Teju Cole, Open City, Random House, 2012.
www.tejucole.com/books/
A haunting novel about identity, dislocation, and history, Teju Cole’s Open City is a profound work by an important new author who has much to say about our country and our world.
Along the streets of Manhattan, a young Nigerian doctor named Julius wanders, reflecting on his relationships, his recent breakup with his girlfriend, his present, his past. He encounters people from different cultures and classes who will provide insight on his journey—which takes him to Brussels, to the Nigeria of his youth, and into the most unrecognizable facets of his own soul.
Publishers now pitch their books like Hollywood concepts, so Teju Cole’s first novel, “Open City” (Random House; $25), is being offered as especially appealing to “readers of Joseph O’Neill and Zadie Smith,” and written in a prose that “will remind you” of W. G. Sebald and J. M. Coetzee. This is shorthand for “post-colonialism in New York” (O’Neill), “lively multiracial themes” (Smith), “free-flowing form with no plot, narrated by a scholarly solitary walker” (Sebald), “obviously serious” (Coetzee), and “finely written” (all of the above). There is the additional comedy that Cole’s publishers, determined to retain the baby with the bathwater, boldly conjoin Smith and O’Neill, despite Smith’s hostility, advertised in an essay entitled “Two Paths for the Novel,” to O’Neill’s expensive and upholstered “lyrical realism.”
This busy campaign for allies does a disfavor to Teju Cole’s beautiful, subtle, and, finally, original novel. “Open City” is indeed largely set in a multiracial New York (the open city of the title). Cole is a Nigerian American; he grew up in Lagos, came to America in 1992, at the age of seventeen, and is a graduate student in art history at Columbia University. The book’s half-Nigerian, half-German narrator walks around New York (and, briefly, Brussels), and meets a range of people, several of them immigrants or emigrants: a Liberian, imprisoned for more than two years in a detention facility in Queens; a Haitian shoeshiner, at work in Penn Station; an angry Moroccan student, manning an Internet café in Brussels. This narrator has a well-stocked mind: he thinks about social and critical theory, about art (Chardin, Velázquez, John Brewster), and about music (Mahler, Peter Maxwell Davies, Judith Weir), and he has interesting books within easy reach—Roland Barthes’s “Camera Lucida,” Peter Altenberg’s “Telegrams of the Soul,” Tahar Ben Jelloun’s “The Last Friend,” Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “Cosmopolitanism.”
So the novel does move in the shadow of W. G. Sebald’s work. While “Open City” has nominally separate chapters, it has the form and atmosphere of a text written in a single, unbroken paragraph: though people speak and occasionally converse, this speech is not marked by quotation marks, dashes, or paragraph breaks and is formally indistinguishable from the narrator’s own language. As in Sebald, what moves the prose forward is not event or contrivance but a steady, accidental inquiry, a firm pressurelessness (which is to say, what moves the prose forward is the prose—the desire to write, to defeat solitude by writing). The first few pages of “Open City” are intensely Sebaldian, with something of his sly faux antiquarianism. On the first page, the narrator tells us that he started to go on evening walks “last fall,” and found his neighborhood, Morningside Heights, “an easy place from which to set out into the city”; indeed, these walks “steadily lengthened, taking me farther and farther afield each time, so that I often found myself at quite a distance from home late at night, and was compelled to return home by subway.”
But I hope the prospective reader will turn that first page, because the novel soon begins to throw off its obvious influences. The prose relaxes into a voice rather than an effect, and it becomes apparent that Cole is attempting something different from Sebald’s project. Eschewing the systematic rigor of Sebald’s work, as well as its atmosphere of fatigued nervous tension, Cole has made his novel as close to a diary as a novel can get, with room for reflection, autobiography, stasis, and repetition. This is extremely difficult, and many accomplished novelists would botch it, since a sure hand is needed to make the writer’s careful stitching look like a thread merely being followed for its own sake. Mysteriously, wonderfully, Cole does not botch it: “When I turned around, I saw that I was at the entryway of the American Folk Art Museum. Never having visited before, I went in”; “In early December, I met a Haitian man in the underground catacombs of Penn Station”; “The days went by slowly, and my sense of being entirely alone in the city intensified”; “At the beginning of February, I went down to Wall Street to meet Parrish, the accountant who was doing my taxes, but I forgot to bring my checkbook”; “Last night, I attended the performance of the Ninth Symphony, which is the work Mahler wrote after Das Lied von der Erde.”
Well, not quite, because we also need a flâneur to see interesting things in the city, and to notice them well, and Cole’s narrator has an acute, and sympathetic, eye. Sometimes he is witty and paradoxical, in a way that recalls Roland Barthes. Watching a park full of children: “The creak-creak of the swings was a signal, I thought, there to remind the children that they were having fun; if there were no creak, they would be confused.” More profoundly, he offers this paradox about Manhattan’s relation to its rivers:
This strangest of islands, I thought, as I looked out to sea, this island that turned in on itself, and from which water had been banished. The shore was a carapace, permeable only at certain selected points. Where in this riverine city could one fully sense a riverbank? Everything was built up, in concrete and stone, and the millions who lived on the tiny interior had scant sense about what flowed around them. The water was a kind of embarrassing secret, the unloved daughter, neglected, while the parks were doted on, fussed over, overused.
Watching Simon Rattle conduct Mahler at Carnegie Hall, Julius is alive to the sorrow of the composer’s “long but radiant elegy.” He thinks of the strange fact that a hundred years ago, “just a short walk away from Carnegie Hall, at the Plaza Hotel, on the corner of Fifty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue, Mahler had been at work on this very symphony, aware of the heart condition that would soon take his life.” Then, before the music has ended, an old woman rises from her front-row seat, and goes up the aisle: “It was as though she had been summoned, and was leaving into death, drawn by a force invisible to us. The old woman was frail, with a thin crown of white hair that, backlit by the stage, became a halo, and she moved so slowly that she was like a mote suspended inside the slow-moving music.” Cole prepares his effects so patiently and cumulatively, over many pages of relatively “flat” description, that the image of the old woman leaving as if for death, suspended like a mote in the music, seems not forced or ornamental but natural and almost inevitable.
At these moments, and, indeed, throughout “Open City,” one has the sense of a productive alienation, whereby Cole (or Julius) is able to see, with an outsider’s eyes, a slightly different, or somewhat transfigured, city. It is a place of constant deposit and erasure, like London in the work of Iain Sinclair (or in Sebald’s “Austerlitz”), and Julius is often drawn to the layers of sedimented historical suffering on which the city rests. There is, most obviously, the gaping void of Ground Zero: “The place had become a metonym of its disaster: I remembered a tourist who once asked me how to get to 9/11: not the site of the events of 9/11 but to 9/11 itself, the date petrified into broken stones.” But there were streets before the towers went up, cleared to make way for the new buildings, “and all were forgotten now. Gone, too, was the old Washington Market, the active piers, the fishwives, the Christian Syrian enclave that was established here in the late 1800s. . . . And, before that? What Lenape paths lay buried beneath the rubble?” The area of Manhattan between Duane Street and City Hall Park, where Julius walks, was once the Negro Burial Ground, where “the bodies of some fifteen to twenty thousand blacks, most of them slaves,” had been interred.
The modern city as unacknowledged palimpsest might seem a familiar theme, were it not renovated by Julius’s attention to the contemporary, in particular to those in danger of becoming modern victims of prosperous urban forgetfulness or carelessness. He goes with a church group to visit a detention center in Queens, and hears someone give a harrowing but riveting account of escaping the civil war in Liberia, arriving in Spain, and then, after two empty years in Lisbon, finally getting the chance to go to the States, on a Cape Verdean passport. “He had the option of saving money by flying to La Guardia, and he’d asked the ticketing agent if she was sure La Guardia was also in America,” Cole writes. “She had stared at him, and he shook his head, and bought the JFK ticket anyway.” It is at the more expensive airport that the émigré’s journey ends: for the past twenty-six months, he has been “confined in this large metal box in Queens.” Julius is not, really, a natural sympathizer, despite his tender eye. He went with the church group because his girlfriend was going, and he can’t help noticing “that beatific, slightly unfocused expression one finds in do-gooders.” This complexity adds friction to his relationships with some of the people who, coming from the same continent as Julius, want to assert a kinship with him. A cabdriver is irritated that Julius gets in without a salutation, and upbraids him. “Not good, not good at all, you know, the way you came into my car without saying hello, that was bad,” the driver says, and continues, “Hey, I’m African just like you, why you do this?” But Julius feels “in no mood for people who tried to lay claims on me.” A black postal worker tries to read his bad poetry to Julius, and he makes a mental note to avoid that post office in the future.
