Customer Reviews

Open City: A Novel

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New Yorkers are often heard to say that they have not yet been to Ellis Island or taken a walk to the Cloisters. Teju Cole's Open City nudges us out of our complacency and opens our eyes to everyday life, the life that passes us by while we rush around. This book makes us pause, look around, think of the people past and present who have viewed these same city streets. A well thought out and wonderfully written prose pulls you into a year of Julius's life: his sensitivity to what goes on in another's life, his failure to fully reckon with his own delusions. As other reviewers have said, this book is really not for readers in a hurry. In the midst of our hectic life, Open City has given us a reason to slow down and add a few more years to our years. Nicely done, Mr. Cole.

Open City is an exceptional novel.

Its intense, detailed and specific narrative, unravelling inside the mind of one man, Julius - a young Nigerian-German doctor completing his residency in psychiatry in a New York hospital - brings the city of new York hauntingly to life in a different, slower, deeper way from anything I've ever read. From this detail and specificity, it reaches out widely to the global flows of our fluxing, ungraspable world, personified by the various immigrants and asylum seekers he encounters. It reaches in, too, to touch the reader's mind and senses and emotions. For this restrained, intellectual voice, you realise, is piercingly sensitive - it gets to you!

This is not one for the fan of plot-heavy pageturners, perhaps. Julius spends much time alone, walks a lot and thinks a lot, about art and memory and history. He sees a lot, as loners sometimes do, and has strange, surprising, significant encounters, often with other immigrants, as loners sometimes do.

His story, perhaps, goes nowhere much. And yet, in his actual journey to Brussels, his journeys of memory back to Nigeria, and in the mouths and memories of those he meets from far-flung places, it goes to Africa, to Europe... and to places in the heart.

It travels too, through his observations and reflections, in time, political and cultural history. Full of seeming digressions, it digresses in fact not at all, but is a seamless deepening through detail of the whole picture and atmosphere of today's global city.

And it goes to a sharp inner twist that you will not forget.

It's a book to love, and to reread many times.

"And so 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."

So this singular novel begins, and so too does the journey into a mind steadying itself on the supports of a brooding New York City. Julius is a startling, searching narrator who builds up his varied histories the way we all do--relying on an assiduous, rhythmic accumulation (and excising) of detail outlining who we wish to be, who we think we are, who we once were. It is the city's job to fill itself up with the world; Teju Cole's job of filling up the world with his opened city is more than complete, it is thoughtful, devastating, tuned in close to the landscape's heartbeat. Once Julius's layers have been peeled away--and once the pealing of his layers stops ringing in your ears--you will find your environment to be deeper than you'd ever suspected it to be, and you will face the pacings of your neighbor, your street corner, your daily fictions with an utmost sensitivity. Open this book, and you will open your city.

Julius, a New York City psychiatry intern in his early 30s, is an African with a white German mother and black Nigerian father. Racism, politics, mental states, music and death are the dominant themes of Open City, with death a constant chord in this monotone chant.

Open City begins with Julius taking long walks around New York City. With elegant descriptions and historic data, it gives a refreshing look at parts of the city seen hundreds of times, as well as those avoided or rarely seen. And as a reader and great walker, it drew me in immediately.

I thought I would love this book because Teju Cole is so wonderfully descriptive about what he sees around him, but soon I felt estranged from this character. He is one-dimensional. A ghost (not literally) who expresses little, feels little, is not particularly involved with his own life. He does not attach to anyone or anything deeply. It is a surface life, this camera of a person who takes many pictures but just snaps and keeps walking. Even Julius's own horrid actions are slipped over without attachment or concern.

Cole brings up racism and politics and death, but he is like a tour guide: On your left is where this horrible event occurred; on your right we see this injustice. There's no there, there.

I think Cole has literary skill--and if he intended to portray emptiness and alienation, he has done that well. But the themes just don't feel justified.

