Blind spot

Teju Cole

Book - 2017

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2nd Floor 779.092/Cole Due Oct 4, 2024
Subjects
Published
New York : Random House [2017]
Language
English
Main Author
Teju Cole (author)
Other Authors
Siri Hustvedt (writer of foreword)
Edition
First edition
Item Description
Includes index.
Physical Description
xvi, 332 pages : color illustrations, map ; 23 cm
ISBN
9780399591075
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

BLIND SPOT, by Teju Cole. (Random House, $40.) This lyrical essay in photographs paired with texts explores the mysteries of the ordinary. Cole's questioning, tentative habit of mind, suspending judgment while hoping for the brief miracle of insight, is a form of what used to be called humanism. MY FAVORITE THING IS MONSTERS, by Emil Ferris. (Fantagraphics, paper, $39.99.) In this graphic novel, drawn entirely on blue-lined notebook paper, a monster-loving 10-year-old in 1960s Chicago tries to make sense of a neighbor's death, her mother's decline from cancer, and her crush on another girl. The story is punctuated by drawings of the covers of the horror magazines she loves. CHEMISTRY, by Weike Wang. (Knopf, $24.95.) A Chinese-American graduate student struggles to find her place in the world, arguing with her parents about whether she can give up her Ph.D. and wondering whether to marry her boyfriend. Wang's debut novel is both honest and funny. CATTLE KINGDOM: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West, by Christopher Knowlton. (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $29.) The 20-year grand era of cowboys and cattle barons is a story of boom and bust. Knowlton's deftnarrative is filled with sharp observations about cowboys and fortune-hunters. THEFT BY FINDING: Diaries (1977-2002), by David Sedaris. (Little, Brown, $28.) Over 25 years, these diaries mutate from a stress vent, to limbering-up exercises for the kind of writing Sedaris is going to do, to rough drafts. His developing voice - graceful, whining, hilarious - is the lifeline that pulls him through. TOWN IS BY THE SEA, by Joanne Schwartz. Illustrated by Sydney Smith. (Groundwood/House of Anansi, $19.95; ages 5 to 9.) This evocation of daily life in a picturesque, run-down seaside town in the 1950s stirs timeless, elemental emotions. The ocean light is contrasted with the coal mine far below, where a boy's father works and where he is destined (and resigned) to follow. OTIS REDDING: An Unfinished Life, by Jonathan Gould. (Crown Archetype, $30.) It's hard to write about Redding; he died at 26 and no one has anything nasty to say about him. Gould relies on interviews with his surviving family members and exhaustive research into his early years as a performer to tell his story. THE COMPLETE STORIES, by Leonora Carrington. Translated by Kathrine Talbot and Anthony Kerrigan. (Dorothy, paper, $16.) The Surrealist painter and fabulist wrote 25 fantastical and droll stories in English, Spanish and French. COCKFOSTERS: Stories, by Helen Simpson. (Knopf, $23.95.) Nine tales offer memorable characters, comic timing, originality, economy, poignancy and heart. Although they are entertaining, the mortality and the passage of time is an underlying theme. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review

Cole is an award-winning novelist (Open City, 2011), essayist (Known and Strange Things, 2016), art historian, photographer, and world traveler. Deeply attuned to the profundity of seeing, of what we perceive and what we don't, Cole nearly lost his vision in one eye, an experience that shaped this exquisite pairing of images and lyric essay, incisively introduced by novelist and essayist Siri Hustvedt (A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, 2016). At first look, Cole's photographs from Brooklyn, Beirut, Bali, Lagos, Nuremberg, Selma, and beyond seem strangely humble: an RV parked behind a hedge, filmy white curtains, construction sites. But image-by-image, his acute sensitivity to shadows and reflections comes into evocative focus; so, too, his perception of translucency and opacity, multiple layers and confusions of scale. Cole's strongly patterned compositions capture the expressiveness of chain-link fences, crosses, windows, furniture, signs, and puddles. His accompanying narrative is a mosaic of memories, anecdotes, myths, Bible stories, and grim historical facts. Cole's deeply affecting work juxtaposes tragedy with hidden-in-plain-sight beauty as he embraces poetic possibility in every scene and moment.