The best, and longest, episode in the book is also Cole’s subtlest portrait of alienation and affection. Around Christmas, Julius goes to Brussels, ostensibly to look for his grandmother, who had been living there, but perhaps also to escape New York. At a local Internet café, he starts talking to Farouq, a young Moroccan who works behind the counter, and who surprises Julius with his reading material: a commentary, in English, on Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History.” Julius is at first intimidated by Farouq’s intellectual confidence and ideological certainty, but he is attracted by it, too. Farouq “had the passion of youth, but his clarity was unfussy and seemed to belong (this was the image that came to me) to someone who had undertaken long journeys.” Farouq reveres Edward Said, is at ease with the work of Paul de Man and Benedict Anderson. He tells Julius that he prefers Malcolm X to Martin Luther King, because King’s passive resistance is too Christian: “This is not an idea I can accept. There’s always the expectation that the victimized Other is the one that covers the distance, that has the noble ideas; I disagree with this expectation.” To Julius, Farouq seems angry, “in the grip of rage and rhetoric,” and yet his animation and need are also exciting: “The victimized Other: how strange, I thought, that he used an expression like that in a casual conversation. And yet, when he said it, it had a far deeper resonance than it would have in any academic situation.” Farouq seems, to Julius, “as anonymous as Marx in London.”
A few days pass—Julius has a sexual encounter with an older Czech woman, spends a day in his rented apartment reading Roland Barthes (the French aestheticism a telling counterpoint to Farouq’s more ideological texts), and meets Farouq and a fellow-Moroccan, Khalil, for a drink. The two Moroccans work each other up, and now Farouq is more uninhibited, and perhaps more predictable. The conversation between the Moroccans turns on the question of whether America really has a left wing; on Israel, and how it has a reputation as a democratic state but is really a religious one; on how Saddam Hussein was the least of the Middle East dictators. Saddam, Farouq says, should be admired because he stood up for his country against imperialism. Julius protests, but is argued down. “As we spoke,” he reflects, “it was hard to escape a feeling that we were having a conversation before the twentieth century had begun or just as it had started to run its cruel course. We were suddenly back in the age of pamphlets, solidarity, travel by steamship, world congresses, and young men attending to the words of radicals.”
Soon, Farouq is telling Julius about his childhood, and his intellectual ambitions, how he came seven years ago from Morocco to Brussels, to study for an M.A. in critical theory: “I wanted to be the next Edward Said!” He wrote his thesis on Gaston Bachelard’s “Poetics of Space”:
The department rejected my thesis. On what grounds? Plagiarism. They gave no reason. They just said I would have to submit another one in twelve months. I was crushed. I left the school. Plagiarism? This had nothing to do with me. The only possibilities are either that they refused to believe my command of English and theory or, and I think is even more likely, that they were punishing me for world events in which I had played no role. My thesis committee had met on September 20, 2001, and to them, with everything happening in the headlines, here was this Moroccan writing about difference and revelation. That was the year I lost all my illusions about Europe.
Julius records this without obvious comment. The long scene ends with Julius still impressed by Farouq’s “seething intelligence” but fatalistically sure that he will remain “one of the thwarted ones.”
This is one of the very few scenes I have encountered in contemporary fiction in which critical and literary theory is not satirized, or flourished to exhibit the author’s credentials, but is simply and naturally part of the whole context of a person. And how very subtle of Teju Cole to suggest, at the same time—but with barely an authorial whisper—that perhaps Farouq leans too heavily on his theoretical texts, and that this was the real cause of the plagiarism charge. (The 9/11 scapegoating seems unlikely, though Julius doesn’t say so.) And how delicately Cole has Julius pulsate, in contradictory directions, sometimes toward Farouq, in fellow feeling, and sometimes away from him, never really settling in one position.
We learn a lot about Farouq’s anger, in these pages, but we also learn a lot about Julius’s liberalism—about its secret desires, its dissatisfaction with itself, and its passivity. More than anything, “Open City” seems a beautifully modulated description of a certain kind of solitary liberalism common to thousands, if not millions, of bookish types. Julius’s friends, for instance, are into various green and ecological causes; Julius stands to one side, and it is clear that his political inactivity has to do with his ability to see things so well. “It was a cause, and I was distrustful of causes,” he tells us, “but it was also a choice, and I found my admiration for decisive choice increasing, because I was so essentially indecisive myself.”
He is engaged but disengaged. He is curious about the lives of others, but that curiosity is perhaps purchased at the expense of commonality. (This contradiction is even more strongly felt in the work of V. S. Naipaul, whose influence is apparent in Cole’s book.) The city is “open,” but perhaps only in a negative way: full of people bumping their hard solitude off one another. One’s own small hardships—such as forgetting one’s A.T.M. card number, as Julius does, and being consumed by anxiety about it—may dominate a life as completely as someone else’s much larger hardships, because life is brutally one’s own, and not someone else’s, and is, alas, brutally banal. In a sad and eloquent passage, Julius suggests that perhaps it is sane to be solipsistic:
Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him. Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people’s stories, insofar as these stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic.
This is a brave admission about the limits of sympathy, coming as it does near the end of a book full of other people’s richly recorded stories. Julius is not heroic, but he is still the (mild) hero of his book. He is central to himself, in ways that are sane, forgivable, and familiar. And this selfish normality, this ordinary solipsism, this lucky, privileged equilibrium of the soul is an obstacle to understanding other people, even as it enables liberal journeys of comprehension. Julius sets out only to put people’s lives down on paper, and not to change them, as Farouq, his secret sharer and alter ego, would want to do. But then it is because Julius set out not to change Farouq’s life but to put it down on paper that we know Farouq so well. - James Wood www.newyorker.com/
When I was thirteen I worked at the concession stand of a summer film festival showing old movies. For some movies I would sneak in once the film started and watch the whole thing, sometimes again and again if it was really good, like The Philadelphia Story. When Roberto Rosselini’s Rome, Open City was shown, my mother, a committed Italo-phile, attended every showing. After each show, she’d reemerge from the theater wiping her tear-streaked face with the back of her hand. I never went inside the theater for that movie, and instead slouched irritably at the counter in the sundress my mother had sewn for me from fabric of such a shade of yellow that it would not show the stains of Tastee Pop, the butter substitute we squirted into the popcorn.
Recently, after reading Teju Cole’s new novel Open City, I decided to watch Rosselini’s film for the first time. In war, cities that face imminent attack may be declared "open," which means that no resistance will be mounted to stave off the attackers. By declaring a city open it is hoped that casualties will be limited and historical landmarks will be spared. Rome was declared an open city on August 14, 1943, and the film Rome, Open City takes place during that time period, when the Nazis have taken control and are attempting to quash an underground resistance movement. The film is a melodrama with an unrelentingly depressing storyline. I could chart the onset of my mother’s weeping to when a pregnant Anna Magnani crashes to the ground with an agonizing cry, cut down senselessly by a Nazi bullet. By the time the credits begin rolling by to a haunting melody, and Magnani’s young son, now orphaned, has just watched his family priest die at the hands of a firing squad, my mother’s catharsis would have been complete.
Teju Cole’s Open City is neither a melodrama, nor is it about a city that has technically been declared "open" during wartime. The novel is set in New York City, no more than a couple of years ago, and narrated by a Nigerian psychiatrist on a research fellowship. Throughout the novel, the psychiatrist, Julius, wanders the streets of the city taking careful note of everything he sees, and everyone with whom he interacts. His observations are recorded in beautifully clear prose with the precision of a clinician, or at least the way one might wish to imagine the precision of a clinician. The descriptions of the cityscape around him are interspersed with memories of his boyhood in Nigeria. His time in New York is interrupted by a trip to Brussels which Julius takes using up his entire four week vacation time, in the vague, unrealized hope of somehow encountering his grandmother there. He is, however, unsure as to whether she is still alive, or even if she lives there at all. Without a clear plan to find her, he continues his habit of wandering, observing, interacting, recording.
In 1940, Brussels was declared an open city, a fact our narrator mentions during his trip there. As he observes:
Had Brussels’s rulers not opted to declare it an open city and thereby exempt it from bombardment during the Second World War, it might have been reduced to rubble. It might have been another Dresden. As it was, it had remained a vision of the medieval and baroque periods, a vista interrupted only by the architectural monstrosities erected all over town by Leopold II in the late nineteenth century.
