I am a novelist, and my goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think. A good novel shouldn't have a point.

This past Saturday my wife and I viewed the Parts Unknown episode devoted to Lagos. This viewing was obviously burdened with grief. What did my mourning betray? I spent much of the weekend lodged in such contemplation but alas Saturday I watched Anthony Bourdain traipsing the frenetic streets of the Nigerian capital.

He made allusions to the improvisational nature of the city, how it self-regulated. There was only a casual gloss to the idea that the city "policed itself". This minor point was the subject of essay late in Cole's collection. Lynching or popular justice is still somewhat common in Nigeria. Apparently it is often documented on Youtube. I told my best friend who was about to fly back from the Netherlands I wish I could unread the graphic essay. This is Cole's gift: he makes us uneasy, not expectedly like when discussing racial politics but about the reality of the fleeting human experience.

Cole name-drops, but with a deadpan air. He introduces figures, like Peter Sculthorpe of whom I wasn't at all aware. He cites lines of poetry and ruminates on why in Brazil the wait staff ignore him in a restaurant. Much of this volume is on photography which offers minimal interest to me. There is also some excellent journalism. Cole went to Harlem in 2008 the night of president Obama's election. Cole looks at his unlikely origins born in Michigan, raised in Nigeria and back to the US as a plethora of challenges and opportunities. He is haunted by his own doppelgänger: W.G. Sebald. He parses Sebald's work and reflects. there is a rich vein of estrangement in his work. perhaps in my own life. Maybe that's why even when in deep disagreement with the author, Teju Cole feels like home.

I always enjoy reading Cole's gorgeous prose, and this book is no exception. However, there is a bit too much of the book that focuses on his love of photography for my taste. The travel writing is quite compelling, especially when he writes about being in Switzerland and comparing his experiences with James Baldwin's or his travels along the US-Mexico border or in Palestine (which I wish there was more of). One of my favourite essays is the one on the White Saviour Industrial Complex, an essay that remains as relevant and when he wrote it in 2012 in response to the Kony campaign.

Not moi fav

Teju Cole is a brilliant writer. This is a book of essays, and one of his essays is titled "Perplexed...Perplexed"- that sums it up for me. In this book I bounce around the globe. Sometimes I am blown away by his highly intellectual nature and feel the need to have a dictionary and thesaurus nearby. Sometimes I am swept up in beautiful prose. Sometimes I get tired of a subject and am eager to move on. I cannot put my finger on him, but he is unmatched in many ways.

I thought often while reading this book the specific distance Cole holds with the things he’s writing about. He writes about terrible things, like lynchings, but doesn’t dissolve into saying, out loud, how terrible the thing is. He is able to describe the thing and convey the terribleness. It seems this ability must come either through startling levels of detachment or a very grounded yet assured place of thinking; for Cole, it’s the latter. When he writes, for example, about watching Black men and boys die by the hands of police, he doesn’t describe sadness or discomfort, he describes the much more specific feeling of intrusion, “I recognized the political importance of the videos I had seen, but it had also felt like an intrusion when I watched them: intruding on the sorrow of those for whom those deaths were much more significant, but intruding, too, on my own personal but unarticulated sense of right and wrong.” Ultimately, the effectiveness of his writing is built through the ability to accurately translate experiences into the most specific words possible.

He describes some concepts I’d like to remember: “cold violence” in reference to the use of legal bureaucracy by Israeli authorities to keep Palestinians disenfranchised in the most brutal of ways, which reminded me of populations in the States who are entrapped in cold violence by law enforcement and the FBI. And the idea of “thinking constellationally” in an essay about the well-meaning but violently shallow idea of “making a difference.”

Cole critiques Nicholas Kristof and the “white savior industrial complex,” and explains what it is to think constellationally: “His good heart does not allow him to think constellationally. He does not connect the dots or see the patterns of power behind the isolated 'disasters.' All he sees is hungry mouths, and he, in his own advocacy-by-journalism way, is putting food in those mouths as fast as he can. All he sees is need, and he sees no need to reason out the need for the need.”

Like with other writers I admire, I was struck by the connections Cole makes between what he sees and experiences and (the seemingly endless memory of) what he’s read.

Some of these essays were fascinating, and some were eerie and sad in how they seemed to be written this month about institutional racism and police brutality. Some of them, though, were a bit beyond me; I had trouble following some about writers I wasn’t familiar with. But some made me want to become familiar with those writers. Overall I struggled a bit, but am happy I read this and am more familiar with Mr. Cole and his work.

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.

Excellent writing from an endlessly curious, intellectual, passionate, political, and empathetic mind.

Please note: It would have been helpful for the publisher to state that the majority of the book is about photography. This is not necessarily an area of particular interest to me, and I thus grew somewhat weary of the plethora of short reviews of photo exhibits, etc. And yet, I kept reading.

For me, the standout section was the final one, at times cool and measured, at times a contained deep frustration, but always incisive and intellectually, emotionally, and politically stimulating.