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this collection of photos, cultural critic Cole (Known and Strange Things) explores the construct and limitations of human perception using snapshots from his travels paired with his written interpretations. He transports readers around the world to the Congo, Germany, Lebanon, Libya, New Zealand, Nigeria, and elsewhere, turning his lens on quotidian and intimate scenes that are at once familiar and foreign. A photo of hotel-room draperies inspires in him thoughts of Albrecht Dürer and the relationship of the human and divine: "In the crumbles, pleats, gathers, creases, falls, twists, and billows of cloth is a regular irregularity that is like the surface of water, like channels of air, like God made visible." Later, an image of tables draped in white plastic table cloths calls to mind the hotel-room drapes, and then thoughts of Dürer again. Each turn of the page brings a new pairing of written and visual record, and with it an impressionistic branch to what Cole refers to as "a tangled tree of meanings." In the foreword, novelist Siri Hustvedt aptly describes the work as a study of "a person's embodied consciousness in relation to the visual word." This ambitious study deserves a spot on the shelf next to Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida and Susan Sontag's On Photography. 150 color photos. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Readers may be most familiar with Cole as a novelist and essayist (Every Day Is for the Thief; Known and Strange Things), but he is also an accomplished photographer and critic, contributing to the "On Photography" column for the New York Times Magazine. Many photographers have experimented with combining text and image, but this title brings them together in ways unusually sophisticated, expanding the possibilities of the photo caption. A travelog of sorts, this book presents images taken during the artist's journeys around the world. Cole's pictures, however, lack the superficial gloss associated with much travel photography-many are, in fact, rather banal takes of hotel rooms or unremarkable streets. The outwardly nondescript images serve as triggers for the photographer's thoughts and feelings about place, as he investigates what one can make visible through the medium, and how photos might express facts beyond the obvious surface. These image/text combinations merge interior monolog with an outward-looking gaze. VERDICT Highly recommended as a project expanding our sense of what it means to create and look at photographs. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Memoir meets museum catalog in this engagingly meandering, genre-bending collection.Cole's debut novel, Open City (2011), is written nearly entirely as the inner monologue of his protagonist, a graduate student walking around New York. In less capable hands, this would be insufferable, but Cole (Known and Strange Things, 2016, etc.) is a master of the quiet, often nonsensical workings of the mind. Here, images take center stage: one per every two pages, with short accompanying text, like the notes at a gallery show (which they arethe images were originally on display in a solo exhibition in Milan). Cole made the pictures over a three-year period as he traveled the globe from Seoul to the Swiss Alps to London to Lagos and back to Brooklyn, where he makes his home. But this is hardly a travelogue; while the pictures are often gorgeous, they are not iconic or grand. Rather, Cole focuses on small thingse.g., the shadows of an outdoor staircase adjacent to the sweeping mountain view at an Alpine summit, tables being set up for an event in Rome, a partially open garage door in Ubud, Indonesia. Tarps and drapery are common themesthey cover musical instruments in Lagos, a brick wall in Berlin, and the windows of countless hotel rooms. War and violence also loom prominently, though the images are uniformly quiet and profoundly peaceful. Accompanying a photo of a nondescript conference room in Seoul, Cole writes about missile negotiations; in Zurich, he remembers "all the places and bodies that had been blown apart by the hundreds of millions of dollars of annual Swiss arms sales." The author is present in some of the text: waiting for a haircut or moving into a new house, a constant reminder that we are seeing the world through a particular set of eyes. As Siri Hustvedt asks in the preface, "what is seeing? What is inside the looking person and what is outside him? How do we parse what we see?" A strange, cerebral, and very beautiful journey. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Tivoli Spring, even in America, is Japanese. It is not only the leaves that grow. Shadows grow also. Everything grows, both what receives the light, and what is cast by it. There is more in the world, all of it proliferating like neural patterns. Almost all of it: it is also the most melancholy season, for, as Alkman says, there is nothing to eat. Resurrection is far too close to death, and the moment when the sleep begins to leave your eyes is the most fragile, the most porous, for at times in spring, even the emotional granaries are depleted. I remember the lines from Sans Soleil: "Newspapers have been filled recently with the story of a man from Nagoya. The woman he loved died last year and he drowned himself in work--Japanese style--like a madman. It seems he even made an important discovery in electronics. And then in the month of May he killed himself. They say he could not stand hearing the word 'Spring.' " Lagos One sense of sleep is the disappearance of the eyes. The head turns inward, toward darkness. Another is an entry into a state of being carried. Outside a church in Lagos, a man sleeps. The body transitions from carrying itself across the earth into being carried by it, into giving itself up to that. The body of Christ is on the now-lowered cross. A white cloth is draped around him. He is not dead, only sleeping (a sleep of two nights and one long day). Around him at the moment of descent are John the Beloved, Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, Mary Magdalene. Closest to him is his mother, in white. John holds out a larger white cloth with which to receive his body. The earth carries the cross. The cross carries the body. The body on the cross carries the world: in a state of sleep, one common dream is that of superhuman strength. It is said (in the Orthodox tradition) that the True Cross is made of cedar, pine, and cypress. It is said (by Calvin) that were all the fragments of the True Cross held in all the reliquaries of all the cathedrals of Europe to be assembled, an entire ship would be filled with the gathered wood. In sleep, one form of vision is foreclosed, and another becomes available. Outside an Anglican church in Lagos, the sleeping Christ dreams of sustenance and levitation. Btouratij The texture of memory and the texture of dreams are curiously similar: an intense combination of a freedom verging on randomness and a specificity that feels oneiric. Most narratives of dreams simply don't work, on a technical level, while most dreams do narratively "work" as dreams. You don't have a dream and think, "That was not a dream." But often when you read about a dream, or see a depiction of one, you feel like you're reading about or seeing something that isn't a dream. Nuremberg In the spring of 1507, Albrecht Dürer returned from his second trip to Italy. He had seen Leonardo's oil sketches, and been impressed by their use of drapery to suggest form, movement, wind, and light. A folded drapery is cloth thinking about itself. Under pressure from itself or the influence of external agents, a material adopts a topographical surface. A material, around the axis of itself, faces some part of itself, and confounds its inside and outside. A drapery study of Dürer's from 1508 shows the influence of a sketch of Leonardo's from about two decades earlier. Folding: "falten": to bring something together, and also to iterate that bringing together: a joining and a repetition. In the crumples, pleats, gathers, creases, falls, twists, and billows of cloth is a regular irregularity that is like the surface of water, like channels of air, like God made visible. The human is the divine enfolded in skin. (There is a curious comment about folds in John's account of the Resurrection: a folded cloth that remained folded even as events unfolded: "Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus' head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself.") In Nuremberg, almost within sight of Dürer's house, I saw, about eight minutes after they began their stellar journey, some several rays of the sun describing the folds on the curtains of my hotel room. Auckland Tane and his siblings conspire to push apart their mother, Papatuanuku, the earth, and father, Ranginui, the sky. In the space forced between the two is the light of the world. The light falls and flows between two eyelids. Muottas Muragl They used to burn women here. In these peaceful-looking cantons, women accused of consorting with the Devil were executed in the most sadistic ways imaginable, for God's greater glory. Now the landscape is long settled, like a reputation. The eye scans and organizes the folded mountains. All is at peace. Nevertheless, in one enciphering corner of my mind I believe still that every line in every poem is the orphaned caption of a lost photograph. By a related logic, each photograph sits in the antechamber of speech. Undissolved fragments of the past can be seen through the skin of the photograph. The tectonic plates are still busy in their rockwork, and there is a faint memory of burning