Brussels serves as a point of comparison with New York for the narrator. It is New York, not Brussels, that is the open city to which the title refers, and in keeping with the naunced writing of the novel, I took the term to have multiple referents: the constant and steady streams of immigration that have always made up the population of the city; the diversity of its architecture and neighborhoods; and finally, its status as a city with a major landmark that has been bombed in an act of war.
It is reductionist to call Open City "a post-9/11" novel, but there is an element of its spirit that must be defined by its historical relation to that event. On a particular day of wandering through the city, Julius happens through an alleyway (“no one’s preferred route to any destination”), walks down some other streets, when, he reports:
...I saw to my right, about a block north of where I stood, a great empty space. I immediately thought of the obvious but, equally quickly, put the idea out of my mind.
He keeps walking, and then from the West Side Highway:
The taillights of cars were chased by their red reflections towards the bridges out of the island, and to the right, there was a pedestrian overpass connecting one building not to another, but to the ground. And again, the empty space that was. I now saw, and admitted, the obvious: the ruins of the World Trade Center.
Reflecting on this blank spot in the natural crowding of the city’s landscape, and examining it from more than one angle (with continued observations and conversations on topics other than the missing landmarks interspersed), Julius ends by musing on the layered history of this piece of land. Listing the multiple waves of immigrants, of streets and buildings that had existed in this spot before and been removed, he concludes:
The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten... Generations rushed through the eye of the needle, and I, one of the still legible crowd, entered the subway. I wanted to find the line that connected me to my own part in these stories.
As a narrator, Julius is aloof, exact, learned and a little bit chilly. His need to find that line that connects him is real, because for all his powers of observation, he construes himself as an outsider and impartial observer in all things, including his own history. But there are threads that connect him to the city and to the people in the city, some of which prove to be less than pleasant. Though he is not entirely able to see his own part in the melodrama of a wartime city, he too plays a role.
The review materials I received with Open City ask me to compare Cole’s writing to that of W.G. Sebald or J.M. Coetzee. I was instead reminded of Wharton and James, of their pacing, of their detailed descriptions of place, history and person and of their slightly god-like distance from their characters and subjects. I read in Open City a kind of sequel to Wharton’s The Age of Innocence: the writing style, similarly precise and clear; the city, even less innocent than it was then. Cole, who is also a photographer and an art historian, has an enviable ability to take a subject, say, the city of New York, and turn it inside out and upside down, shake it out, and examine the contents, then pack it up again. In this, his writing resembles his photography, which, unlike most urban photography, manages to find grand vistas and great heights in the claustrophobic clutter of a city landscape. In a photograph such as this one, a bird’s eye view of what appears to be the interior of a multi-storied shopping mall becomes a delicate abstraction, the suspended star-shaped lights an orderly arrangement of origami, the tiny shoppers, so many ants dotting the background. I was reminded of a passage near the end of Open City, when Julius exits a concert at Carnegie Hall, not realizing he has stepped out on a vertiginously constructed metal fire escape. After a hair-raising climb down a few flights, he finds a door which opens back into the concert hall:
Before I entered the door, holding it open with relief and gratitude, it occurred to me to look straight up, and much to my surprise, there were stars. Stars! I hadn’t thought I would be able to see them, not with the light pollution perpetually wreathing the city, and not on a night on which it had been raining. But the rain had stopped while I was climbing down, and had washed the air clean. The miasma of Manhattan’s electric lights did not go very far up into the sky, and in the moonless night, the sky was like a roof shot through with light, and heaven itself shimmered. Wonderful stars, a distant cloud of fireflies: but I felt in my body what my eyes could not grasp, which was that the true nature was the persisting visual echo of something that was already in the past. In the unfathomable ages it took for light to cross such distances, the light source itself had in some cases been long extinguished, its dark remains stretched away from us at ever greater speeds.
This weighty moment in the history of a city, its days and nights, its landmarks and its inhabitants buzz exquisitely, so many fireflies trapped under the glass of Cole’s crystalline prose. - Daisy Rockwell
New York makes so much noise about itself, discusses itself so endlessly on its streets and in its bars, lends its name so freely to magazines and websites and newspapers, that the novelist foolhardy enough to engage with this nonstop tantrum of a place has little choice but to turn himself or herself into a noise-comprehender (The Fortress of Solitude, Netherland) or a noise-amplifier (Herzog, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, The Puttermesser Papers). I wasn’t aware that a third path exists until I read Teju Cole’s Open City—a novel that simply blots out the noise in favor of moments of eerie tranquility and solitude, moments than can be achieved without much effort if, like the thirty-something narrator of the book, you are willing to ditch the rush-hour roar and enter a museum, a classical concert, or the house of an aging friend.
“Every time I caught sight of geese swooping in formation across the sky, I wondered how our life below might look from their perspective, and imagined that, were they ever to indulge in such speculation, the high-rises might seem to them like firs massed in a grove.” “Prayer was, I had long ago settled in my mind, no kind of promise, no device for getting what one wanted out of life; it was the mere practice of presence, that was all, a therapy of being present . . .” “When I eventually walked down the stairs and out of the museum, it was with the feeling of someone who had returned to earth from a great distance.”
These are feelings many temporary New Yorkers experience at some point during their youthful exile to the city, but that have been purged from the historical record of novels because they offer a lower-level of reality instruction than, say, a brawl in a bar or a game of cricket on Staten Island; they smack of the staid PhD seminar rather than of lived life. The brilliance of Open City lies in its ability to straddle both worlds at once—the worlds of high art and low life—and to treat each as a privileged window into the other. A visit to the Folk Art Museum, for instance, might be followed up, a few pages later, by a run-in with a Barbadian guard from the museum. The novel, like the city, is full of such “fatigued immigrants who rarely raised their heads to look above street level.”
Open City unfolds as a series of walks in Manhattan, allowing for coincidences and linkages to occur naturally, without the superstructure of a plot. The narrator, Julius, who is half-Nigerian and half-German, and completing a year-long psychiatry fellowship at Columbia University, has no specific agenda other than to make sense of his adopted home, to read his landscape the way one might re-read a favorite book. But the city reads its own inhabitants as well, and though Julius would rather spend his time musing silently upon the pit of nothingness at Ground Zero or discussing the arcana of bedbugs with friends, he is repeatedly accosted by other lonely black men—the museum guard, a shoeshine, a USPS clerk—who see him as a kindred spirit, a “brother.” The novel never needs to justify its juxtaposition of the world of high art and street life; the conflict is built into Julius himself.
Refreshingly, Julius does not use his status as a cultural double-agent to rage against the obvious injustices of liberal Manhattan. He does not, for instance, decide to throw in his lot with the oppressed footmen or grow paranoid about his own blackness: the novel maintains a sober approach to race, treating it as yet another experience available to a certain type of educated man of color. Julius is happy to participate in the experience, serenely recording the stories of the immigrants that come his way: a Haitian man who has escaped the killings in his nation to become a shoeshine in the “underground catacombs of Penn Station”; a refugee from the Liberian civil war who takes a plane to JFK seeking asylum and ends up in a detention facility in Queens, where he turns himself into an expert reteller of his own story; and a gay, 89-year-old Japanese-American professor who was committed to an internment camp during the Second World War but prefers to talk to Julius about poetry. What these people have in common is a sort of bracing, needy loneliness, as if the city, which claims to be so hospitable to immigrants, is actually a place of brutal anonymization. Cole’s task in the novel is to get these anonymous people into the open, to reveal the invisible pathways of immigration that deposit individuals on the streets of Manhattan, and to show how the fate of these people has become all the more precarious after September 11. The tranquility, it turns out, is a way into a quieter kind of trouble.
But for all the pull they exert on Julius’s attention, none of these people manage to break through his solitude and enter his life in a meaningful way. Julius’s portraits are drawn at a remove, with the hushed stillness of the Dutch paintings he admires, and one of Cole’s great achievements is that these people feel like fixtures in the landscape of the novel rather than edifying moments in a picaresque tale.
Julius too does not reflect on these characters further once he moves on with his walks. He is mostly interested in maintaining his tranquility, and we begin to realize that, though the city is open, our narrator, for all intents and purposes, is closed.
Teju Cole was born in Michigan and moved back to Nigeria with his parents when he was five months old. He returned to the country of his birth in 1992 to attend Kalamazoo College and later enrolled as a doctoral student in the art history department at Columbia to study the Dutch painter Bruegel. It was here, in the trenches of academia, that he wrote Open City.
