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shaunagm's review against another edition
4.0
A wandering, thought-provoking collection of short essays about the ways we relate to each other, through art, travel, history, and conversations with friends and strangers.
My only complaint is that so many of the essays were about art and photography, and yet the edition of the book I read had only a dozen or so pages of the referenced art. I don't know whether this was due to space or cost constraints, or trouble with licenses, but I definitely preferred the essays where I could actually see the works in question.
My only complaint is that so many of the essays were about art and photography, and yet the edition of the book I read had only a dozen or so pages of the referenced art. I don't know whether this was due to space or cost constraints, or trouble with licenses, but I definitely preferred the essays where I could actually see the works in question.
line_so_fine's review against another edition
4.0
Reading Cole's essays here and there in the New Yorker doesn't quite give you the full picture of the sheer breadth of his writing. From politics to movies to photography to poetry to identity to literature and on and on- the ground he covers is wide. Most of the pieces are short and sweet- I read this all in one day.
ochutchinson's review against another edition
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
Fantastic collection of essays, quick thoughts, art critique, and lovely writing.
lectrice's review against another edition
4.0
4.5: The sign of a strong essayist for me is that they make even unfamiliar topics or subjects somehow riveting, and Cole mostly succeeds here. I found a few essays less engaging but on the whole, his range, erudition, language, and tone are impressive. And he’s a talented photographer on top of it
bookchasm's review against another edition
For three years I have guiltily side-eyed this collection of essays sitting on my nightstand. I finished maybe half. They are brilliant, but I came to a section that was too brilliant for me, and there it sits.
jdscott50's review
5.0
Cole's latest work is a collection of previously published essays focusing on books, movies, photography, personal experiences on race, war, and colonialism. The stories are interconnected only in that they are mostly reviews. A good review, however, can reveal the thoughts of the reviewer more than the author's work. We can see through Teju Cole's lens though his reviews. Many of the topics deal with perception. Overall an excellent collection of his work.
NOTES FROM
Known and Strange Things
Teju Cole
September 17, 2016
Black Body
To be a stranger is to be looked at, but to be black is to be looked at especially.
September 17, 2016
Black Body
The lines throb with sadness. What he loves does not love him in return.
September 17, 2016
Black Body
It can hoard its malice in great stillness for a long time, all the while pretending to look the other way. Like misogyny, it is atmospheric. You don’t see it at first. But understanding comes.
September 17, 2016
Black Body
The news of the day (old news, but raw as a fresh wound) is that black American life is disposable from the point of view of policing, sentencing, economic policy, and countless terrifying forms of disregard. There is a vivid performance of innocence, but there’s no actual innocence left. The moral ledger remains so far in the negative that we can’t even get started on the question of reparations. Baldwin wrote “Stranger in the Village” more than sixty years ago. Now what?
September 17, 2016
Natives on the Boat
aggressive in his lack of sympathy toward Africa, so brutal in his treatment of women. He knew nothing about that. He knew only that he needed help standing up, needed help walking across the grand marble-floored foyer toward the private elevator. The city below. At certain heights, you get vertigo, but you also see what you otherwise might not.
September 17, 2016
Housing Mr. Biswas
One finally reads or rereads Mr. Biswas for this balanced totality, this fecund complexity, for the way it brings to startling fruition in twentieth-century Trinidad the promise of the nineteenth-century European novel.
September 17, 2016
Tomas Tranströmer
There is little elaborate construction evident; rather, the sense is of the sudden arrival of what was already there, as when a whale comes up for air: massive, exhilarating, and evanescent.
September 17, 2016
Always Returning
I searched. Finally, coming around the chancel, I saw Sebald’s gravestone: a slab of dark marble, a slender marker shaded by a large green bush. There he is, I thought. The teacher I never knew, the friend I met only posthumously.
