Excerpt: Teju Cole's Known and Stranger Things

Teju Cole has a new book out. Whoope! Finally! 

The Excerpt Reader has been looking forward to reading something new from this young and (very) talented writer ever since reading his excellent debut novel, Open City. Whilst waiting impatiently for a new book, I've also read Every Day Is for the Thief, a book which, to my eye, walks the border between Fiction and Non-Fiction. 

So now we have a new book, after 4 years of waiting. It's a compilation of essays Cole has written in the past 8 years, some of which were published in The New Yorker. The title is Known and Strange Things: Essays.

As a customer review on Amazon points out, 'This book of essays by Teju Cole aren’t always essays: they might be scraps of thought, well-digested and to an immediate point.' 

Here's an excerpt from the book. It's the opening chapter.

Judging by the excerpt, Cole's writing in this tome of essays is very intimate, pensive and revealing at times.

In this opening chapter, Cole writes about a visit to the town of Leuk, Switzerland, following the footsteps of renowned writer James Baldwin, who also spent a while in this town, back in 1951. Baldwin recorded his experience of being the only black person in a small Swiss town in his essay, “Stranger in the Village.” 

Being a black man himself, Cole sympathizes with Baldwin:

To be a stranger is to be looked at, but to be black is to be looked at especially [...] To be black is to bear the brunt of selective enforcement of the law, and to inhabit a psychic unsteadiness in which there is no guarantee of personal safety. You are a black body first, before you are a kid walking down the street or a Harvard professor who has misplaced his keys.

In 2013 as in 1951, to be black, indeed to be a person of color in a predominantly white environment, is to be singled out, pre-judged. 

There is one huge difference, though. As Cole rightly points out, the cultural world Baldwin inhabited was still predominantly white. Black art - be it music, literature, or painting - was regarded with skepticism and suspicion during his years as a young writer. Cole inhabits a totally different world, wherein African Americans heritage is given its due place in American mainstream culture, and black people occupy influential positions in all echelons of society. 

Still, there is a huge divide between white and black people, in the US and elsewhere: 

Black American life is disposable from the point of view of policing, sentencing, economic policy, and countless terrifying forms of disregard.

Which leads Cole to end his essay in a very pessimistic tone:

Baldwin wrote “Stranger in the Village” more than sixty years ago. Now what?

Indeed, what has changed?

Excerpt: Nicole Krauss's Great House

Nicole Krauss is still a 'debutant' writer, though widely celebrated, like her talented fellow-writer husband, Jonathan Safran Foer, largely because of their very skilled writing and unique and stylistic prose.

After her last novel, The History of Love (2005), was met with great critical acclaim and worldwide reader reception (the book is set to be released as a film by Warner Brothers in 2010), the expectations from her third novel, Great House, set to be published this October, are undoubtably abundant.

Until it will be available in bookshops, avid Krauss readers can content themselves with an excerpt, titled The Young Painters, from what is promised to be a "powerful, soaring novel" (Amazon).

The narrator in Painters is a female writer confessing to a 'Judge', as though admitting to a crime.

The act of writing is presented as a 'compensation' for an intrinsic loss in the narrator's life.

First, she writes a short story about a couple of children who were put to death by their own mother (the narrator herself does not have any children of her own, despite confessing: "Though when I was younger I believed I wanted to have a child, I was not surprised to find myself at thirty-five, and then forty, without one". Secondly, she writes a a novel about her recently deceased father: "I [...] took his illness and his suffering, with all its pungent detail, and finally even his death, as an opportunity to write about his life".

This incessant occupation with death is explained as some inexplicable urge to 'understand' or 'explain' something which is unexplainable; or to excerse some nihilistic urge for 'artistic freedom' or "vocation"; to be "free of laws", or of morals.

The general atmosphere in Painters is that of mystery and suspense. An ambiance of noir-fiction prevails, that of decline and crepuscule, where even a child's cry is sounded as a warning, a looming threat.

Krauss's prose is very well crafted, even if at times it seems over-calculated and slightly academic, a trifle 'experimental', however reading The Young Painters brings to mind the best central-european suspense writers, like Stefan Zweig and Franz Kafka.

VERDICT: BUY IT as soon as it comes out.

Excerpt: Jonathan Franzen's Freedom

Freedom is Jonathan Franzen's long anticipated 4th novel, forthcoming from Barnes & Noble.

The novel is set for publication in September of 2010, however two excerpts (Good Neighbors and Agreeable) have already been released in The New Yorker in the past year.

After the huge success The Corrections was met with (literary controversies and journalistic disputes aside), the great expectations and comparisons are quite inevitable.

The first excerpt, Good Neighbors, chronicles some 15-20 years in the lives of Walter and Patty Berglund (again, the north european heritage) and their son and daughter, Joey and Jessica in St. Paul, Minnesota

The title refers, cornily and sarcastically at once (a trait that could only be attributed to Franzen, it seems) to the strange and at times hypocrite relationships the Berglund's carry on with their neighbors, Carol Monaghan (whose daughter, Connie, carries on a teanage infatuation with the Berglund's son, Joey), and the Paulsens (Seth and Marrie, your average keep-to-themselves-but-constantly-criticize-their-neighbors couple).

As in The Corrections, Franzen's prose in Good Neighbors is very detailed and life-encompassing, and the excerpt could easily be read a short story (though maybe not a very complete and gratifying one.)

The second excerpt, Agreeable, takes the readers back to Patty's adolescence, back in the 1970's. Again, the title is cruelly sarcastic, this time even much more so, given the story recounts Patty's 'agreeableness', which ultimately gets her raped by a fellow student. Indeed, it is this trait/vice which Franzen chooses to the cause for this unfortunate 'incident' as Patty's mother, Joyce, prefers to describe her daughter's rape:

"Being a very agreeable person, however, she went on dates with practically anybody who asked [...] Patty had given Ethan Post a mistaken impression. She was far too agreeable even when she wasn’t drunk. In the pool, she must have been giddy with agreeability. Altogether, there was much to blame herself for."

What other topics will Franzen treat in his new novel? What other eprotagonists will he focus his pointed pen at? I know he's left me curious what he's going to fill the rest of the novel's 550+ pages with...

VERDICT: BUY IT (as soon as it comes out..)