The academic influence shows in the book. Open City reads like a digressive monograph of the sort favored by Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, sweeping up changing seasons, news, gossip, and historical tidbits in service of big questions. What does it mean for a city to suffer an attack and go on pretending nothing happened? How are people holding up five years later? Dialogue is recorded with precision and without quotes, giving the text a flat affect, and some of the wintry descriptions have a dreamy quality, as if the novel were expiring within the line breaks of Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro.” Certain subjects, like the race of the people Julius encounters, are left without discussion, as if they were out of the scope of this particular postracial study. (We always infer the race of a character in Open City from his or her nationality, accent, or life experience.) The novel possesses an air of roving inquiry: it exists to solve intellectual rather than emotional questions.
This turns out to be one of the games that Cole is playing with the reader. Over the course of the novel Julius emerges as more than a mouthpiece for critical theory; he is a complicated creature, a man of enigmas and silences who can’t be pinned down as a straightforward liberal. An unapologetic devotee of high Western art—of Mahler and Barthes and Coetzee—he seems to value his own solitude above all else, cutting off conversations when he is bored or irritated. He also refuses to enter into sustained relationships, and we begin to wonder if the “epidemic of sorrow” he senses everywhere is a manifestation of his own sadness. One gets the feeling that he is the sort of person who will talk to you at length about his favorite books and concertos but never tell you why he is alienated from his widowed German mother (left behind in Nigeria), what it feels like to be a German-Nigerian in the US (there can’t be many of those), or why his girlfriend has dumped him (a trope with which the novel begins, linking it to Netherland, another novel about a footloose immigrant in the city). Even his flashbacks to his childhood in Nigeria have a quaint, coming-of-age quality—though he admits that the name Julius linked him “to another place and was, with my passport and skin color, one of the intensifiers of my sense of being different, of being set apart, in Nigeria,” not much comes of this difference. As a narrator, Julius thinks all noise—even personal noise—is beneath him.
But something is clearly nagging at Julius, and about ninety pages into the novel he sets off to Brussels to find his German grandmother. In another book, such a digression would feel like a breach of contract, but by now Open City has tutored us in its serene randomness. In Belgium, Julius looks up his grandmother in a phonebook, finds nothing, and quickly tires of the search. Walking around Brussels in the dead of winter, he muses about the monstrosities of King Leopold’s colonialism and its connection to a recent wave of hate crimes against Muslims. Then, at an internet cafe, he befriends an academically ambitious Moroccan youth eager to talk about theory and politics. One thing leads to another and soon the two men are arguing about Israel and Palestine, terrorism, xenophobia, radical Islam—Julius from the liberal left, the Moroccan, named Farouq, from the Islamist right. There is something slightly playful about this conversation—two intellectuals sizing each other up, neither involved in actual hostilities: a debate that might happen in the halls of a large liberal university. But as the argument progresses both men become more serious, holding tight to their positions. Farouq attacks the Jews, Julius defends them. The big guns—Chomsky, de Man, Finkelstein, Mohammed—are brought out and discussed. The conversation enters a sort of sour stalemate, with Julius flailing.
The conversation turns out to be the centerpiece of the novel, a superb exploration of how men dance around their silences. Cole recreates the dialogue with breathtaking exactness, complicating our conception of Farouq at every turn. When we first meet Farouq, he is an oppressed minority working at an internet café and dreaming of the ivory tower. He has a slightly irritating way of recommending books and spouting theory, but he also has plenty to feel defensive about. “What Farouq got on the trams wasn’t a quick suspicious glance,” Julius explains. “It was a simmering, barely contained fear.” But eventually our sympathy, and Julius’s, begins to wear. Farouq is utterly unyielding in his views about Jews, Palestine, and Islam. He is a good talker, but not much of a listener—there is no real compromise that can be reached between the two men. He is a man who reads liberal thinkers but has lost his liberal inclinations. He only begins opening up to Julius when Julius gives up arguing and takes on his usual role as interlocutor. Soon Farouq reveals a predictable source of hurt: his thesis was rejected by a European university. “How many would-be radicals, just like him, had been formed on such a slight?” Julius wonders as the encounter abruptly ends. But this is not a sentimental question. We can’t feel too sorry for Farouq because we cannot know how much of his failure is owed to discrimination or to his own intransigence. We are left only with a sense of lost promise, a sense so overwhelming that, by the time the section ends, we have forgotten that Julius’s own mission, to find his grandmother, has also been a failure.
There is constant misdirection throughout Open City, a movement from Julius’s private problems to public questions and conversations. After his Brussels interlude, Julius heads back to New York where, with the onset of spring, he spends more time outside, wandering around Central Park, hanging out with friends, and thinking about the city’s history of violence toward black slaves and Native Americans. What does it mean when an entire city has built itself on layers of forgetting? What are the consequences for the rest of us, who aren’t engaging directly with the past? These questions became a bit annoying and repetitive—so much academic white noise, easy to research and even easier to play for sympathetic sighs (no one likes massacres). At this point the novel is in danger of turning into a sort of mournful Wikipedia entry or personal blog about springtime activities. But these digressions turn out to be a patient setup for the revelation that Julius, so quick to uncover the amnesia of others, is an amnesiac himself—another immigrant seeking refuge in New York from his past.
The revelation that comes at the end cannot be discussed except to say: we learn from another character that the great decoder of suffering has likely committed a major crime himself and simply forgotten. The revelation is not foreshadowed by anything that comes before: it goes off like a bomb in the reader’s, and in Julius’s, consciousness. Naturally, some critics have taken issue with this late-in-the-game plot twist, but I think it is a brilliant innovation. In a novel that is a meditation on a sort of fragility and tranquility that exists in cities that are badly prepared for disaster—the fragility of characters like Farouq, in museums, at concerts, in detention facilities, in the homes of old people—the revelation allows the structure of the book, itself a fragile space, to enact the shattering. We spend the entire novel being educated by Julius’s liberalism only to have it brought into question. What does it mean to trust a man who thinks himself above everything and engages in big questions but doesn’t remember his own crimes? Should we trust such a man? Or is he really another sort of postracial innocent, worthy of our pity? The book wisely ends before it can answer these questions, right at the moment when a novel of liberal or racial guilt, the sort exemplified by Coetzee’s Disgrace, might begin.
Open City will be remembered, I think, for its casual radicalism of form. It is a novel about New York that deals with silence, eschewing the usual forays into sex, food, drugs, and relationships, and a novel about the strange privileges and obligations of race that rarely addresses the subject directly (no critic has been moved to declare it a great Nigerian-American novel, a great German-Nigerian novel, or a great African-American novel). Did Cole actively strive to erase these markers of New York noise to produce what is—despite the academic ugliness of the phrase—a truly postracial novel? I can’t say; his methods are obscure. But he has an original way of seeing things and an enormous talent for ambiguous character sketches. He has produced a novel that, in its willingness to look and look again at obvious monuments and symbols in a landscape, reminds one of V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival, reworked for the environment of urban America.
The novel’s problems come from an occasional impulse to omit too much. In turning down the dial on New York glamour, the prose sometimes clots into touristy lists of buildings and places (Open City does not contain memorable descriptions of the New York landscape). The pacing is haphazard and shifty, never quite living up to the symphonic promise of the opening chapter. I also felt that the absence of white Americans, in a borough that is so white and in a novel that luxuriates in “all-white spaces,” was an evasion rather than an omission. But here Cole was one step ahead of me. Toward the end of the novel, having administered the shock about the crime, he has Julius let down his guard and confess that, when he is attending the symphony, he “can’t help noticing” that everyone there is white; that, sometimes, waiting in line for the bathroom, he feels like “Ota Benga, the Mbuti man who was put on display in the Monkey House in the Bronx Zoo in 1906.” The moment is poignant because it is delivered not as a cry of rage or self-hate but rather as one of helplessness. The noise of racial differences, playing ceaselessly under and over everything else, is never totally omitted.
- Karan Mahajan
Julius is an American psychiatrist training in Manhattan. Of German and Nigerian extraction, he is rootless in New York. Entranced by the city, he is anxious not to fetishise his outsider status. He is also on the rebound from a relationship. These states of mind connect with walks that he makes across the urban grid, now for a purpose, now aimlessly.