ash. The difference between peace and mayhem is velocity. Piz Corvatsch One of the smallest things in this picture--the reddish mound at the southwest corner of the red mesh--is in reality one of the largest. The picture was made at three thousand feet on Piz Corvatsch in the Engadin, and that wine-dark smudge is one of the great peaks of the Bernina Alps. From this point of view, it is about the same size in terms of area as the last small parcel of summer snow on the scree. Both are far smaller than the open shadows cast on the bottom left by unseen railings. Corvatsch was Nietzsche's favorite mountain, and maybe a line from Ecce Homo could caption this picture: "Philosophy means living voluntarily among ice and high mountains." But maybe not. Something less strident is needed for an inventory picture like this one, in which no square centimeter is allowed to lord it over any other one, just as we learn in school that a kilo of iron miraculously always weighs the same as a kilo of feathers. Instead of philosophy, this is a picture of fact: siding, poles, mesh, sky, mountain, gravel, railing, and shadow, as well as color, angle, horizon, and loss of balance. Capri Later on, I thought of the catalogue of ships in the Iliad. "I could not tell over the multitude of them nor name them, / not if I had ten tongues and ten mouths, not if I had / a voice never to be broken and a heart of bronze within me, / not unless the Muses of Olympia, daughters / of Zeus of the aegis, remembered all those who came beneath Ilion." But that was literary, that came later. On the day itself, on the evening of the morning in which I opened up the window of my room to see the apparition of a shining fleet on the Mediterranean, what I thought of was what Edna O'Brien said to those of us in the audience: "We know about these beautiful waters that have death in them." McMinnville In February 1930, a man and a woman were involved in a car accident, the man died instantly. The woman, his wife, not long after. She'd been pregnant. Their son, raised in an orphanage, became an industrialist, founded an aviation company, and died at age eighty-four in 2014. In March 1995, a former fighter pilot died in a car accident before his thirtieth birthday. His grieving father, who had founded an aviation company and was to die many years later at the age of eighty-four, in 2014, was said by locals to have been CIA, a charge he never confirmed or denied, saying only that it was better than being KGB. Tripoli The date to remember is 1654. He paints The Goldfinch that year. The color harmonies are cool, the wall is as full of subtle character as a face. His life is like a brief and beautiful bridge. He studies with Rembrandt in Amsterdam. He teaches Vermeer in Delft. The same year, 1654: I am walking in the narrow alley between the castle of the Crusaders and the busy souk. There are children wild in the alley. There is a bird on the wall. It is him, Carel Fabritius. The bird suggests it (though this bird is a bulbul) but it is the wall that confirms it. Suddenly the gunpowder depot explodes. Fabritius is killed, and most of his paintings are lost to history. But not all is lost. The bridge has been built and it has been crossed, the bridge from shadow into light. He is not yet thirty-three years old. Brazzaville There is that which is carried, like a cross. There is that which drapes over, like a funeral sheath. Everywhere, I begin to see as I am carried along by my eyes, are these two energies, which, with water as the third, together begin to constitute an interpretive program: the solid (like wood, iron, or stone), the solid-fluid (clothlike), and the fluid (water). On the banks of the Congo River one afternoon, a boy plays on a railing. He wears a white shirt and black gloves. Ahead of him is the cross on which he is supported, reinterpreted as red elements of iron and painted concrete. On the boy's body is the infant Christ's towel, the condemned Christ's loincloth, the Sudarium of Saint Veronica, the linen shroud of burial: white cloth on a body, the solid-fluid that mediates between the cross and the river. Behind him, the river rushes. Is he a type of Christ, or is he an angel (that glove is as intense and uncanny as a pair of wings), or is he Saint Christopher, the Christ bearer at the river's lip? But all three are carriers, and types of one another too. Like them, the boy moves between metaphors. Suddenly, he lowers his head, his eyes disappear. Poughkeepsie A fluency in the dialect of geography, miniatures, and paper, an inclination for creating a gently fabular atmosphere, a commitment to what seems to be plain description, a return one way or the other to the empty dreamlike classroom, and a testing of the shimmering