Otvoreni grad

by Teju Cole, Alen Bešić (Translator)

Prvi roman nigerijsko-američkog književnika Tedžua Kola mogao bi da bude vodič: kako laganim korakom potpuno utisnuti grad u svoj život. Na prvi pogled, konstrukcija je sasvim jednostavna. Početkom završne godine stažiranja na psihijatriji, Džulijus počinje da izlazi u večernje šetnje. Pripovedajući u prvom licu, sakuplja krhotine onoga što vidi i čuje, produbljuje ono o čemu razmišlja i suočava se sa sećanjima koja iskrsavaju dok hoda ulicama Njujorka. Kao na fotografijama, otkriva nove svetove. Priča se otvara stranicu po stranicu, sloj po sloj i pri svakom novom čitanju nudi drugačiji miraž. Na prvi pogled, pažnju nam privlače pravi uglovi i paralelne linije koje drže grad na okupu. Ali, dok pratimo Džulijusov korak, perspektive se produbljuju. Vreme i prostor dobijaju nove dimenzije.

Čitalac upija takav svet kao Džulijus Njujork.

„Otvoreni grad” je opčinjavajući, snoliki roman – poetična meditacija o ljubavi, nacionalnom identitetu, rasi, slobodi i gubitku – koji su mnogi uporedili sa Zebaldovim romanima. U pitanju je suptilna studija karaktera koja je proglašena za najbolju knjigu godine u dvadeset časopisa kao što su The New Yorker, The Economist, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe.

Možemo slobodno reći da je ovo jedan od najimpresivnijih debija u novijoj književnoj istoriji (...) Jedna od velikih knjiga o Njujorku, ali i o prostoru, jeziku i pamćenju.

Aleksandar Hemon

Genres: Fiction, Africa, New York, Novels, Nigeria, Contemporary, Literary Fiction

276 pages, Paperback

First published February 8, 2011

About the author

I was born to Nigerian parents and grew up in Lagos. My mother taught French. My father was a business executive who exported chocolate. The first book I read (I was six) was an abridgment of Tom Sawyer. At fifteen I published cartoons regularly in Prime People, Nigeria’s version of Vanity Fair. Two years later I moved to the United States.

Since then, I’ve spent most of my time studying art history, except for an unhappy year in medical school. I currently live in Brooklyn.

Reviews

[Adina · Rating 4 out of 5]

“We experience life as a continuity, and only after it falls away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float.”

The novel’s narrator, Julius, is Nigerian-German psychotherapist living in New York. To relax, he takes long walks around his city observing different sights and remembering some moments from his past. He meets some friends, has some reported conversations with them, more or less important. The novel has a strong Sebaldian vibe, that’s for sure. There is no plot to be found here, it does not feel that the book is going anywhere. However, it does not mean that the author had no plan while constructing the novel. The most important intervention, so to speak, was the way the real personality of the narrator is revealed. In the beginning we see him as he pretends to be, a well read, smart, friendly young man. Slowly, his unlikable treats come to surface. He proves to be insensitive to others and avoids his own painful emotions and truths. His personality is in contrast with his profession as psychotherapist and hurts the people around him.

There is considerable number of digressions, some interesting, other less so. However, all his lessons of history, politics, art, psychology gather around the theme of inhumanity and all the ways people hurt other people.
Some quotes:

“This was part of my suspicion that there was a mood in the society that pushed people more toward snap judgments and unexamined opinions, an antiscientific mood; to the old problem of mass innumeracy, it seemed to me, was being added a more general inability to assess evidence. This made brisk business for those whose specialty was in the promising of immediate solutions: politicians, or priests of the various religions. It worked particularly well for those who wished to rally people around a cause. The cause itself, whatever it was, hardly mattered. Partisanship was all.” This paragraph sounds very relevant nowadays.

"I became aware of just how fleeting the sense of happiness was, and how flimsy its basis: a warm restaurant after having come in from the rain, the smell of food and wine, interesting conversation, daylight falling weakly on the polished cherrywood of the tables. It took so little to move the mood from one level to another, as one might push pieces on a chessboard. Even to be aware of this, in the midst of a happy moment, was to push one of those pieces, and to become slightly less happy."

[Terryn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading Cole’s “Open City” was kind of like giving someone the black person head nod, and the other person staring back at you like you’re crazy. That’s basically what I felt in struggling to finish this book. I bought the novel as an act of solidarity, because he is a young black writer writing about young black experiences. Now, I won’t stop supporting writers in general and young black ones in particular, but I will keep it real if the work is not engaging. I didn’t recognize myself (or people I know) in the story.