Along with seemingly profound reflections on cultural forms, descriptions of these walks constitute most of Open City, the first full-length novel by Teju Cole, which has been much praised in the United States for its prose style and for its take on the city as a site of power, desire and community. It is akin to one of those "spatial stories" identified by the philosopher Michel de Certeau in his book The Practice of Everyday Life.
Breaking through the anonymity of the crowd, Julius has encounters with strangers, acquaintances and friends. These include Moji, a woman he knew as a girl in Nigeria, but had forgotten, or chosen to forget. He remembers his time in the Nigerian Military School, goes to Brussels, has sex with a middle-aged Czech woman there, comes back, has a picnic, gets mugged.
Saving a climactic invasion from Julius's past, that's about it so far as action goes. But action is the wrong spoor by which to pursue this book. What comes strongest off it, instead, is a cosmopolitan range of reference. Moments of genuine narrative are most often the springboard for a jump into book chat, music trivia or historical disquisition.
This dangerous gamble pays off. The environment of which Open City is mostly mimetic is the hall of semiotic mirrors inside our heads, and the proliferating data now so easily accessed by our fingertips: twin arenas of information which, at once dazed and delighted, we struggle to connect both to everyday life and an overall interpretative code.
Dramatising this, Cole recommences a process of synthesis between two aspects of the novel which have long consorted and contested with each other: between (as Malcolm Bradbury once put it) "on the one hand, the novel's propensity toward realism, social documentation and interrelation with historical events and movements, and on the other … its propensity toward form, fictionality, and reflexive self-examination".
Cole further calls on at least three city walkers out of literary history: the "strolling spectator" type which has informed the novel from its earliest days; the Baudelairean flâneur which transferred into fictional prose with tales such as André Breton's Nadja (Julius's ex is called Nadège); and the roving "I" of European romantic modernism, which has found its most eloquent recent exponent in the work of WG Sebald.
Open City is also effective at dramatising the relationship between objective and subjective experience. In one fabulous scene, Julius is stranded on a fire escape, high on the edge of Carnegie Hall. It's night-time. He finds himself lost in relativity, plunged between the wailing of an ambulance "reaching me from seven floors below" and "starlight that was unreachable because my entire being was in a blind spot".
These are the limits of being open. The book's title comes from the declaration by defenders, in the event of imminent capture, that a city is "open" and the enemy can march in. Reading Open City, it is important to bear the title in mind, and not become impaled on fixed ideas about what kind of person Julius is. Otherwise one might assume that his contemplations should be taken at face value.
For as well as being an excellent novel about spatial relations (compare Tom McCarthy's equally satisfying Men in Space) and layers of urban history and immigrant experience, Open City is a novel about an intellectual show-off. And if what Moji says is true, he is something much worse.
Negative space (the space between forms or around utterances) is key. We are disposed to read Julius's reflections for their so-called content, whereas we do better to read them in relief, for what they say about him. This is the real juice. We have to work hard to get it, searching in the gaps for what Julius calls "a double story". At the same time, it's in the nature of language and experience that the totality will elude us.
Part of the delight of Cole's book is how it exploits refinement until Julius reveals himself as a poseur through intellectual over-reaching, disclosing an irony for which readers may not be prepared. One instance of this comes when Chinese musicians in a park remind him "of Li Po and Wang Wei, of Harry Partch's pitch-bending songs, and of Judith Weir's opera The Consolations of Scholarship".
How to read Open City is obliquely signalled by these pretentious pratfalls. In the notes of the trumpet of another Chinese band, Julius hears the "spiritual cousins of the offstage clarion in Mahler's Second Symphony". I'm not a musician, but I suspect that's twaddle. But when he hears, in the same tune, the "simple sincerity of songs I had last sung in the school yard of the Nigerian Military School", and is returned, trembling, to a state of childhood innocence, the observation has the force of something genuine. The little emotional space to which no one else in the city is likely to have access is much more important than the public-facing attitudes of the cultural dandy. - Giles Foden
The narrator of Teju Cole’s odd, sometimes striking, sometimes frustrating first novel is a med student named Julius who likes to wander through the streets of New York City, and the book is filled with arresting, strobe-lit glimpses of Manhattan, “this strangest of islands.”
Central Park in a blizzard, when the snow “erased the most obvious signs of the times, leaving one unable to guess which century it was.” The abyss at Ground Zero, with “three or four tractors scattered around inside it,” so dwarfed by the size of the pit that they looked like toys. The brisk sidewalk trade in Harlem — “the Senegalese cloth merchants, the young men selling bootleg DVDs, the Nation of Islam stalls,” and the entrepreneurs hawking “self-published books, dashikis, posters on black liberation, bundles of incense, vials of perfume and essential oils, djembe drums, and little tourist tchotchkes from Africa.”
Some of Mr. Cole’s descriptions of New York have a faintly hallucinatory feel, suggesting a contemporary version of T. S. Eliot’s “Unreal City” in “The Waste Land” — a cacophonous metropolis, filled with anonymous, “Night of the Living Dead”-like crowds surging through the streets. At other times, his city feels like an intimate small town — a constellation of convivial neighborhoods linked by familial ties, religion, ethnicity and serendipitously shared passions.
Most of all, the New York of Mr. Cole — a writer, photographer and historian who was raised in Nigeria and came to the United States in 1992 — is a city of immigrants: Nigerians, Kenyans, Syrians, Lebanese, Malians, Haitians, Chinese and others who have come to escape the sorrows of their own history or to pursue their versions of the American dream.
This multicultural metropolis may initially remind the reader of Zadie Smith’s exuberant multicultural London in her 2000 masterpiece, “White Teeth,” but Mr. Cole does not share Ms. Smith’s interest in creating three-dimensional characters or her gift for old-fashioned storytelling. Instead, his glimpses of the city turn out to be fragments in a meandering stream-of-consciousness narrative that often reads like an ungainly mash-up of W. G. Sebald’s work and the Camus novel “L’Etranger.”
Mr. Cole’s hero, Julius, is a peculiar fellow — and a none-too-reliable narrator. Although Julius tells us that he’s completing the final year of a psychiatry fellowship, he’s strangely detached from his own past, consciously or unconsciously withholding crucial aspects of his youth in Nigeria. Moody, melancholy and dyspeptic, he allows his moods — in a very un-doctor-like manner — to color his reactions to people. And for a young doctor completing a fellowship, he seems to have an awful lot of free time to wander the city at night, and to go to museums and concerts.
During his peregrinations, Julius meets a startling array of people who tell him their life stories. The encounters with the more fully fleshed-out characters — a former professor who is suffering from cancer and an elderly Belgian doctor he meets on a flight to Europe — attest to the author’s gift for portraiture, but other, more perfunctory exchanges with strangers have a solipsistic, dreamlike quality, as though these people were simply projections of Julius’s own sense of dislocation.
A runner, from Mexico or Central America perhaps, who has finished the New York City Marathon and who has no friends or family to greet him at the race’s end produces feelings of pity in Julius. A Haitian bootblack recounts his autobiography as he shines Julius’s shoes. And a postal clerk claims spiritual kinship with Julius, reciting a poem about “silenced voices” and people who have “received the boot.”
Meanwhile, Julius spends a lot of time thinking about death and the meaning of life, the relationship between the political and the personal, racism and identity, exile and nationality. He is the sort of person who takes his time at the post office, deciding which stamps to buy to put on a package, spurning anything with a flag and looking for something aesthetically pleasing.
Julius also has a penchant for apocalyptic grandiosity. The mention of bedbugs makes him think about “the magical power of blood” and “cannibalism, the fear of being attacked by the unseen.” And the mention of a declining bee population makes him think that modern man is “completely unprepared for disaster” and that butchery, continual war and death by epidemic used to be the norm.
This outlook, combined with Julius’s solemnity about himself, make him a decidedly lugubrious narrator. And Mr. Cole’s failure to dramatize his alienation — or make it emblematic of some larger historical experience, as Sebald did with his displaced characters — impedes the reader’s progress while underscoring the messy, almost ad hoc nature of the overall narrative. What stands out in this flawed novel — so in need of some stricter editing — is Mr. Cole’s ambition, his idiosyncratic voice and his eclectic, sometimes electric journalistic eye. - MICHIKO KAKUTANI
The very first words in “Open City,” an indelible debut novel by Teju Cole, imply an inevitability, connecting the narrator’s past with his present task, that of explaining his place in the world: “And so,” his narrator, Julius, says, “when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city.”
