Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief was probably my favorite book of 2008. Published obscurely in Nigeria, it’s now almost impossible to find a copy.
Cole’s new book, his first novel, could not have a different reception. He has been fawned by the New Yorker and the New York Times, among others, and deservedly so.
The story is the inner narrative of a man, a young Nigerian psychiatry resident, as he walks through his New York life for a year. Plot and character develop slowly and subtly, and feel mainly like a vehicle for Cole’s assorted musings on art, the city, culture, race, and history. To pull off this feat, one must have interesting things to say and an ability to say them in an interesting way. Cole manages both.
An afternoon lounging in Central Park with friends recounts a conversation that flits from race to music to mental illness in an amazingly uncontrived way. Then, when a handful of stunt parachutists surprise the fieldful of New Yorkers, the inner thoughts take a different turn:
We are the first humans who are completely unprepared for disaster. It is dangerous to live in a secure world. Look at this harmless and beautiful stunt by the parachutists. We know that they are in the right, right for having made something memorable for us, at some personal risk, but the police are charged with keeping us safe at all times, empowered to secure us with the force of arms, and protect us even from pleasure.
I often think of the long nineteenth century, which, in all parts of the world, was one interminable bloodbath, an orgy of continuous killing, whether in Prussia or in the United States, or in the Andes or in West Africa. Butchery was the norm, and nations went to war on the slightest pretexts. And it went on and on, interrupted by brief pauses for rearmament. Think of the epidemics that wiped out ten, twenty, even thirty percent of populations in Europe: I read somewhere recently that the city of Leiden lost thirty-five percent of its population in a five-year period in the 1630s.
What could it mean to live with such a possibility, with people of all ages dropping dead around you all the time? The thing is that we have no idea. In fact, when I read it, it was as a footnote in an article talking about something else, an article about painting or furniture. Families that lost three of their seven members were not at all unusual.
For us, the concept of three million New Yorkers dead from illness within the first five years of the millennium is impossible to grasp. We think it would be total dystopia; so, we think of such historical realities only as footnotes. We try to forget that other cities in other times have seen worse, that there isn’t anything that immunizes us from a plague of one kind or another, that we are just as susceptible as any of those past civilizations were, but we are especially unready for it. Even in the way we speak about what little has happened to us, we have already exhausted ourselves with hyperbole.
There are many more mesmerizing passages. Very much worth picking up. I am hopeful the earlier memoir will soon be re-released to an American audience.