“City” is Cole’s first novel, and details the daily life of Julius, a Nigerian-German psychiatry student in his last year of residency in a New York hospital. The story follows him as he wanders Manhattan and thinks. Cole’s prose is beautiful and reflective and the book is incredibly written. However, the minimal plot and Julius’ general douchiness (a symptom of his privileges – male, socioeconomic, doctoral) left me not really caring about anything happening in the protagonist’s life. Like at all. I don’t care that he walked down to Wall Street to reflect, I don’t care that he hates his white mother, and I don’t care that he goes to Belgium and screws a cougar. I had literary constipation, because I literally did not give a give a sh*t.

[Candi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to admit, I picked up this book while on a trip to New York City, mainly for the promise that I’d have the opportunity to wander throughout the streets of Manhattan with the narrator, Julius, long after my own visit had come to a conclusion. I was definitely rewarded on that account.

“Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.”

Furthermore, there was a one month journey to Brussels, and that, along with some flashbacks to Julius’s childhood in Nigeria, gave me further opportunities to explore. However, there was so much more to this novel than simple armchair travel. It’s intellectual and complex. I’m not sure I uncovered all the layers of this enough to properly explain what it’s about. One thing that I couldn’t help thinking throughout was that this reminded me quite a lot of Rachel Cusk’s Outline, which I read about a year ago. There’s not much of a plot to speak of, but rather a series of interactions with other people, conversations, and plenty of inner reflection. Music, art, politics, religion, racism, photography, and catastrophes are all covered. The inhumanity of man comes up numerous times, as does isolation. The odd thing is that I never really felt anything at all for the narrator. I’m not sure that I was supposed to anyway. He seemed likeable enough at first, but then I started to feel a bit unsettled. He’s in his last year of a psychiatry fellowship, so naturally I assumed right away that he was a “people person”. That he’d be warm and empathetic. He certainly seemed interested in the ideas that others shared with him; he appeared open to learning various points of view. Eventually, a couple of flimsy interactions and his disdain towards certain persons began to disconcert me. Maybe he’s not all that he appears to be. This is a first person narrative after all. Then he basically reveals this exact problem to us as readers or as people that listen to the stories others share with us about themselves.

“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 those stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic…”

I found this to be a rather brilliant observation once it arrived – along with a rather abrupt and shocking revelation. It made me think about the author, Teju Cole, quite a bit more. He has broad interests and understandings. He shines light on a variety of topics but in the end it seems many of us live in darkness. Can we truly know another? Are we even completely honest with ourselves? Through the narrator’s reflections regarding the field of psychiatry, we can see just how difficult it truly is to comprehend the workings of the human mind – whether it be our own or another’s.

“… the source of our information about the mind is itself the mind, and the mind is able to deceive itself.”

This is not an easy book to read, but one that I felt delivered a lot of rewards. It’s fun to haul out the old grey matter for a round of mental calisthenics from time to time! If you find that a wide range of topics touched on here and there in one fairly slim volume is something you might like, then this book is for you. If you become aggravated by lack of plot, then you might want to pick another instead! One thing that any reader couldn’t deny is that the prose here is truly a marvel in itself – even if you’re not a fan of an “ideas” sort of story. Apparently, this reader is!

“Wonderful stars, a distant cloud of fireflies: but I felt in my body what my eyes could not grasp, which was that their 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.”

[Orsodimondo · Rating 4 out of 5]

LE RUOTE DELL’INGRANAGGIO CHE GIRANO


Foto di Stephan Schacher, autore anche di quella sulla copertina.

Incredibile quante piccole storie la gente si portava dietro in ogni angolo della città.
Sono queste le storie che racconta Teju Cole: quelle della gente incontrata e incrociata per caso, e quelle di angoli della città. Non solo New York, anche Lagos e Bruxelles dove l’io-narrante trascorre una lunga vacanza natalizia (un mese) sperando di ritrovare la nonna materna, senza però riuscirci.
Storie che diventano altro, allungano il filo, conducono ad altre storie, s’intrecciano. E Julius, l’io-narrante, ha l’abitudine di camminare molto, seppure racconta anche di tragitti in autobus o metro o taxi o aereo: ma il vagabondare è attività frequente.
Non sono l’unico a percepire echi di quello che per me è il viandante per eccellenza, W.G. Sebald, ma il tono di Cole è ben diverso, molto meno malinconico, e la visione non altrettanto spessa e stratificata.


Foto di Martin Munkacsi di cui parla Teju Cole.

Chiaro che viaggi e vagabondaggi portano anche al sé dell’io-narrante, che prende spunto da quel che vede e incontra per iniziare un viaggio nell’anima. E chiaro che Julius, figlio di madre tedesca e padre nigeriano, è un alter ego dello stesso Cole.
Ma secondo me a trionfare davvero è New York, autentica città aperta, categoria universale dell’immaginario
Curiosità: qui e là l’io-narrante accenna a un suo amico, che rimane sempre senza nome, e non è mai lo stesso, e anche se lo fosse non lo sapremmo perché di questi amici non dice nulla, non racconta nulla, se non a volte i discorsi che fanno.