There is much to admire about the elegant yet restless writing of *Open City*. I was content to meander about Morningside Heights with the narrator, a flaneur who conveys NY spaces very well. However, conveying characters -- people -- is a but trickier for the novelist. His discrete observations never quite come together in a novelistic way. I don't require plot from books, but there does need to be some development, some realization or even question to hang your hat on, even if it is only in the realm of philosophy. Perhaps this might have been a more successful book had it been a collection of essays, since the writer seems keen to show what he knows about what it means to be human in the 21st century (and indeed, to show what he knows about all kinds of things that don't feed into some basic trajectory). The closest we get to a structure that might lead us somewhere is an accusation in the end (I won't spoil here). The narrator does absolutely nothing with this important claim: doesn't deny, embrace, mourn it, although he presents himself as a sensitive thinker.

This might have something to do with a troubling relationship with women; however much the narrator strives to show how sophisticated he is on the issues of race and religion, he is utterly antiquated and dull on the subject of women. We are told that this one is not physically beautiful, this one is -- and somehow this is supposed to shed light on something. Bleh. The narrator can only really see women as people when they are ancient somehow, long devoid of sexuality (but of course even then he needs to talk about how she must have been a great beauty.... why? why? Not so open there, Julius (or Cole)). This is important because we are carefully prepped to not like the female character who accuses the main character... how? by delineating her unattractiveness -- both her personality but naturally her looks are rather repellent (to Julius): small eyes, purple blotches... well, of course we will let this man off the hook, given such a tableau.

There is no reason to believe Teju Cole intended his debut novel to present a challenge to reviewers, but that is what "Open City" does. The only way a critic can genuinely convey the force of this book -- its full weight and effect -- is to break a covenant with the potential reader by entering the forbidden territory of the spoiler. But revealing the specific shock that hits you like a block of concrete when you reach the novel's final pages is something no responsible critic will do.

Instead, you are apt to come across a positive review of "Open City" saying the novel is, in some non-specific way, a "tour de force." Another will cagily suggest something's amiss by labeling the story's narrator, Julius, a 32-year-old Nigerian-American who is completing a psychiatry fellowship in New York City, "an unreliable narrator." I will put it this way: what this enormously talented writer has succeeded in doing is crafting a multi-layered reading experience that you'll be dying to talk about with other readers.

Since Cole is a newcomer, critics are stepping over themselves trying to identify a comparable veteran. Which writer will Cole remind the reader of? Candidates are piling up. One is Joseph O'Neill, who, like Cole, is a writer of mixed parentage and hence multicultural perspective. O'Neill's 2008 novel, "Netherland," similarly explores themes of displacement and anxiety in post-9/11 New York City. Another is Zadie Smith, who, like Cole, unabashedly tackles matters of race, class, the immigrant experience, and the suppressed elements of history whose exposure is our moral duty.

W.G. Sebald is mentioned as well, presumably for his erudition and a shared style of writing that is slow and meditative, seemingly without much of a plot, and dependent on the cumulative accretion of observations. Cole, however, is not a formal innovator like Sebald, and the reader may be relieved to learn Cole is a conventional technician, using standard-length sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. Albert Camus' "The Stranger" also has been cited as a model. At first blush this makes some sense (Meursault and Julius are both protagonists of alienation). But my view is if Cole is following Camus, a stronger influence is "The Fall," with its restless, talkative confessor.

Another author I'd place on the list of comparables is Elizabeth Hardwick. Cole shares Hardwick's keen turn of mind, her love of music, and her unerring command of language. Cole today, as Hardwick two generations ago, feasts on the endless supply of attractions on the walkable streets of Manhattan. Both writers tune their ears to the innumerable personal stories waiting to be heard. (Cole has said he wanted "Open City" to show how New York City is "a space full of ghosts and unfinished psychological business.") Finally, like Cole, Hardwick showed no fear in letting autobiography undergird her fiction, notably in her New York novel, "Sleepless Nights."