September 17, 2016
Always Returning
I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the University of East Anglia, where he had taught for more than thirty years. A large magpie followed me around, disappearing for occasional spells, but always returning, a solitary bird, sharp black and white, bigger than I expected, and as starkly devoid of color as a woodcut. I am not superstitious, and thought nothing of it. But the bird was persistent. These things, as Sebald said in one of his last interviews, once you have seen them, have a habit of returning, and they want attention. He said this with regard to the interred past, but I think he possibly meant more
September 17, 2016
A Better Quality of Agony
As Deraniyagala said in a recent interview, she found that “writing is a much better quality of agony than trying to forget.” In accurately describing her family’s life—and I’m drawn here to the root word “cura,” care, from which we get “accurate”—she rescues her family from uncaring, careless fate. Losing them plunged her into darkness. Writing about what happened brings them back into the light, a little.
September 17, 2016
Double Negative
Photography is a fast art now, except for those who are too old-fashioned to shoot digital. But for most of the art’s history—until about fifteen years ago—most photographers had no choice but to be slow. Film had to be loaded into a camera, the shot had to be taken with some awareness of the cost of materials, the negative had to be developed, and the print had to be enlarged. A certain meticulousness was necessary for photographs, a certain irreducible calmness of temperament.
September 17, 2016
In Place of Thought
As I wrote my modern cognates, I was struck at how close some of them came to the uninterrogated platitudes in my own head. Stupidity stalks us all.
September 17, 2016
A Conversation with Aleksandar Hemon
We’ve been friends since, and I’ve been regularly looking for ways of listening to—and reading—Teju Cole. The man knows a lot, and knows what to do with it.
September 17, 2016
A Conversation with Aleksandar Hemon
made a sideways move from art history into writing, and I think this, in part, is why I also find the stern distinction between fiction and nonfiction odd. It’s not at all a natural way of splitting up narrated experience, just as we don’t go around the museum looking for fictional or nonfictional paintings. Painters know that everything is a combination of what’s observed, what’s imagined, what’s overheard, and what’s been done before. Is Monet a nonfiction painter and Ingres a fiction painter? It’s the least illuminating thing we could ask about their works. Some lean more heavily on what’s seen, some more on what’s imagined, but all draw on various sources.
September 17, 2016
A Conversation with Aleksandar Hemon
All I want is to be dragged down into a space of narrative that I haven’t been in before, into a place where, as you say, a truth is created. And let’s be frank: even the most scrupulous New Yorker article is an act of authorial will and framing, and is not as strictly “nonfictional” as it suits us to think it is.
September 17, 2016
A Conversation with Aleksandar Hemon
There is no way to leave history. There is no other place to go. As a diasporic person I’ve learned that it’s in fact really easy to leave your country. What is difficult is leaving its history, as it follows (or leads) you like a shadow. That kind of history is in your body (as it was in Lazarus’s) and cannot be relegated to a museum or, as in America, to entertainment.
September 19, 2016
Unnamed Lake
It seemed to me instead that my consciousness had become like a narrow, high-walled corridor crammed with everything I had lately read or seen, every landscape I had recently passed through or touched on in my thoughts. The intensity and speed of these images—which had come to resemble a slide show played at absurd speed—became harder and harder to bear until I suddenly sat upright, shutting down the show, as it were, and got out of bed.
September 19, 2016
Unnamed Lake
A composer who loses his hearing can still compose. The real disaster for a composer would be to lose the ability to count.
September 19, 2016
Wangechi Mutu
Out there on the coast where I stayed, just outside Lamu, there are bats flying around, there’s the sound of the ocean, and there’s this magical atmosphere. This is the way the stories get under your skin.”
September 19, 2016
Red Shift
The search for one’s double is like a bird’s when looking for a branch. Color forms another set of links in the film: red streetlights, billboards, furniture, clothing seem interconnected in the same gentle and elusive way that the characters are. They create an alternative map of the city.
September 19, 2016
Object Lesson
We look at them anyway, for the change that they bring about elsewhere: in the core of the sympathetic self. We look at them for the way they cooperate with the imagination, the way they contain what cannot otherwise be accommodated, and the way they grant us, to however modest a degree, some kind of solace.
September 20, 2016
A True Picture of Black Skin
is as if the world, in its careless way, had been saying, “You people are simply too dark,” and these artists, intent on obliterating this absurd way of thinking, had quietly responded, “But you have no idea how dark we yet may be, nor what that darkness may contain.”