John Brewster: One Shoe Off (1807). La bambina ritratta è sorda, come lo era il pittore.

Ci sono momenti – che a me sono sembrati alquanto frequenti – in cui Cole introduce un argomento, lo costruisce - e leggendolo io pensavo al pallavolista che alza la palla per la forse prevedibile, ma anche logica e quasi sicuramente efficace schiacciata del compagno – e che però Cole lascia sgonfiarsi come un soufflé venuto male, pluf – e lo schiacciatore non schiaccia, si limita a ribattere piano la palla nell’altro campo, oltre la rete – e tutto l’argomento elaborato rimane sospeso, senza riflessione o conclusione, e in assenza dell’affondo non gli rimane che sgretolarsi.
Forse dipende da una diffusa sensazione di eccesso di politicamente corretto.
Alla fine l’impressione più viva che mi è rimasta, la vincente, si è collegata a Paolo Sorrentino e al suo incredibile talento di saper raccontare, mostrare e asserire l’ovvio e il banale con una tale classe ed eleganza e sontuosità da farli sembrare profonde e intelligenti verità, materiale su cui avvitarsi in riflessioni.

[Jennifer nyc · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a way I read this three times, because I kept going back and starting sections again. I combined audio and the page to ensure absorption, but it took intention. I went back to find the threads, which are not obvious or easy to follow. It’s almost as if the psychiatrist-protagonist, Julius, became the free-associating patient, and me his psychoanalyst. I had to take his meanderings and synthesize them myself.

So in a way, the book is brilliant. Teju Cole’s prose is precise and interesting and musical. It begins during walks all along the west side of Central Park, a neighborhood I not only grew up in, but spent a fair amount of my adult life as well. That’s not just fun, but meaningful, because Julius’ bursts of thought go deep. And as much as there are spurts of thought, there are also spurts of action. He recalls conversations from his past in Brussels and Nigeria, visits a dying mentor, gets mugged, goes to parties. He also traces Freud’s theories, recalls complex conversations about race and identity, and shares intimate observations of New York City.

So, if you love a cerebral riff told in contemplative prose, are interested in New York City, loss, courage, shame, and cultural identity, and can roll with what feels like a nonlinear memoir that could easily be made into a book of essays, then this is the perfect novel for you. I prefer fiction with a sturdier thread and more emotional connection between characters.

The end provided us with an unsettling reveal and an even more unsettling lack of aftermath that made me wonder if some of the emotions came due to the very strength with which Julius pushed them away.

Worth the work, but not always enjoyable, 3.5

[Justin Evans · Rating 2 out of 5]

Had I done a bit more research, I never would have started this book. I do not care about New York. I do not care about your observations of birdlife. I do not care about your descriptions of buildings. I do not care about your random conversations with random people about nothing, in large part because I do not think they add up to anything.

Well well, I vaguely remembered a review of a novel, possibly not this one, in which a guy thinks about Foucault. For some reason, I thought I was in the mood for that last night, and started this book. Bad idea. As if all my above indifferences were not enough, the prose reminded me of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland. For instance, "As interesting as my research project was--I was conducting a clinical study of affective disorders in the elderly--the level of detail it demanded was of an intricacy that exceeded anything else I had done thus far." Where was Cole's editor when he was writing this (rather than, say "My research project was interesting--I was conducting x. But it demanded far more concentration from me than anything I had done before it" or any other variation on the sentence that doesn't involve nonsense (how can a 'level of detail' be intricate?) and barbarous (why put 'level of detail' before 'it demanded')?

A similar example: "In that room, into which always seemed to flow a gentle and cool northern light, he was surrounded by art from a lifetime of collecting". Why is the verb before the subject of the verb in the second clause? Why is this sentence not two sentences, given that the "In that room..." has nothing to do with the sentence's purpose? I could go on, but will refrain. Throughout the book, Cole's prose is falsely precise (it sounds 'smart,' but is not) and cold.

Then there is the constant name-dropping, which makes the book feel a bit like listening to NPR: biographies of great men (all men), combined with mentions of the fact that their works are being consumed--Tolstoy, Borges, Barthes, Mahler, El Greco, on and on and on... The book mentions almost everyone that a respectable middle-class pseudo-intellectual should have read, listened to or seen. And with only one exception, nobody actually talks about those men or their works. This is not pretentiousness; I love pretentiousness. A pretentious book would spend fifteen pages talking about whether Mahler was an ironist. But this book is, in general, vulgar.

Which is not to say that there are no deep thoughts here. There are many deep thoughts, for instance, "to be alive, it seemed to me... was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone." The characters constantly talk about, while never experiencing, injustice, whether due to race, gender, ethnicity or religion. Etc... Again, NPR.

