Another world, in this one: Teju Cole's Switzerland

In the summer of 2014, Teju Cole left his home in New York and travelled to Switzerland, the recipient of a residential fellowship from Literaturhaus Zürich. His residency came with a stipend, an apartment facing the distant mountains in a quiet part of the city, and the requirement that he reside in Switzerland for the better part of six months – though not necessarily in Zurich. Cole anticipated an opportunity for sustained absorption in his manuscript-in-progress, a nonfictional work about Lagos, where he grew up: “where better to write about chaotic, relentless, overpopulated Lagos than in modest, quietly industrious Zürich?” But what followed was a period less of writing than of mesmerized wandering and photography, through a country Cole evokes as “more different than others,” travelling by every available mode of public transport from the funicular to the ferry, with an old Yashica camera in his hands.