And, to add one more plate to the table: I see resemblances to the methods of Roberto Bolano's "By Night in Chile." Although Bolano's short novel uncovers different sins and belongs to an earlier time of stress in a foreign nation, it shares with "Open City" a narrator prone to non-stop outpouring of stories, of exquisitely observed morsels of experience. Both narrators, it could be said, are engaged in a sort of "talking cure," on a path to revealed truth. In both novels, readers may find the meandering style frustrating. A stream of consciousness leaves some cold. Yet in each story it all adds up, at last, to form a devastating contemporary psychological portrait.

But enough. Let Teju Cole and "Open City" be what they want to be: each reader's own discovery.

Open City is a vast (don't be fooled by its 259 pages) book of ideas, explored by its narrator Julius as the psychiatric intern follows the migratory string of his life through time/space. His life span fits neatly into the post colonial/post 9.11 eras, but his seemingly meandering ruminations expand those contexts considerably to include a time when exploiting slaves was a matter of daily business in New York before installation of the Statue of Liberty to welcome immigrants, and during a foray into the Old World he visits the Medieval practice of "prison" ships sailing port-to-port to collect "undesirables."

A word of warning to those who cherish character and plot: this is not the book for you. In the plainest of English, this is a complex and sophisticated monologue of the mind. Very little happens beyond the daily life of an unexceptional migrant from Lagos. There are no characters here other than the sketches the reader gets through the lenses of Julius' mind. No offense, but bugger off if that's what you expect from your reading.

That said, there is much thought in this deep and wide little book. Part of it is obvious as Teju Cole puts philosophical arguments in his characters' mouths, such as the Moroccan emigrant who strives to be the next Edward Said; or in-your-face accessible such as the neighbor whose wife passed away unnoticed by Julius; but many of the ideas are more subtle, such as the metaphor of migratory birds (a mythical metaphor for soul that serves as a thread through Julius' wanderings) that frames this mind movie of an emigrant/immigrant among emigrant/immigrants.

I scribbled pages of notes reading this little tome, and by no means did I pick up on even a majority of Cole's expansive allusions to the classical music world, or to literature (fact is I compiled a considerable reading list just noting the allusions).

But I did pick up on the metaphor of Julius following the string of his life, his mind movie, to discover how he fits into his time, and Time in the larger sense of the world. In addition to the migrating birds that frame the book, there is a bird representing a boy's soul tethered to the child by an electric blue string early on that serves as a handle for the reader to make sense of Julius' peregrinations as he explores his personal memory and how it fits into history. What some may find disconcerting is that the recounting of this journey through Julius' mind movie yields no result that can be expressed in the short concept statement favored by today's commercial movie industry.

For instance, Julius is morally neutral, even as the sister of a friend accuses him of seducing her while she was intoxicated in their prior life in Lagos. There is no reaction at all from Julius to her confrontation. It's as if he has erased the event that sparked her accusation from his memory. This is how memory works, Julius finds. It is a palimpsest that allows him to erase such an event from his memory, not unlike the grave of 15,000-20,000 slaves whose final resting point serves as the foundation for office towers on some of Manhattan's priciest real estate.

Cole's book is artistic and it is impossible to do it justice in a review. It is so broad in its explorations, and the connections so subtle that it would require several times the number of pages without yielding more insight than Cole challenges the reader to make.

I read a lot of literary fiction and almost never write reviews. I have thought often about the novel after reading it. Something about it is so different from other novels in the same category. There is something very "present" about it. It is a little like David Foster Wallace in that the narrator sounds like the voice in your head. Highly recommend. Esp. if you live in or love NYC.