Spoilers in this paragraph:

In the last twenty pages or so, Cole tries to justify all the silliness that has gone before. First, his narrator thinks about Paracelsus, whose theory of 'Signs' is meant to explain the narrative strategy: external material things can teach us about the inner realities. That is why the narrator spends so much time looking at birds. They are teaching him about himself. Second, [SPOILER ALERT!], a woman accuses the narrator of raping her. His response is to think about Nietzsche and Scaevola. Now, this will remind you that the narrator reacts to almost everything, including getting mugged, by thinking about something else. He is hiding in his thoughts, you see. You can't trust him, you see. He might even be a rapist, though you can't trust the rape-victim either. This is why the prose is so cold: because you can't trust the narrator! Even good NPR listening folks are untrustworthy, because they perceive the world in their own way and not as it really is in-itself (note: the only name the narrator doesn't drop is Kant). Stories are untrustworthy! Good liberals are untrustworthy! And now, having amused yourself with this story, reinforcing your awareness of your liberal guilt, and thus sloughing it, you can get back to the martini party.

The book is saved from my toilet-paper pile by the conversation our narrator has with a young man in Belgium, who is reading Benjamin. This guy can actually talk about Benjamin, rather than just name-dropping him, which rather throws our narrator off. Cole doesn't bring up Walter's famous, and relevant, claim that "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism". But it should come to mind at the end of the novel. In any case, the passion this young man shows for the justice and duties of Islam were so pleasant in the face of everything else on offer that I could, conceivably, go back to re-read those pages. And if Cole ever gets an editor worthy of his ambition, I might even read his later books.

[Karen· · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stepping off the kerb

So, here's the conundrum. If you are writing the sort of novel that refuses to do any of the traditional jobs of an old-fashioned novel, like fulfil a quest, solve a puzzle, achieve redemption, map a transition from one state to another, if it denies the idea of an arc of tension or indeed a plot of any kind, in fact, then how do you finish it?

Here we have Julius, walking around Sebald-like in New York, then walking around in Brussels, where he vaguely thinks about looking for his Oma, but undertakes practically no steps to do so, and then walking around in New York again. All artificiality of plot has been dispensed with, no cause and effect, no because, no therefore, no as a consequence.

Every decision - where to turn left, how long to remain lost in thought in front of an abandoned building, whether to watch the sun set over New Jersey, or lope in the shadows on the East Side looking across to Queens - was inconsequential and was for that reason a reminder of freedom.

This freedom gives play to his imagination, yes, to free associations, to openness. Strangely, (artificially?) though, the film Julius goes to, the people he meets, the troubles of the patients he treats, the demos he sees, the illegal immigrant he encounters as part of a Welcoming project, even the man who shines his shoes appear in order to foreground every atrocity of the twentieth century that you might possibly think of: internment camps, lynchings, mass exterminations, genocide, rape, hate crimes; from Haiti to the Holocaust, from Rwanda to Pol Pot, Idi Armin, Columbine, Charles Taylor, and the Russians in East Germany at the end of WW2.
Once Julius got to Brussels I got an inkling that this might turn into something radically political: the juxtaposition of the information that Brussels was declared an open city during WW2, thus one that was undefended, open for the invading forces to walk in, with the debates with Farouq, a Moroccan, got me wondering if he was figuring immigrants as the invading forces, but that faded quietly away as Julius left and returned to New York and to more mundane, day-to-day forms of violence. And there's the point: all these issues are only touched lightly in passing. We forget the past and walk on, unseeing, overlooking the memorials, obliterating the past, our past.
Julius is as culpable as everyman: he may be observant, but he forgets, oh man how he forgets.

So, to get back to my question. How to finish? Here, a first-person narrator, telling us his story, so we can hardly have him step off the kerb in front of a yellow cab, and stop mid-sentence. The natural end would be death, but how to get there without killing off the narrator? Sebald, in The Rings of Saturn, to which book Cole is obviously paying hommage, traces a silken thread to finality through the use of that woven material for Queen Victoria's mourning dress, or for covering up the kind of paintings that might waylay a soul on its path to heaven. Cole, here, uses a masterful allegory, that involves Mahler's Ninth and Julius stepping out, not into the road, but out the wrong door of the Carnegie Hall, which leaves him suspended between sky and earth, and then taking a ferry ride that can only conjure thoughts of Charon. And even if there is no arc of action, no redemption in this novel, there is an architecture of repeated patterns, for instance in the shape of birds. In the wonderful closing metaphor: the beacon of light of the Statue of Liberty (Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me!) was fatally disorienting to thousands of storm-tossed birds. They may have dodged the cluster of skyscrapers in the city, but they lost their bearings when faced with a single monumental flame.

I'm going to stop here. But have I finished, there's the question.