Julius’s peripatetic wanderings and their connections to personal histories — both his own and those of the people he meets — form the driving narrative, allowing him to reflect on his adopted New York, the Africa of his youth, the America of today and a Europe wary of its future. With every anecdote, with each overlap, Cole lucidly builds a compassionate and masterly work engaged more with questions than with answers regarding some of the biggest issues of our time: migration, moral accountability and our tenuous tolerance of one another’s differences.
It’s the autumn of 2006, and Julius is in his early 30s, absorbed with the humanistic intellectual life and a lover of classical music. Born in Lagos to a German mother and a Nigerian father, Julius has always felt like something of an outsider. While at the Nigerian Military School, he was mindful of not being sufficiently black. After moving to the United States to study medicine, he learned what it was to not be white. As the perpetual Other, Julius casts a disquisitive eye over the world he encounters, one where a diversity of identities and ideas is often overlooked as the norm.
From Morningside Heights, his peregrinations liberate him from the stresses of both his work as a psychiatric fellow at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital and his recent breakup with his girlfriend. His feet lead him widely, to Tower Records and Central Park, to diners, movies and the subway, to the financial district with its gaping wound at ground zero. Julius visits friends, goes to museums and concerts, vacations in Europe. He attends a poetry reading at the 92nd Street Y. Everyday activities, all.
The significant travels occur, however, via the interactions of the quotidian and his mind, an intellect at once solid in its urbanity and restless in its isolation. Julius summons a palimpsest of connecting and conflicting histories. Some of these concern the oppressed, like the slaves interred in the African burial ground near Wall Street, or the Moroccan clerk at an Internet cafe who gives his perspective as a Muslim intellectual. Others involve the forgotten: a statue in Chinatown, erected in honor of a 19th-century antidrug activist, now collecting pigeon droppings; a Liberian refugee, sitting in limbo in a detention center in Queens. Most of the histories, however, are of the often memorialized — Mahler, Nietzsche, Alexander Hamilton, New York City police officers killed in the line of duty — who live on either in the work bequeathed to us or in the myths constructed around them after their deaths.
Cole’s writing is assured, his ideas are well developed, and his imagery is delicious: a bus is “like a resting beast,” public chess tables are “oases of order and invitations to a twinned solitude,” and in an ailing friend’s room Death hovers “with its cheap suit and bad manners.” In places Cole’s prose recalls W. G. Sebald’s, or the young James Joyce’s in “The Dead.” And his talent for juxtaposing the past and the present turns this book into a symphonic experience: a disabled person on the subway sets Julius thinking about a Yoruba creation myth; this connects with a book his patient wrote about Cornelis Van Tienhoven, the brutal settler of New Amsterdam, and the horrors inflicted on the Native Americans in subsequent centuries; this segues into thoughts on skepticism about global warming, then partisan politics, then Idi Amin, then racial representation in the film “The Last King of Scotland” and other media, until finally Julius considers his own place among it all. Thus he decides to visit Brussels, with the vague notion of finding his aging German grandmother, his remaining link to his maternal past.
Plot developments like this one can at times seem perfunctory. When Julius gives up on finding his grandmother, we’re left with the impression that his trip was mostly an excuse to meditate on the differences between Europe and America. Other times, metaphors may seem too capacious, or references too ponderous. (The connection between a bust of the Vichy-supporting poet Paul Claudel and Auden’s odes to Yeats and the Bruegel painting in a museum nearby may not immediately bring to mind, as it’s meant to, the responsibilities of the intellectual during troubled times.) And while this book will disappoint some who require plot twists or a character’s epiphanic transformation, Cole need not worry. His readers will be those who understand that all stories are interconnected, that literature is not mere entertainment, and that art is nothing if not an extended conversation spanning eras, nations and languages.
The novel’s importance lies in its honesty. Characters make declarations that may seem untenable to some readers, though these characters are not zealots. One genteel European who spent her life practicing medicine in the United States describes America as a “terrible, hypocritical, . . . sanctimonious country.” The Native American author who wrote about Van Tienhoven finds it “a difficult thing to live in a country that has erased your past.” An Ivy League academic wonders whether choosing the circumstances of one’s death is not only more dignified, but also simply right. In a cafe, a young philosopher with a taste for egalitarianism believes that Israel has no title to its territory in Palestine, reasoning that its claim is only as strong as his is, as a Moroccan, to Spain: “Now how would it be if we invade the Spanish peninsula and say, Our forefathers used to rule here in the Middle Ages, so it is our land. . . . It makes no sense, does it?”
And yet Cole, who is in his mid-30s and moved to the United States from Nigeria in 1992, is neither radical pinko nor reckless provocateur. One realizes from his novel that the promises of America are so great that they often can’t help but lead to disillusionment. Through his characters he shows how the world is seen by those who are forced or unafraid to consider the possibilities beyond the status quo; he shakes the familiar comforts and urges us to confront viewpoints usually dismissed as inflammatory.
I did have one larger objection, to a discomfiting turn the novel takes toward its end. A woman from Lagos whom Julius knew in his youth shares an ostensibly shocking revelation about a transgression in his past. To this forgotten or repressed or secreted memory he responds ambiguously. In any other story, such a twist would send tremors across the pages, yet here, set against the novel’s grand scope, it feels unnecessary, either a misstep by a young author or an overstep by a persuasive editor. Could the denouement not simply have comprised the undramatic culmination of the book’s ideas?
“A book suggests conversation,” Julius explains early on. “One person is speaking to another.” In “Open City,” this dialogue does precisely what literature should do: it brings together thoughts and beliefs, and blurs borders. Cole suggests that we re-examine, as perhaps limited and parochial, the idea of the Great Fill-in-the-Nation Novel. Instead, we can look again at the notion of what Goethe called Weltliteratur. This book may not be the Great World Novel, but it points to such a work’s possibility and importance. Judging from his performance here, Cole may eventually be the one to write it. - Miguel Syjuco
The narcissism began to seep: through Teju Cole’s narrator, into my paperback-clutching hands, on an airplane from Chicago to New York. It was my first time back in New York since I’d left, six months ago, after living there for a little more than three years. The city demands approximation: about a half a year ago; more than three years; an airplane, suspended over someplace in between two other places. And also that seeping—the empathy with the narrator I couldn’t quite achieve but didn’t mind not achieving because that seemed, in a way, the point of the book, the proof that no matter how open a place or person is, sharing emotion after emotion, there’s still much left beneath the storytelling or, sometimes, literally buried beneath the city.
Open City (Random House, 2012) is the story of narrator Julius’ wandering through New York, and, briefly, Brussels. It is his contemplation of immigration and nationality in the U.S., his fleetingly depicted but often strong friendships, the way we manufacture brotherhood as a way to both unite and distance ourselves from humanity. It is, too, about a city in flux and the way certain cities, like New York, are built of layers and rise vertically, covering the topography below but never quite flattening it into oblivion. So when I boarded a subway for the first time in months, after buying a weekly Metrocard and missing the train because I kept swiping my credit card too quickly or too slowly, I felt nothing had accumulated in my time away. I could pretend it was the same city accepting the same character it had when I first moved there, nearly four years earlier.
Then, on the subway, I returned to the book. One cannot fall in love with this narrator. He is too distant and too honest at once, and towards the end, I found myself believing another character more than the narrator—because she seemed nicer? Because she might have made a nicer real-life person? Or because she was not the narrator, not the voice I had been instructed to trust and therefore reflexively questioned from the get-go? Or because what she accused him of made me immediately believe her and not him, because in these kinds of accusations, that’s usually the way things go, just as in New York, eventually something will happen that feels like the worst and that feels like it could only happen and could only feel like the worst in such a vertically closed and superficially open city. But that’s all hyperbole, because the worst never does happen; there is always the possibility (the optimism to achieve!) something even more unbearable. The trick, Cole’s Julius shows, is that in New York, the city is never the one to not bear it.
I did not walk so much in New York because the novel I was reading when I arrived was, in part, about walking. I walked because that’s what you do there to kill time, because there are always destinations to be invented and a sense of accomplishment regardless of whether you reach them or buy anything when you’re there. I walked because the soles of my shoes have begun to wear more slowly and I have yet needed to make a trip to the cobbler in Iowa City. I walked, too, because it is what I did when I lived in New York and was not, as I was most recently, just visiting. Julius is only just visiting when he’s in Brussels, but he feels impermanent in New York, like he is awestruck by it for the first time despite being world-weary restless. He is a perpetual tourist, stopping in his steps to gawk, never in a hurry but always moving somewhere—if not forward or backward, still somewhere.