September 20, 2016
Perfect and Unrehearsed
The photographer has to be there to begin with, tuned in and tuned up, active, asking a family for permission to attend a funeral in Port-au-Prince, following a man and a donkey down the road in Bombardopolis. The rest is fate.
September 20, 2016
Touching Strangers
When we sit at a café or in a restaurant, we pretend to be wholly focused on our food and our companions, but we spend some of our time imagining the lives of the people around us all the time. Those two men holding hands a few tables over: How long have they been together? Why is the woman at that table over there crying quietly into her napkin? What will the suspiciously older man seated with her do about it? Is he her father or her lover? And the anxious woman who has been alone at the bar for a while now: What’s happening with her? Has her date stood her up? Or is that her job, to wait until some generous stranger takes interest? We do this habitually, making up stories about other people, and, at the same time, they are certainly making up stories about us.
September 20, 2016
Touching Strangers
Any society is governed by the invisible perimeter fence of its taboos. Benign
September 21, 2016
Memories of Things Unseen
I am more familiar with Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, where long-finished interactions can be retraced and relived, and the voiding of the record on Snapchat was startling. But it was also a relief. Our real selves remained, but the photographs were no longer there, and something about this felt like a sequence more preferable to the other way around, where the image lives on and the model is irretrievable. But just as nothing can be permanently retained, nothing is ever really gone. Somewhere out there, perhaps in the cloud or in some clandestine server, is the optical afterimage of our interaction: the faces, the shoes, the texts. In these all-seeing days, the traffic between memory and forgetting becomes untrackable. Photography is at the nerve center of our paradoxical memorial impulses: we need it there for how it helps us frame our losses, but we can also sense it crowding in on ongoing experience, imposing closure on what should still be open.
September 21, 2016
Memories of Things Unseen
Photography is inescapably a memorial art. It selects, out of the flow of time, a moment to be preserved, with the moments before and after falling away like sheer cliffs. At a dinner party earlier this year, I was in conversation with someone who asked me to define photography. I suggested that it is about retention: not only the ability to make an image directly out of the interaction between light and the tangible world but also the possibility of saving that image. A shadow thrown onto a wall is not photography. But if the wall is photosensitive and the shadow remains after the body has moved on, that is photography. Human creativity, since the beginning of art, has found ways to double the visible world. What photography did was to give the world a way to double its own appearance: the photograph results directly from what is, from the light that travels from a body through an aperture onto a surface.
September 22, 2016
Death in the Browser Tab
The video from North Charleston seemed to enact this disregard, this voiding of empathy, in seconds that felt like hours, seconds in which the shooter could have stopped and reconsidered, just as the murderous drover Robin could also have stopped and reconsidered, but didn’t.
September 22, 2016
Death in the Browser Tab
Finally, I start to watch footage of Walter Scott’s last moments. It’s the third time, and it makes me uneasy and unhappy. The video begins with the man holding the camera racing toward the fence. A few seconds later, Walter Scott breaks away from Michael Slager. Slager plants his feet and raises his gun. There is still time. He shoots once, then thrice in quick succession. Scott continues to run. There is still time. That is when I stop the video and exit the browser.
September 22, 2016
The Unquiet Sky
Dronestagram. One, hosted at the website www.dronestagr.am, invites submissions from aerial-photography enthusiasts who are using small, commercially available or homemade drones to take photos or make videos.
September 22, 2016
Against Neutrality
The camera is an instrument of transformation. It can make what it sees more beautiful, more gruesome, milder, darker, all the while insisting on the plain reality of its depiction
September 22, 2016
Far Away from Here
Along the way, I felt the constant company of doubt: my lack of talent, my impostor’s syndrome, my fear of boring others. Every once in a great while, there was finally a superb picture, but when I looked at it the following week, I would see that it actually wasn’t very good: too obvious, too derivative. Three thousand photographs and three thousand doubts.