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

WINNER OF THE 2012 PEN/HEMINGWAY AWARD FOR FIRST FICTION!

The Publisher Says: Along the streets of Manhattan, a young Nigerian doctor doing his residency wanders aimlessly. The walks meet a need for Julius: they are a release from the tightly regulated mental environment of work, and they give him the opportunity to process his relationships, his recent breakup with his girlfriend, his present, his past.

But it is not only a physical landscape he covers; Julius crisscrosses social territory as well, encountering 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.

My Review: The annus horribilis of Julius, a Nigerian psych resident in Manhattan. He is estranged from his mother, his only surviving parent; never knew his German maternal grandmother; is alone and adrift in the cold (too cold for his tropical self) and cruel city. He responds to his recent loss of a girlfriend to the lures of San Francisco by walking. He lives in Morningside Heights, a small college town on Manhattan's far Upper West Side; he works his last year of residency at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, one of the city's medical gems; he attends a concerts of music I'd pay money to avoid (Mahler! PURCELL! *shudder*); and he walks.

His ramblings take him to every part of Manhattan, later also Brussels where he spends a month looking quite haphazardly for his probably dead German grandmother whom he does not find; his trained ear allows him to listen to text and subtext in his many conversations with many and various people of most every ethnicity these famously open cities have to offer. He is, in Christopher Isherwood's very apt phrase, a camera ("I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording not thinking...."); we are never treated to a view of the man holding the camera, but rather we are in the camera as he swings it about. In the end, there are no actions to report of Julius, but he makes up for his passivity with his introspection, and his clearly flawed impassivity to the emotional realities of others.

I had no idea this book was coming to me. In a truly random act, Random House's Random House imprint delivered me a signed copy of the book, with the editor's card (thank you, kind sir! Nice to get a gift from someone I don't know!) and a photocopied rave review of the book from The New Yorker. I read the first 10pp anyway, since The New Yorker and I almost never agree on books.

I was hooked. I was claustrophobic and annoyed and hooked. I had no idea books like this, the truly interior novels of the nouveau roman ilk, were still able to be published in the USA. I mentioned above that we never, ever leave the camera that is Julius's head; all experiences are filtered through his eyes, heard with his ears. It's actually physically confining, this technique; like being tied up and read to. NOT a favorite activity of mine, for the record; either of them. It's a species of intimacy that I find quite discomfiting. But it works here because the narrator is so completely unable to be anywhere but here, think about any time but now; his excursions into memory are forced, and intentionally so (I think; Mr. Cole and I aren't acquainted, so I impute motives to him on no basis but my eyes).

Anooyingly, Julius is not very good at contextualizing his world. This is the risk an author runs in writing from inside the tightest and narrowest of boxes, the human skull. Of course, no sane person runs around through the day contextualizing his or her own story, so that's hardly a mark against the author's fidelity to his vision. But it makes Julius a little less of a forceful presence and more of a miasmic infestation in his own book. I was left feeling that the bedbugs (horrible bloodsucking little fiends) resembled the narrator a little too closely. Both are simply *there* and the fact of them is meant to be enough to set action rolling. I mildly disagree, but that's neither here nor there in evaluating the book's merits.

And merits it has. The prose is begulingly poetic. The lushness of description would feel out-of-timely off-putting were it not for the sense of inevitability and rightness the descriptions provide. The structure of the book (the hardest personal and professional year of a residency, that last one) isn't in any way innovative, but it's used to excellent effect. Julius, based on reading this book, seems like the sort of man who would be interesting to run into on his walks around Manhattan. I suspect the same would be true of Mr. Cole. Whatever force impelled the author to write this book, however the shock to his system that's the sine qua non of bringing forth such a sustained and elaborate feat of craftsmanship was delivered, it's my hope that another will be delivered soon. In the meantime, I'd suggest investing in this book will prove a winner for most sophisticated readers.

[M. Malmierca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nueva narrativa «usamericana». Voces jóvenes, de orígenes no estrictamente norteamericanos, están posicionándose y mostrando puntos de vista diferentes y actuales, nuevas miradas que enriquecen ese complejo país que es Estados Unidos, centrándose en otro tipo de gentes (no WASP) que la literatura de masas suele olvidar que también lo habitan: Junot Diaz, Chimamanda Adichie, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Louise Erdrich... y, en este caso, Teju Cole (1975-).

Ciudad Abierta (2011) es la obra de este último escritor nacido en Nigeria. Su peculiar mirada recorre la ciudad de Nueva York con los ojos de un recién llegado, redescubriéndola al mismo tiempo para el lector. Lugares no habituales, vidas no habituales. Todo un microcosmos que, aun sin ser un relato amable, se convierte en un homenaje a esta ciudad de todos y de nadie a la vez. La ciudad como simple escenario o quizá como un ente culpable de los graves problemas a los que se enfrentan determinadas personas.

