensitive boy, the sickly girl--straight out of a Harlequin romance before pivoting to a heroine cribbed from the Twilight series.

 

For Anne "Agnes" Hathaway is not just your run-of-the-mill 16th C. wife and mother. No, she has powers far beyond those of mortal men, even (or especially) one who cranked out 38 plays and 154 sonnets in 24 short years. She is clairvoyant. She communes with nature. She gets to the true soul of plants and animals and people, not wasting her time on merely making memorable, incisive and enduring observations about the human condition. 

 

Sadly, she lacks healing powers, and so her daughter suffers from a host of childhood maladies while her son dies of a sudden illness. That son is Hamnet, a name interchangeable with Hamlet. The way that Agnes is interchangeable with Anne. The way that this book is interchangeable with loo paper. 

** but really *

REVIEW OF DEMON COPPERHEAD Barbara Kingsolver

By Tom Wells 

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

 

Barbara Kingsolver has said in interviews that a novel is not worth writing if it does not have a social purpose. She has adopted as her muse Charles Dickens, whose novels addressed such Victorian ills as child labour, debtor's prison and anti-Catholic bigotry.  With DEMON COPPERHEAD—a deserved Pulitzer Prize Winner and one of the great American novels of this or any century--she has taken Dickens's most autobiographical novel, DAVID COPPERFIELD, and transformed it into a funny, heartbreaking and searing critique of two of America's most pressing problems, social inequality and opioid addiction.  

 

Like its progenitor, DEMON COPPERHEAD is a first-person account of a boy's harrowing journey to manhood, one that includes parental death, step-fatherly abuse, labour exploitation and homelessness, his only relief coming from the fortuitous discovery of a caring maternal relative. Yet, whereas David Copperfield encounters hardship despite his avoidance of moral pitfalls, Damon Fields (aka Demon Copperhead) is too often the author of his own troubles, notably when he chooses self-medication over surgery for a football knee injury and when he seals his first carnal embrace with a fentanyl kiss.

 

Still, it's not as if Demon has had the benefit of sound adult guidance in support of his decision-making. Whatever positive influence he manages to find himself under—from Mrs. Peggot, Aunt June, Betsy Woodall and Coach Winfield--tends to be doled out in small doses before invariably dissipating or disappearing altogether. And their ministrations are nowhere near enough to overcome the circumstances and consequences of Demon's birth. "If a mother is lying in her own piss and pill bottles while they're slapping the kid she's shunted out, telling him to look alive, likely the bastard is doomed. Kid born to the junkie is a junkie."  Which is what Demon becomes, with no small push from a drug industry providing ample incentive to the medical profession to prescribe opioids as miracle cures when they are nothing more than highly addictive palliatives. 

 

The only miracle here is that Demon survives, ultimately with the help of Angus, his one reliable friend, to glimpse a future with a sliver of hope. For Doom has ordained not only Demon's descent into addiction but also his immunity from death in the ocean. Which is where he and Angus are heading as the story comes to an end. "The trip itself, just the getting there, possibly the best part of my life so far. That's where we are. Well past the Christianberg exit. Past Richmond and still pointed east. Headed for the one big thing that is not going to swallow me alive."

*****

#81 TREMOR Teju Cole

 

TREMOR
by
TEJU COLE

A refracted view of a West African professor across time, space, and events.