September 23, 2016
A Reader’s War
I know language is unreliable, that it is not a vending machine of the desires, but the law seems to be getting us nowhere. And so I take helpless refuge in literature again, rewriting the opening lines of seven well-known books: Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Pity. A signature strike leveled the florist’s. Call me Ishmael. I was a young man of military age. I was immolated at my wedding. My parents are inconsolable. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead bearing a bowl of lather. A bomb whistled in. Blood on the walls. Fire from heaven. I am an invisible man. My name is unknown. My loves are a mystery. But an unmanned aerial vehicle from a secret location has come for me. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was killed by a Predator drone. Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His torso was found, not his head. Mother died today. The program saves American lives.
September 23, 2016
A Reader’s War
Nevertheless, a man who names among his favorite books Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Robinson’s Gilead, and Melville’s Moby-Dick is playing the game pretty seriously. His own feel for language in his two books, his praise for authors as various as Philip Roth and Ward Just, as well as the circumstantial evidence of the books he’s been seen holding (the Collected Poems of Derek Walcott, most strikingly), add up to a picture of a man for whom an imaginative engagement with literature is inseparable from life. It thrilled me, when he was elected, to think of the president’s nightstand looking rather similar to mine (again, mindful of the cliché; again, unable to elude its grasp). We had, once again, a reader in chief, a man in the line of Jefferson and Lincoln.
September 23, 2016
Break It Down
That which doesn’t speak dumbfounds. After all, who can tell what such objects are thinking? Best to destroy the inscrutable, the ancient, if one is to truly usher in a pure new world. So, the invaders continue their work in Timbuktu with enthusiasm and good cheer, smashing pots, breaking bricks, rattling at the doors of the mosque. It takes a lot of work to silence silent objects. But already it is clear that not only the people watching from behind the gate are consumed with fear
September 23, 2016
The White Savior Industrial Complex
People of color, women, and gays—who now have greater access to the centers of influence that ever before—are under pressure to be well behaved when talking about their struggles. There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner: newspapers love to describe words or deeds as “racially charged” even in those cases when it would be more honest to say “racist”; we agree that there is rampant misogyny, but misogynists are nowhere to be found; homophobia is a problem, but no one is homophobic. One cumulative effect of this policed language is that when someone dares to point out something as obvious as white privilege, it is seen as unduly provocative. Marginalized voices in America have fewer and fewer avenues to speak plainly about what they suffer; the effect of this enforced civility is that those voices are falsified or blocked entirely from the discourse.
September 23, 2016
Blind Spot
When we write fiction, we write within what we know. But we also write in the hope that what we have written will somehow outdistance us. We hope, through the spooky art of writing, to trick ourselves into divulging truths that we do not know we know
All Excerpts From
Cole, Teju. “Known and Strange Things.” Random House Publishing Group - Random House, 2016-08-09. iBooks.
This material may be protected by copyright.
oczerniecka's review against another edition
3.0
It's hard to select rating for the book. I did not read in all, I selected essays that I liked, that when started reading I wanted to know more, wanted to keep reading. There are not many of essays like this in the book.
First of all, most of the essays were just not for me, they were too thick with detailed information and were overwhelming. I did not enjoyed essays that presented life of a fictional character through this characters eyes as presented by Teju Cole. This is something that many people will definably enjoy, something that for certain readers and art enthusiasts or art historians, will be extremely interesting and worth reading. But not for me.
However essays that were about Cole's personal experiences, his travels, his life or how art affects him were really good and I enjoyed them. Those felt just real, without overthinking. Teju Cole has a very interesting view on the modern technology, how art can be a part of everyday life, how it can be seen and made every single second, how effortless it can be, how easy to access. He writes what he thinks about Instagram (he follows only one photographer there, and himself does not post anything) and Snapchat. I especially likes his essay that mentions Snapchat, how photography often is a proof for existence and a proof of destruction. Photos stay, and items in the photos often do not. Snapchat is a way of communicating without leaving a proof that something looked like this at this specific moment and in future it will cease to exist.
Definitively not a book for everyone, but everyone will find at least one essay that will speak to them. So many it is a book for everyone after all? You decide.
First of all, most of the essays were just not for me, they were too thick with detailed information and were overwhelming. I did not enjoyed essays that presented life of a fictional character through this characters eyes as presented by Teju Cole. This is something that many people will definably enjoy, something that for certain readers and art enthusiasts or art historians, will be extremely interesting and worth reading. But not for me.