Ocurren hechos duros en la novela, pero en su descripción no encuentro atisbos de ira ni de odio. No hay buenos ni malos, sólo una ciudad que, a pesar de todas dificultades que entraña, sirve de refugio a gentes de todas clases y lugares, que los hace suyos. El tono es tan uniforme y melancólico que a veces resulta monótono. No te permite posicionarte, te reprime, se diría que desea que lo leas como un simple espectador sin opinión, sin emoción, que no busques los porqués de lo que te está contando.

Tomé conciencia de lo fugaz que era el sentimiento de felicidad, de cuán endebles son sus bases: un restaurante cálido después de la lluvia, olor a comida y vino, conversación interesante, la tenue luz del día en la lustrada madera de cerezo de las mesas. Mover el ánimo de un estado a otro costaba tan poco esfuerzo como mover piezas en un tablero de ajedrez.

Se trata de una novela de estilo postmoderno, que nadie busque un bestseller en ella: estructura lineal, sin cambios significativos, final abierto... Según los gustos, a algunos les aburrirá, lo sé, pero, la sensación que ha dejado en mí ha sido agradable.

Se le puede dar una oportunidad.

[Hugh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finished this book too late to review it yesterday, and I was hoping that sleeping on it would help to clarify my thoughts, but my opinions remain unfocused and very mixed.

Perhaps this is inevitable - the book has almost no plot and like Rachel Cusk's recent trilogy it consists of a series of reported conversations. We do learn more about the narrator Julius, a half-German Nigerian psychotherapist living in New York, so the comparison is superficial, and the book is really an extended meditation on the nature of life in modern multicultural cities, mostly New York but with an interlude (which I found more interesting) set in Brussels. There are also occasional reflections on the narrator's youth in Nigeria.

Cole is something of a polymath, appearing to be well read in many different fields, and while some of his digressions were fascinating, others bored me, perhaps because my visual memory is poor so I don't relate very well to descriptions of art and architecture. There is quite a lot of history, and the book is strong on the after-effects of various forms of inhumanity.

This book is being discussed this month in the 21st Century Literature, and I hope the discussion there helps me to see what I am missing. I see that a number of people have compared it to W.G. Sebald, which I find a bit of a stretch, but perhaps I share more common interests with Sebald.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Teju Cole's work Open City is part philosophical questioning, part history, and part observation of human nature. Open City is a meandering stroll through New York City, Brussels, and Julias' thoughts and memories. And it is a stroll; there is no plot to speak of. This novel is constructed of vignettes of encounters that Julias has with people he knows, people he meets on his walks, and internally. Some of the topics he gives voice to are how we can live with differences? what does it take for white people to consider the genocide of brown and black skinned people? how do we live with past atrocities? how do we cope with disaster? can we decide the manner and timing of our own deaths?

He presents art as an extended conversation. He asks me to consider viewpoints vastly different from my own.

Cole introduces me to the concept of communitarianism, the idea that human identities are largely shaped by different kinds of constitutive communities and that this conception of human nature should inform our moral and political judgments as well as policies and institutions. He lists some of these communities:

"White is a race, . . . black is a race, but Spanish is a language. Christianity is a religion, Islam is a religion, but Jewishness is an ethnicity. It makes no sense. Sunni is a religion, Shiite is a religion, Kurd is a tribe . . . "

As global borders become more permeable and populations become more heterogeneous is it possible to live harmoniously?

I get glimpses of Cole's protagonist which I try to assemble into a cohesive whole. At the end of the novel I am presented with a revelation about Julius' past and am left to decide for myself if this event is a repressed memory or if it never occurred.

Cole's writing is strong and imaginative. For example: a bus is “like a resting beast” and public chess tables are “oases of order and invitations to a twinned solitude".

If you are looking to curl up with a good story, choose something else. If you want to think and ponder, do give this work a try.

[Kima Jones · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book meandered from continent to continent. At times, I was absolutely bored despite some really beautiful and impressive passages. No one can doubt Cole's absolute command for the historical or philosophical, but as a criticism of how it appears in this text, I'm just not interested in every mundane human interaction with a stranger or old friend. Further, the plot twist in Chapter 20 didn't feel real or even remotely connected to the last 19 chapters that I had just diligently waded through. I am still questioning the twist because I feel like it's tied to some larger dialogue about memory without the protagonist having even a single moment of cognitive dissonance. His reaction left much to be desired for such a man of letters and thought. A plotless book with a plot twist! I don't doubt that the twist happened, as some have suggested in articles I read online, what I doubt, now, are Julius' other interactions in the text.

I have been and am interested in Cole's nonfiction work and will continue to read it. I will also read his next title hoping he does something completely new.