boundary between the map and the territory are some of the things Elizabeth Bishop, Luigi Ghirri, and Italo Calvino have in common. The empty chalkboard bears the ghostly trace of everything ever written on it. Each soul has its genetics. Milan It holds its violence in reserve. It is symmetrical, as are most vertebrates. It is in fact bipedal, like the animal that stands up, the animal that can mourn strangers. This suggestiveness is the key to surrealism. Suddenly coming up for air, a whale breaking the sea's surface, the surreal object is beyond or over (sur) a reality it might have been expected to stay below. The scissors is a mask without a face. Berlin He is masked by the shine. The mask spreads outward. Outside the gilt frame, on the periphery, are various things imperfectly seen: too dark, too small, cut off, blurred. I took this photograph at the moment my friend came down into the lobby. It was the night we were to see the Brahms violin concerto at the Philharmonic. From time to time, people leaned back and closed their eyes, so that Brahms would seep into their bloodstream. Btouratij We were a few miles from Tripoli, which is dry, so we stopped by a café to get our last glass of wine. The woman who owned the place was from Iraq, and the café was decorated with postcards and images of Iraq's ancient history. She brought us white wine. The sun was so bright outside that the road was almost white. Babel, famous for its tower, became Babylon, in Iraq. On the wall in a café in North Lebanon, Bruegel speaks for Iraq. Bruegel: he painted many things that cannot be painted. Zürich I walk around the city not knowing if I am a giant in a miniature landscape or a midget in monumental surroundings. The bright sun obliterates scale. The city is modular: office plans look like city maps, and the façades of buildings resemble street plans. In this fractal city, each fragment is the city in microcosm. Glimmering things--narcotics, stimulants--are stacked and hover just out of reach behind grille and glass. The city is a druggy rush of machine: rectilinear, vertical, tantalizing, and masked. You zoom in and in, and still remain recognizably in the city. Imagine the city destroyed, and out of one surviving miniature, out of the DNA, say, of a shop front, the city had to be reconstructed--as in Jurassic Park. This is one possible city, the central city. The other is the city of peripheries, which with looser structure also contains the code of the city. Both cities are ever-present in the continuous city. Berlin Each brick contains within its form something crushed. I am on the board of an arts organization. We meet in the organization's postwar building. The design is beautiful, the rooms large and airy, the whole structure surrounded by a park. For three days we talk about the future. We drink coffee, look at charts, and exchange ideas. I enjoy the intelligence of the curators and my fellow board members. At the end of the third day, the director draws our attention to the past. On the map of the building we are in, a second map is superimposed: the building that had been there before, before its destruction in the war. (I remember the pain when the doctor cauterized the holes in the retina of my left eye with a laser. An intense pain, not bitter like a knife but sour like darkness.) That first building is constructed in 1872. The banker Hans H. purchases it on an unrecorded date. Charlotte H. inherits the building in 1918, when her husband dies. From 1928 onward, two upper floors are converted into a clinic, for which one Kurt P. is hired as bookkeeper. Below each map is the ghost of another. Mapping is formalized forgetfulness. After 1933, the Jewish owner is no longer allowed to operate the clinic. In 1937, Kurt P. purchases the clinic, for a price well below its market value. Charlotte H. has three sons, all of whom flee Germany. Charlotte H. remains, steadily becoming poorer, and in March 1943, she is deported from Berlin to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Her fate there is (un)known. Berlin Like speech, which leaves no mark in the air, the arrangement of our bodies leaves no mark in space. A moment later, the man by the trees has moved on. He has not noticed his echo behind him, and the man who echoes him has not noticed him or, even if he has, has certainly not noticed himself noticing him. There are thousands of such echoes and agreements every minute. Almost all go unseen, and almost none are recorded, unless photography intervenes. Berlin is a city of ever-proliferating and overlapping peripheries. But even here there is a code, though it is a code made of wounds. Excerpted from Blind Spot by Teju Cole All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.