Julius,a Psychiatrist in residency at the University hospital,wanders the streets of New York and Brussels as a means of escape from an overflowing world, and is drawn into recollections of his youth in Nigeria.He sees the history of New York and Europe changing as the migrations of Africans, Asians and Arabs repeat the flights for freedom and liberty that drove the old world people to create the new; a desire for freedom and liberty. In this World of increasing globalism, technology and anonymity, people of all cultures and races seek to re establish their identity;something natural to man, yet the root of which is racism and tribalism.
A hugely thought provoking book. There is no 'story' as such-other than biographical-Cole uses the history of New York,Europe and Africa to explore how their histories have inter mingled over the centuries; how our history is forged due to circumstances;how the people who win the battle to interpret history win the battle for power.But is their interpretation neccessarily right? Cole cleverly links this to Psychiatry where one group decides-or is the mean average that decides- what is normal, and those outside as mad. He looks at how we as individuals never perceive ourselves as wrong or evil;we can reason out-no matter how ridiculous-all our worst actions and not be affected by their gravity. This is true of nations also.The other side commits the atrocities; its other people who are to blame.
A tremendous book that really gets the mind working. It reminds of WG Sebalds "Rings of Saturn" and "Emigrants" on history; how events and cities, once so dominating and powerful can be reduced to irrelevence as time progresses and new events and powers usurp, and also Saul Bellow in his philosophical musings on the modern, global technical age.
Outstanding. An author to take note of.

Full disclosure: I briefly worked with Teju Cole eleven years ago. At the time, I was a little awed by how eloquent he was: he spoke like he had already written five or six books. So I wasn't surprised to learn, recently, that he had published a book, or that it was getting good reviews.

I want to take an angle that I haven't seen taken yet, and talk about what one can learn from Open City. Books are teachings, even when they're fictional. Authors take the knowledge they have acquired and share it with the public, like teachers do. Sometimes it's facts; sometimes it's subtler stuff like perceptions, analyses and open questions.

1. Race. (Whatever that is.) The book made me feel like I was understanding race better. Many of the characters are also involved in thinking about race.

2. Compassion. Many of the characters, including the narrator, are engaged in the narratives of other individuals and groups. There's a sense that it's possible for each of us to go beyond our own tribal obsessions. In this way, the book offers an antidote to identity politics. This is not a book about the Holocaust, but it's deeply engaged with many forms of human suffering, and it contains a passage about the Holocaust that was, at least to me, remarkably insightful and moving, while remaining, like most of the book, calm and understated.

3. History. The book analyzes New York as a palimpsest containing traces of all that has happened before. If you're not already an expert, and maybe if you are, you'll learn plenty of new things about the city.

4. Classical music. Ditto. If you don't want to listen to Mahler by the end of the book, there might be something wrong with you.

5. Art history. Ditto. Note that Cole studied art history. There's a scene in which the narrator, Julius, visits an art exhibit. It's like visiting the mind of an art historian and looking out through his eyes.

4. Psychology. Julius, a psychiatrist, is a preternaturally keen observer of his own thoughts, and an equally keen listener to other people's discourses.

5. The immigrant experience. Most of the characters are discussed partly in terms of their relationship to migration. What does it mean to move across the world? Is it possible to have two spiritual homes? What is the nature of one's allegiance to each? This relates, unless I'm being completely obtuse, with the book's title. The title directly refers to Brussels, but indirectly to New York, and the implication is (again, unless I'm missing the point) that New York has survived and thrived by being open to new arrivals.

6. Historical and personal memory. What aspects of the past do we seek to retain through acts of memory? What do we obliterate in order to move unfettered into the future?

7. Contemporary history. The book engages with 9/11, refugees, and global climate change. The present appears in the context of a deep vision of history. Cole gives us a lucid discussion of this historical moment; Open City is both a mirror that reflects and a lamp that illuminates.

8. The effects of light on physical objects. Some of the visual details -- small stuff -- read like things that Vermeer would have written if he had been a novelist. A man that Julius sees one day is described like this: "He was silhouette dark, and his body bore signs either of long hours at the gym or of a lifetime of physical labor." And later, "I could no longer see his bright black back among the throng in the direct glare of the sun."

Cole's prose bears signs of long hours at the computer and a lifetime of intellectual labor. In other words, the prose is seriously buff. It's likely to appeal to both your mind and your heart, and it might make you a slightly wiser person.