TREMOR by Teju Cole

My idea of a novel includes characters and a plot, but this novel really has only one character and no plot.  Tunde is a Nigerian-American professor and photographer who travels to Mali for a speaking engagement.  Chapter Five contains the entire text of the speech, and perhaps the audio version of this book gives it justice.  In written form, it is meandering and not exactly dazzling, just like the rest of this book.  Chapter Six is a series of first-person vignettes narrated by denizens of Lagos, Nigeria.  (One review suggested that these are Tunde’s interviewees.)  All that aside, I have two major complaints about this book.  First of all, there is a huge amount of discourse on African art and music, most of which was meaningless to me as a non-connoisseur.  Secondly, the narrative changes unexpectedly from third-person to first-person, with a few second-person references in which the “you” is never identified, at least as far as I could tell.  The change to first-person confused me to the point that I wasn’t really sure if the narrator was Tunde, but I assumed that it was.  Then on page 235, four pages from the end, in the middle of all of this first-person prose, we have a sentence that starts with “Tunde is making aviation cocktails with Sean’s help.”  Never mind that I have no idea what an aviation cocktail is.  My real question is whether or not Tunde is now referring to himself in third person, and if Tunde is not talking about himself, who is?  Needlessly frustrating.