[Stephanie Sun · Rating 4 out of 5]

On a flight to Belgium a third of the way through the book, narrator/human palimpsest Julius muses that conversations with strangers on planes quickly turn tiresome for him, rarely rewarding his curiosity. Ironic, because that's how I began to feel about Julius's rambling digressions by about this time in the book. That's not to say that he's never insightful—he's often brilliant in fact—but some of the observations are quite dull, the banal profundities of everyone's late-night conversations in college. So I skimmed—a lot.

However, I am convinced that there is a purpose to the pretension here (for once!), other than a (successful) bid at impressing the likes of James Wood. Cole is carefully, patiently building an imbalance of clinical detail, at the expense of passion, and—when he turns up the dial in the penultimate chapter and holds Julius's hands to the fire—it is a compelling moment of supreme complexity and darkness. It is the definition of payoff.

Open City is about the obscuring power of insight, and, thus, uses insight to obscure, and blindness to illuminate.

At exactly the 50% point (if this was on purpose, I am so blown away!), one of the more memorable sock puppets, Farouq, cites Paul de Man:

"[de Man's] theory has to do with an insight that can actually obscure other things, that can be a blindness. And the reverse, also, how what seems blind can open up possibilities."

I did not find Julius to be a cipher; long-winded, risk-averse, and deeply in denial, yes; but not a cipher. There is evidence that Julius's blindness does not come from some kind of spectrum disorder: his pain and borderline panic upon hearing of Dr. Saito's death, most notably.

In contrast to both this book's fans and its critics, I didn't enjoy the book on a sentence to sentence level. Instead I loved the supposedly non-existent plot and characters. I enjoyed Moji very much during all of her brief appearances, and, by the end, I felt intimately Julius's regret, pain, and very human inability to be anyone other than the person he is.

By the time Julius's Rhett-Butleresque comeuppance came—"he sees through you anyway, you, the psychiatrist, the know-it-all"—my own resentment of Julius's superficial intellectual smoothness dissolved into a powerful understanding of a flawed man's embrace of ideas, art, and city as solace.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve now read all three of Cole’s books. I admire each of them, chiefly for the sense of place and the sense of self. Here Julius, a sophisticated psychiatry resident, wanders the streets of Manhattan and Brussels, meeting people, hearing stories and dredging up memories from his early life in Nigeria. “I was the listener, the compassionate African who paid attention to the details of someone else’s life and struggle.” I loved the mixture of external events and internal shifts: a startling revelation about his past that he never deals with is just as momentous as a mugging.

Class and race are particularly subtle in this novel. From time to time Julius meets a fellow African or African-American man who plays up their essential ‘brotherhood’. Being biracial, he’s not always sure how he feels about that.

I feared this would be one of those aimless, plotless novels, but the storyline is strong enough to tie together the peripatetic setup.

Favorite lines:

“How petty seemed to me the human condition, that we were subject to this constant struggle to modulate the internal environment, this endless being tossed about like a cloud.”

“We experience life as a continuity, and only after it falls away, after it becomes the past, do we see its discontinuities. The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float.”

“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.”

[Oriana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been meaning to read this book just forever, and I'm delighted that I finally did. On balance, it's a very lovely, very thoughtful, very soft book. "Soft" probably seems like a bizarre word, but I mean it in a specific way that I've never quite been able to articulate; I feel it with certain Margaret Atwood books but also with Alejandro Zambra's The Private Lives of Trees. It's a quality of stillness, of meandering—when I open books like this it's as if a hush descends, and the prose unfurls as if through molasses. Does this happen to anyone else?

If it's not clear, this also involves a certain slowness. About 60 pages in, someone asked me the dreaded question "What's it about?" and I could not answer her at all. For at least the first half, it's not about much of anything; it's a long rambling wander from the vantage point of a deep thinker who relishes his solitude and can be distracted by or inclined to meditate deeply upon anything from a blind painter to a historical monument to the demigod Obatala. He meets a former professor in his apartment for an intellectual chat, goes to a picnic with some friends that is interrupted by surprise parachuters, rambles down street after street, into this gallery, that bar, this park, that restaurant, thinking and thinking and thinking all the while.

In the middle of the book, he takes a trip to Brussels, and the pace picks up, but just a bit. He meets a retired female surgeon on the plane and then a fiery political philosopher working at an internet café; he has more conversations, more walks, some arguments, some sex.

Throughout, we catch glimpses of his childhood in Nigeria, his estrangement from his family, his complicated feelings toward his ex-girlfriend, his intense life of the mind—all his griefs and loves and sorrows.

It's ultimately a very moving book, with ideas and perspectives I found fascinating and challenging. But it took me twice as long as it usually does to read a book of this size, partly because although once I was in it it was like floating in a sensory-deprivation tank, when I wasn't, I often found it difficult to motivate to pick it up.