However essays that were about Cole's personal experiences, his travels, his life or how art affects him were really good and I enjoyed them. Those felt just real, without overthinking. Teju Cole has a very interesting view on the modern technology, how art can be a part of everyday life, how it can be seen and made every single second, how effortless it can be, how easy to access. He writes what he thinks about Instagram (he follows only one photographer there, and himself does not post anything) and Snapchat. I especially likes his essay that mentions Snapchat, how photography often is a proof for existence and a proof of destruction. Photos stay, and items in the photos often do not. Snapchat is a way of communicating without leaving a proof that something looked like this at this specific moment and in future it will cease to exist.
Definitively not a book for everyone, but everyone will find at least one essay that will speak to them. So many it is a book for everyone after all? You decide.
noahregained's review
4.0
Special and worthwhile without managing to coast on goodness, or perhaps even excellence, for very long. Like life in that way.
He is most clearly limited when trying to discourse about statehood, violence, power, and Obama. He, evidently, worked with a discourse that was limited in its access to these things, one inflected by American mass media. I was adolescent until 2016, and so I don’t really know if media has improved or just my thought, but Teju Cole seems to have spent a lot of time with thought that isn’t worthy of his attention?
His aesthetics do not plumb very deeply into consciousness, its limits and habits (philosophy is the comparison point here— it should be and is). Some genealogy of photography was nice. Some complication of writing and its place was nice, although he mostly bounces off of vulgarities instead of fitting himself out in the ontic.
I needed “Unnamed Lake,” a writing accompanied by Derrida and dreams; “Natives on the boat,” a writing with Naipaul and Conrad and lives; “Poetry of the Disregarded” and “Always Returning” with Sebald; “The Island” somewhere; “A Piece of the Wall” in Arizona and Mexico.
He is least limited in (re)producing melancholy. He mourns enough, but maybe struggles to find better life.
He is most clearly limited when trying to discourse about statehood, violence, power, and Obama. He, evidently, worked with a discourse that was limited in its access to these things, one inflected by American mass media. I was adolescent until 2016, and so I don’t really know if media has improved or just my thought, but Teju Cole seems to have spent a lot of time with thought that isn’t worthy of his attention?
His aesthetics do not plumb very deeply into consciousness, its limits and habits (philosophy is the comparison point here— it should be and is). Some genealogy of photography was nice. Some complication of writing and its place was nice, although he mostly bounces off of vulgarities instead of fitting himself out in the ontic.
I needed “Unnamed Lake,” a writing accompanied by Derrida and dreams; “Natives on the boat,” a writing with Naipaul and Conrad and lives; “Poetry of the Disregarded” and “Always Returning” with Sebald; “The Island” somewhere; “A Piece of the Wall” in Arizona and Mexico.
He is least limited in (re)producing melancholy. He mourns enough, but maybe struggles to find better life.
profpeaton's review
3.0
I enjoyed the wide range of this book; from essays on literature and photography, to politics, war, and immigration. It is a good book to read over extended time, as I did. This was my first introduction to Teju Cole.
pawlugrech's review
4.0
A book that, probably, I would not have read had I not spotted it in the public library but am now incredibly glad that I did such is the emotive power of the writing. This is a collection of essays by Cole that revolve around a number of themes - namely politics, photography, writing and places - that avoids the familiar downfalls of such books that can be boring or repetitive. Known and Strange Things is never the former and only rarely the latter. Instead Cole manages to write with a richness of thought and knowledge on various aspects that is often humbling; how can one individual have such a deep understanding and the ability to call up as deep a reference pool as he does? And how can he imbue into each essay such power that one often has to put down the book to let the author's thoughts and comments sink in?
This is a book with real power; of thought, conviction and expression. It is also a book that deserves to be kept in one's library to provide a reference and be re-read so as to fully appreciate its quality.
This is a book with real power; of thought, conviction and expression. It is also a book that deserves to be kept in one's library to provide a reference and be re-read so as to fully appreciate its quality.