Tremor opens on Tunde taking a picture of a hedge: “He has pressed the shutter twice when an aggressive voice calls out from the house on the right. This isn’t the first time this kind of thing has happened to him but, still, he is startled. He takes on a friendly tone and says he is an artist, just photographing a hedge. You can’t do that here, the voice says, this is private property. The muscles of his back are tense. He folds the tripod, stows the camera in its bag, and walks away.”

When art appears in fiction, it seems a gesture towards the otherwise inexpressible, perhaps the sublime. (From Cole’s photobook Fernweh (2020): “more easily imagined / than described”). But what happens when the fictional artwork is not completed – the sublime deferred? This tense moment stretches over the book and this certain danger imposed upon certain bodies is revisited throughout, Tunde often returning to “history’s bitter spray”, or its “brutality, which refuses symmetries and seldom consoles”.

One of Tremor’s chapters is written as an art history lecture given by Tunde, beginning with Turner’s painting Slave Ship (1840). Tunde notes the complexity of living in the shadow of such violence: “We must forget the Slave Ship in the way we must forget many difficult things with the kind of forgetfulness that allows us to keep on living our lives.” But a ripped fragment of the painting still appears on the book’s cover, insistent; Tremor wrestles with such history of unthinkable cruelties, collective memory and the implications of such forgetting.

Tremor is well-suited to readers who have enjoyed Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow or André Dao’s Anam, for the book is not concerned as much with narrative as we know it, but rather with questions of how to live and how to live well. As Tunde asks, “How is one to live without owning others? Who is this world for?”

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