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A review by thearbiter89
Known and Strange Things: Essays by Teju Cole
4.0
Known and Strange Things is a collection of essays, some long, some surprisingly brief, by the Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole. The essays are split into three broad categories - essays about literature and poetry, essays about photography, and commentaries about the world we live in. The subjects that his essays touch upon are wide-ranging but mostly focus on race, identity, the dynamic of the powerful in relation to the powerless; the vapidity of Instagram, and other topics of import.
As with many such works, what is relatable is often what lingers longer and more indelibly on the mind. To that end, Cole's essays on poets and photographers leave imprints of varying levels of permanence. When he waxes about the rarefied wordplay of poets or pontificates on the sublimity of a photographer's oeuvre, the result is less illuminating than when he speaks about his experiences as a black man wandering through the streets of Leukerbad, Switzerland, in the footsteps of his spiritual literary forebear, James Baldwin, or discusses a photographer's use of Instagram as an experiment in an artistic medium, in stolid (yet pitiful) opposition to the reams of prodigious vacuity that pours forth from the universe of its other users.
The most lasting imprints are left by the essays for the sake of which I bought the book - those that relate writer to world. Cole's recounting of his reactions to the 2008 election is a study in ambivalence, contrasting the symbolic power of this victory with its apparent tokenism. His essay on drone strikes, orchestrated by what was probably the most professorial, thoughtful, and empathetic president in modern times (as evidenced by his choice in literature), was a revelatory moment of what it must have felt to be a conscientious citizen of America during those times, embroiled in an endless, staining war, trying to reconcile the Obama of change with the Obama that adds names (with full, compassionate apprehension of the costs to human life) to the kill list.
And of course, the essay on the white savior industrial complex illuminates the phenomenon of the powerful salving their conscience through interventions in victimised third world countries, while blissfully unaware of their role in perpetrating the conditions that lead to such privation in the first place. That almost Chomskyite concept, polemical in its extremity as it is, illuminates powerfully a kernel of truth often obscured by the incessant signalling of virtue from its perpetrators (although in my view, it would be more accurately, but clunkily, termed the "first-world savior industrial complex", given that this kind of thinking is not limited to the Anglo-Saxon world).
Cole writes with an impassioned pen, sometimes verging on the needlessly verbose, more rarely seemingly almost in thrall to the wending pathways of his superlative prose to write more of it in the same vein, culminating in a crescendo of rhetorical flourish that resonates with a metaphor introduced pages before. It is at times a frustrating read, but other times manages to capture the meanings of things with a striking clarity in the space of a single chunk of prose - a penchant that has worked well for him in the truncated twitter age.
Though I don't think his photography is all that great (sorry).
I give this: 4 out of 5 Yashicas
As with many such works, what is relatable is often what lingers longer and more indelibly on the mind. To that end, Cole's essays on poets and photographers leave imprints of varying levels of permanence. When he waxes about the rarefied wordplay of poets or pontificates on the sublimity of a photographer's oeuvre, the result is less illuminating than when he speaks about his experiences as a black man wandering through the streets of Leukerbad, Switzerland, in the footsteps of his spiritual literary forebear, James Baldwin, or discusses a photographer's use of Instagram as an experiment in an artistic medium, in stolid (yet pitiful) opposition to the reams of prodigious vacuity that pours forth from the universe of its other users.
The most lasting imprints are left by the essays for the sake of which I bought the book - those that relate writer to world. Cole's recounting of his reactions to the 2008 election is a study in ambivalence, contrasting the symbolic power of this victory with its apparent tokenism. His essay on drone strikes, orchestrated by what was probably the most professorial, thoughtful, and empathetic president in modern times (as evidenced by his choice in literature), was a revelatory moment of what it must have felt to be a conscientious citizen of America during those times, embroiled in an endless, staining war, trying to reconcile the Obama of change with the Obama that adds names (with full, compassionate apprehension of the costs to human life) to the kill list.
And of course, the essay on the white savior industrial complex illuminates the phenomenon of the powerful salving their conscience through interventions in victimised third world countries, while blissfully unaware of their role in perpetrating the conditions that lead to such privation in the first place. That almost Chomskyite concept, polemical in its extremity as it is, illuminates powerfully a kernel of truth often obscured by the incessant signalling of virtue from its perpetrators (although in my view, it would be more accurately, but clunkily, termed the "first-world savior industrial complex", given that this kind of thinking is not limited to the Anglo-Saxon world).
Cole writes with an impassioned pen, sometimes verging on the needlessly verbose, more rarely seemingly almost in thrall to the wending pathways of his superlative prose to write more of it in the same vein, culminating in a crescendo of rhetorical flourish that resonates with a metaphor introduced pages before. It is at times a frustrating read, but other times manages to capture the meanings of things with a striking clarity in the space of a single chunk of prose - a penchant that has worked well for him in the truncated twitter age.
Though I don't think his photography is all that great (sorry).
I give this: 4 out of 5 Yashicas