“Every work begins as an obvious metaphor,” John Berger writes. “The metaphor allows [the artist] to imagine the familiar world from above, and his own liberation from it.” Most novels move beyond metaphor toward something resembling a plot; Teju Cole’s Open City (out this week in paperback) does not. Rather, it is itself a single metaphor: aimless wandering as a reading experience.
It’s not the easiest kind of book to dive into. I had to let the aimlessness of it wash over me for awhile, until I began to see how Cole was working, at which point the simple enjoyment of reading quickly became separate from my expectation of what reading should be like — a distinction not so easily grasped. Though the influence is visible, Cole refrains from copying the stream-of-consciousness style of Joyce or the minutely detailed explorations of Baker, and instead works with his own method that interweaves writing style with subject matter into the cloth of a familiar yet original protagonist.
The novel begins as a young man named Julius, seeking “a release from the tightly regulated environment of work,” begins to take long, “inconsequential” walks through New York as “a reminder of freedom.” It is a carefree occupation and a promising device, yet within this premise, an event of consequence fails to follow: Julius just keeps meandering through New York and through the book, an “aimless wandering” that slowly, ultimately, releases us from the tightly regulated environment of the novel.The narrative takes us through a year or so in Julius’ life, but time and place are often jumbled: chapters jump to Nigeria and Brussels, to Julius’ childhood and his budding psychiatric career. As we let ourselves drift with Julius, reading itself also begins to feels aimless, though not insignificant. Liberated from the constraints of a plot, we begin to wonder why we need it at all.
In this respect, Open City isn’t so much a story as an inquiry, and Cole focuses on the means of action rather than its ends. From this rare perspective, the act of storytelling is accomplished through the details of smaller episodes, not a linear progression of scenes. In one childhood anecdote, Julius recounts saving another boy’s life at a swimming pool, trading the glory of what could be a typically heroic tale for a ponderous consideration of the act itself:
The moment that has stayed in my mind is of having not yet reached the boy but having already left the crowd of children behind. Between his cries and theirs, I swam hard. But caught in the blue expanse around me and above, I suddenly felt like I was no closer to him than I had been a few moments before… I thought, for an instant, that I would always be swimming toward him, that I would never cross the remaining distance of twelve to fifteen yards.
Much as Quentin Tarantino uses still frames to accentuate the action in his films, Cole carefully situates his narrative in the space between choice and outcome, the space in which the ambiguity of a decision becomes visible.
Indeed, for the majority of the book, very few choices are actually made. Julius’ world is always happening both with and without him, and he can only occasionally line up his own desires with it. The only capacity in which he proves capable is in bringing a vast catalog of historical and literary references to bear on just about anything he sees: at one point he whips out a biography of Antony de Hooges and the Dutch settlement of upstate New York; later he casually relates the history of Ming Dynasty lacquerware. These intellectualisms do not substitute for actual participation, though, and Julius’ inability to act is a weakness that does not escape his own notice. “I found my admiration for decisive choice increasing,” he admits while reflecting on political engagement, “because I was so essentially indecisive myself.”
It’s not entirely clear whether we should side with Julius — who, we eventually learn, has not always been an innocent bystander to his own life — and the delight of the book is that it coaxes us to at least attempt to decide. A plot would certainly make doing so easier, but its absence is ultimately a blessing. Julius is constantly swimming towards something that feels important, even necessary, though it’s unclear what it is or why it’s so captivating. Cole’s achievement is that he has crafted a novel that needs no beginning, middle, or end because it so humbly imagines actual life: a string of events that follow each other without any perceptible rhyme or reason. His focus on the moment, not the outcome, grants us the chance to “imagine the familiar world from above” and ask whether we’re swimming hard enough.- John Knight
Richard Falk: Reflections on Teju Cole’s OPEN CITY
Teju Cole, Every Day is for the Thief . Random House, 2014.
Every Day is for the Thief (a novella) is about a young man living in New York City who goes to Lagos for a short and bewildering visit. It was my first book, published by Cassava Republic Press in 2007 in Nigeria. A revised version was published in the US (Random House) and the UK (Faber & Faber) in 2014, and was a New York Times Editors’ Pick.
For readers of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Michael Ondaatje, Every Day Is for the Thief is a wholly original work of fiction by Teju Cole, whose critically acclaimed debut, Open City, was the winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was named one of the best books of the year by more than twenty publications.
Fifteen years is a long time to be away from home. It feels longer still because I left under a cloud.
A young Nigerian living in New York City goes home to Lagos for a short visit, finding a city both familiar and strange. In a city dense with story, the unnamed narrator moves through a mosaic of life, hoping to find inspiration for his own. He witnesses the “yahoo yahoo” diligently perpetrating email frauds from an Internet café, longs after a mysterious woman reading on a public bus who disembarks and disappears into a bookless crowd, and recalls the tragic fate of an eleven-year-old boy accused of stealing at a local market.
Along the way, the man reconnects with old friends, a former girlfriend, and extended family, taps into the energies of Lagos life—creative, malevolent, ambiguous—and slowly begins to reconcile the profound changes that have taken place in his country and the truth about himself.
In spare, precise prose that sees humanity everywhere, interwoven with original photos by the author, Every Day Is for the Thief—originally published in Nigeria in 2007—is a wholly original work of fiction. This revised and updated edition is the first version of this unique book to be made available outside Africa. You’ve never read a book like Every Day Is for the Thief because no one writes like Teju Cole.
“By turns funny, mournful, and acerbic . . . Teju Cole is among the most gifted writers of his generation.”—Salman Rushdie
“Crisp, affecting . . . Taking his cues from W. G. Sebald, John Berger, and Bruce Chatwin, Cole constructs a narrative of fragments, a series of episodes that he allows to resonate.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
“Remarkable . . . a luminous rumination on storytelling and place, exile and return . . . This is an extraordinary novel, a radiant meditation on the nature of happiness and faith, corruption, misfortune and belonging.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Shimmering . . . Cole has a way of superimposing emotional landscapes over his portraits of physical places that is transcendent. Every Day Is for the Thief is as much as an epic journey into the heart of the traveler as the place traveled.”—The Seattle Times
“Every Day Is for the Thief is a wonderful meditation on modern African life that will help cement Cole’s reputation as a prose stylist. More than that, it is a book that never fails to find a thoughtful and essential thing to say, with each of its finely crafted sentences and paragraphs offering a vision of justice and order to a people beset by so many woes.”—Los Angeles Times
Teju Cole’s writing bears a resemblance to photography and art, but that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise — Cole is actually a photographer, as well as an art historian. That background plays heavily into his work. Cole’s craft as a writer comes from being an acute observer and having an understanding of art — attributes that are rarely discussed these days, when it seems like all anybody talks about is whether you should live in New York or chase an MFA.
Now, with the release of Every Day Is for the Thief, which pre-dates his Hemingway/Pen Award winner, 2011′s Open City, Cole’s collected output consists of two books, an introduction to Ivan Vladislavic’s Double Negative, an exquisite corpse short story told by RTing other Twitter accounts like a maestro conducting a symphony, New Yorker pieces, and other essays scattered about that might look idiosyncratic at first, but, with just a little effort, make perfect sense together. Everything he does is worth reading, but a Teju Cole novel is a reading experience matched by few contemporary writers.
Cole wrote, in a piece for The New Inquiry, “Fictional characters that have an inconstant inner life are more like us and, therefore, better than those that don’t.” Reading his books, I’m struck by how consistent the characters in his fiction feel, but also how they don’t just feel like characters; when reading something like the short chapter about Pastor Olakunle in Every Day Is for The Thief, with his silk suits and expensive automobiles, I think that Cole hardly has to make things up. Open City and Every Day Is for the Thief aren’t fast-paced books with crazy plot twists; Cole’s stories develop before your eyes like a Polaroid photograph, the image slowly getting clearer the longer you look at it. In Every Day, as opposed to Open City, you’re presented with more images of just one place (Lagos), instead of the journeys that Open City’s narrator Julius takes around New York City, and eventually to Nigeria and also Brussels.
