Known and Strange Things by Teju ColeRandom House, 2016

The 55 essays that follow this book’s preface are divided into three sections, “Reading Things,” “Seeing Things,” and “Being There” (plus an epilogue). The essays in the first section are literary criticism, mostly; the essays in the second section are about art (mostly, but not only, photography); the essays in the last section are sometimes travel essays and sometimes other kinds of essays about places/being in the world. I found myself pleased by this book right from the prologue: I like that Teju Cole is apparently someone who tries out pens in shops often enough to have something he always writes when doing so, and also that the thing he writes when doing so is a snippet of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf. There are things about Cole’s sensibility that make me nod with recognition: he likes poems by Tomas Tranströmer and essays by André Aciman, and it seems like he likes them for some of the same reasons that I also like those things. (It was a pleasure to read Cole’s essay about Aciman’s Alibis, and to remember my own reading of Alibis, where I was when I read it and how the prose made me pause and grin.) I like how Cole is drawn to moments of/the idea of epiphany. I like sentences like this, from “Black Body”: “The music you travel with helps you to create your own internal weather” (7).

In the section of the book about art, highlights for me included a piece about 20th-century West African photographic portraiture by Malick Sidibé and others, and a piece about Roy DeCarava’s photos and photographing black skin when film was calibrated based on white skin and a piece about Howard French’s Shanghai Photographs, and a piece about Richard Renaldi’s Touching Strangers project, and a really really great piece about Dina Kelberman’s I’m Google, which is such a cool project. I also love this list, from a piece about Saul Leiter: “He returned again and again to a small constellation of subjects: mirrors and glass, shadows and silhouettes, reflection, blur, fog, rain, snow, doors, buses, cars, fedoras” (141). I appreciate that there are color inserts that show some of the artwork being discussed, including some of Cole’s own photographs (which are great, especially the one of the US/Mexico border in Sasabe).

The first piece in the last section of the book, “Far Away from Here,” is probably my favorite in this section: it’s about being in Switzerland and taking photos in the Alps and the history of Alpine tourism and travel/travel photos in general, and about homesickness and its opposite. You can read it online here, with more photos than in the book, and it’s excellent. I also really liked the piece about voting in the 2008 presidential election, and pieces about trips to Brazil and Rome and what Cole sees there, partly but not entirely focused on race/race relations/history, and the piece about another trip to Brazil in which Cole tries to find the spot from which René Burri’s “Men on a Rooftop” was taken.