Teju Cole's New Novel is Haunted by the Trespasses of Art

In the autumn of 2020, while stargazing on his balcony in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Teju Cole was inspired to start taking photos of his kitchen counter. He decided that the daily migrations of his pots, pans, spoons, and graters paralleled the revolutions of celestial bodies, and began to track them in a “counter history.” A year later, he published the results as “Golden Apple of the Sun” (2021), a book-length photo essay that magnifies his solitary domestic experiment until it seems to encompass the world. Cole writes about the hunger he suffered as a boarding-school student in Nigeria, Dutch Golden Age still-lifes, slavery and the sugary recipes in an eighteenth-century cookbook, and why “the later a photograph is in a given sequence, the heavier it is.” Somehow, from this kitchen sink of memoir, art history, and observant boredom emerges a spectral portrait of the pandemic’s collective solitude, “this year of feeling buried in the dark earth like bulbs.

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