Every Day is settled, but short, and works whether you have already read Open City or you only plan to; the chronology of how you read Cole’s two books doesn’t matter. What the novella’s snapshots do provide the reader with is a much broader and unforgettable picture of what life is like in Lagos, even more than the novel that gained Cole his acclaim, laying bare the corruption of its uniformed officials to the indifference of its people. He skillfully picks up on the smallest of moments that we couldn’t be bothered to stop and observe: “The field I am standing in is mostly dust, but it has sere grass in scattered patches. Six men sit in the shade of a large Indian almond tree. One of them, a man in a sky-blue cap, is blind in one eye.” You get taken into a store that shows off jazz albums that would cost an arm and a leg to buy, but the owners would gladly burn copies for you for a smaller fee; go into the internet cafes where young men type scam emails to people in other countries so they can “live large and impress their mates on campus.” Cole’s narrator recalls the brutality of the place, seeing a young boy burned alive in front of a crowd after being caught stealing. There are also vibrant moments of beauty and power that few writers can pull off.
The book is balanced from start to finish. It’s Teju Cole proving, yet again that he is doing something different, working outside the boundaries of the conversations the literary community keeps having with itself, and it works out right every time.-
Teju Cole is a writer who lives on the Internet. He gives of himself to Twitter. Although his 2011 US debut Open City won the PEN/Hemingway and got James Wood all excited, I first encountered Cole’s lyrical prose on social media. 140 is enough characters for a good writer to do good writing, whether he’s stretching an essay across many multiple Tweets or just joking about how social media works, like the rest of us:
As much as I like reading Cole online, the experience of reading his work in a big chunk is sharper and feels more complete. Cole’s writing invites you into a fully realized world; at a longer length, his writing is immersive.
Every Day is for the Thief was published in Nigeria in 2007 but never had US distribution until now, which gives the book the strange distinction of simultaneously being both his first and second book to American audiences. Like Open City, Every Day is for the Thief features a male narrator walking around a city. While Open City takes on New York, Every Day finds an unnamed narrator returning to his native Lagos, Nigeria after more than a decade away. Every Day reads like a study for Open City, or a spiritual twin, or a backwards reflection.
From the moment he steps off the airplane in Lagos, Cole’s narrator encounters the corruption that covers every interaction in Lagos like a translucent skin. The longer the narrator stays in Lagos, the thicker and more complex the skin gets, until the reader can see that corruption is not actually a skin, a removable layer, but a part of the body, mixed in with the flesh, organs, and bones.
The narrator feels the loss of a remembered Lagos, and Cole renders the Lagos around the narrator so richly that the book simultaneously takes as its subject the city and the loss of the city. Marketed as a novel, Every Day comes off as surreal travelogue.
Towards the middle of the novel, Cole shifts the book’s subject to the search for art in a corrupt culture, which is where Every Day really finds its legs. The narrator’s palpable frustration at not being able to write amidst the frequent power outages and the ever-present hum of backup generators gives the reader the best sense of the man at the center of the novel, who otherwise recedes to relate the stories of either the city or of a few of its inhabitants. Cole deepens his central character a bit too late in the text, giving the narrator a bit of a half-there feel which I think ultimately steps all over his ability to fully convey Lagos. Once the narrator solidifies the various corruptions and complications he experiences in Nigeria gain a more visceral feel.
My only other objection to Every Day is for the Thief is technical. Like in Open City, Cole renders his dialogue completely without tags, which while clearly a style choice Cole favors, is a pet peeve of mine.
With Cole, though, everything comes back to the prose. When it comes to the language he uses to give shape to his stories, there’s nothing I can say against Cole. If he wrote it, I’d read the entire phone book.
I have a weakness for fiction writers who give good interviews, who seem to have so many ideas brewing in their heads that they can’t help serving them up, as if they were cocktails, wherever they turn. These aren’t the only kind of real writers, for sure. But we need our headstrong, talky ones, the ones who live to stir the pot.
Teju Cole is an American-born writer who grew up in Nigeria, a gifted novelist and essayist and a glowing figure on Twitter, where some of his best flurries of dispatches arrive the way James Baldwin’s telegrams must have in 1963. Mr. Cole defended Twitter about as well as it can be defended in a recent interview, when he commented: “If somebody tells you that a 5,000-word essay in The New York Review of Books is the only way of being serious, they’re lying to you.
Mr. Cole is the author of two novels. His first to be published in America was “Open City” (2011), about a young half-Nigerian, half-German psychiatry student who walks the streets of New York City, soaking up impressions. It was a fluid and flickeringly brilliant novel, one in which his narrator announced, “I forgot what life had been like before I started walking.”
“Open City” was actually Mr. Cole’s second novel. His first, “Every Day Is for the Thief,” was until now available only in Nigeria, where it was published in 2007. It, too, is a book of taut peregrinations. It, too, gives us a narrator who didn’t know who he was until he began to wander.
Mr. Cole’s novel has a mischievous title, taken from a Yoruba proverb: “Every day is for the thief, but one day is for the owner.” It’s about a young Nigerian, also a psychiatry student in New York, who returns home to Lagos for a short visit. He moves through the city by bus, by car and on foot, filtering his observations about his former home through his filigreed observations about himself.
Thievery of various sorts percolates in his mind. He fears he has gone soft in America, that in Nigeria he will become prey. To survive in that country, he is viscerally reminded, there “has to be the will to be violent, a will that has to be available when it is called for.”
The official corruption in Nigeria astounds our unnamed narrator. Lawlessness is pandemic. “The barely concealed panic that taints so many interactions here is due precisely to the fact that nobody is in control, no one is ultimately responsible for anything at all.”
Some of the thievery he encounters, however, almost makes him smile. One of this novel’s best scenes is set in an Internet cafe in Lagos, where the narrator stumbles upon desperate men trying to scam wealthy foreigners in so-called advanced-fee frauds. Actually seeing these famous criminals in the flesh, he says, “I feel as though I have discovered the source of the Nile or the Niger.”
How slow-witted you must be to fall for these scams. “There is a sense, I think, in which the swindler and the swindled deserve each other,” Mr. Cole writes. “It is a kind of mutual humiliation society.”
The narrative ability of these scammers can’t help impressing him. He decides: “Lagos is a city of Scheherazades. The stories unfold in ever more fanciful iterations and, as in the myth, those who tell the best stories are richly rewarded.” Poor John Updike, he decides, stuck in the drab American suburbs. “Had John Updike been African, he would have won the Nobel Prize 20 years ago.”
Mr. Cole’s novels assume the shape of travel writing, and they are sly commentaries on the genre. They are also dense with travel writing’s pleasures, with sharp, sudden observation. Satellite dishes cling to houses “like barnacles”; a scammer in a cafe “keeps at his typing with the single-mindedness of a hen picking a yard clean.”
When the narrator spies a young woman on a Lagos bus reading a Michael Ondaatje novel, it “makes my heart leap up into my mouth and thrash about like a catfish in a bucket.” He adds: “I could hardly be more surprised had she started singing a tune from ‘Des Knaben Wunderhorn.’ ”
The girl on the bus is a signal moment, in its way, in “Every Day Is for the Thief.” In this novel of belonging and not belonging, intellectual seeking and intellectual honesty are prized above almost all else. The narrator refuses to leave his critical faculties behind, even when appraising the things he most loves, even when it hurts.
Nigeria is “a hostile environment for the life of the mind,” Mr. Cole ruefully observes. History is uncontested: “There is no sight of that dispute over words, that battle over versions of stories that marks the creative inner life of a society.” He asks, “Where are the contradictory voices?”
Mr. Cole’s novels can summon contradictory voices in your own mind. At times, they lack the emotional density of the best fiction. There’s no contrapuntal play of egos and ids; the flashlight beam of his imaginative sympathy has not yet extended itself very far outward.
Yet his novels are lean, expertly sustained performances. The places he can go, you feel, are just about limitless. The story he tells here is just about the most primal one, “an inquiry into what it was I longed for all those times I longed for home.” -
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http://www.bostonglobe.com/http://www.washingtonpost.com/
http://www.jsonline.com/
http://www.slate.com/
http://tedlehmann.blogspot.com/
http://www.thestar.com/
Interviews:
http://bombmagazine.org/article/10023/teju-cole
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/palimpsest-city/
http://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/teju-cole#_
http://www.npr.org/2014/03/24/291933966/a-homecoming-minus-the-nostalgia-in-coles-unsparing-thief
http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/pitch-forward/
http://observer.com/2014/03/every-day-a-chance-to-reflect/
http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/6650/a-conversation-with-teju-cole.html
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/conversation-teju-cole/
http://www.listener.co.nz/culture/books/teju-cole-interview-the-long-version/
http://www.whatiwannaknow.com/2013/10/teju-cole/
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