Here, to close, is a bit of Teju, meditating on his day and also, naturally, the entirity of the human condition:

Instinctively saving a baby: a little happiness; spending time with Rwandans, the ones who survived: a little sadness; the idea of our final anonymity: a little more sadness; sexual desire fulfilled without complication: a little more happiness. And it went on like that, as thought succeeded thought. How petty seemed to me the human condition, that we were subject to this constant struggle to modulate the internal environment, this endless being tossed about like a cloud, Predictably, the mind noted that judgment, too, and assigned it its place: a little sadness.

Gives you the chills a little bit, right? Or at least it does me.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading the wonderful Open City by Teju Cole I cannot imagine what a non-New Yorker (meaning, of course, in the elitist New York way, someone from New York City) how someone not from the city would react to this novel or how they would even process it. I have walked exactly the streets the character has walked, visited the places he has visited, even experienced the same reactions to closure of stores like Tower Records on 65th Street. I experienced my own past as much as I experienced the narrator's story. Cole evokes the city powerfully, viscerally; it was profoundly moving, exciting, and satisfying for me, although it did interfere with any "objective" experience of the book I might lay claim to.

But that question of "objectivity" is one I think is confronted continually in this book How we can know the mind of others or even our mind is problematic, even for an "expert" like Julius who is a psychiatrist.

I admire Cole's precision of writing and his presentation of characters, each of whom becomes fully present in a few strokes, and the dispassionate way the protagonist presents himself. He is a somewhat cold person (despite being a psychiatrist) or at least someone who has cut himself off from his more intense emotions. He writes of his meeting with the girl who becomes his girl friend and then his ex (what seems to be the precipitating cause of the books & his endless walks around the city), "Perhaps she fell in love with the idea of myself that I presented in that story. I was the listener, the compassionate African who paid attention to the details of someone else's life and struggle. I had fallen in love with that idea myself."

It seems that through his walks, his travels, his casual (and once violent) interactions, Julius (the narrator) is trying to weave the tapestry that is himself and his life, repair the rips caused by his father's death, his estrangement from his mother, his limited relationship with his grandmother, and bring into meaning his varied background and his present life. His childhood in Nigeria, his boarding school, his losses, his travels to Belgium, his life in NYC, his mother's harsh & largely unspoken experiences of life in post-WWII Germany, he takes all these fragments and lays them out as he walks the streets of a fragmented, post-9/11 city. It feels that he is trying to bring them together, somewhat in the same way that the Cloisters brought the stones of Europe together and recreated a medieval monastery in which hang the famous unicorn tapestries.

However, we learn that there are rips in the fabric of his life that he himself inflicted and it is left unclear as to whether he will or can repair them in any way. The book delivers its shocks obliquely but I ultimately felt that I had read two books-one the story of my city and the emotional relationship one has with one's home and the other the story of Julius and his experience of the world, which turned out to be profoundly different in content from my own. It is the skill of Teju Cole that made this dual experience possible.

It is an odd feeling to read about the abstract and yet personal experience of how we see ourselves as the heroes of our own lives and then see how it plays out in another's. But for more information on that point, you'll have to read the book yourself.

Not a surprise to say I loved this book. So I'll close with some quotes I particularly enjoyed although it was hard to choose from the many ones I relished. Read them if you like or read the book. I'd love to hear from others if their knowledge or lack of knowledge of the city impacted their reading.

Other quotes
"I leaned the art of listening from him, and the ability to trace out a story from what was omitted.

Of an artist whose paintings he finds compelling (seen on a visit to the Museum of Folk Art), there is a "narrative around blindness" but not deafness; the artist's deafness "made him an outsider" and led to the creation of "images...imbued with what that long silence had taught him: concentration, the suspension of time, an unobtrusive wit."

-there is a feeling of stillness, of silence to this book, perhaps because of a stagnation at the core of the protagonist, a profound alienation from himself as well as his family and the world around him

--"If you're too loyal to your own suffering, you forget that others suffer, too."

--"It was a cause, and I was distrustful of causes, but it was also a choice, and I found my admiration increasing, because I was so essentially indecisive myself."

--Julius is spinning connections between Paracelsus, the Cloisters, and medical diagnosis-connections that ultimately lead to his specialty, psychiatry where "diagnosis is a trickier art, because even the strongest symptoms are sometimes not visible." He writes, "It is especially elusive because the source of our information about the mind is itself the mind, & the mind is able to deceive itself."

So ultimately any Narrator is unreliable since we are, to a greater or lesser degree able to understand our own minds and how we perceive the world.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 3 out of 5]

What a strange and surprising reading experience! This is the breakthrough book of Teju Cole, an American of Nigerian-German origin, and that mixed background has clearly left its mark on this work. Do not expect a clear storyline: Cole lets his main character Julius, a beginning psychiatrist, wander through New York, and also through Brussels, and he mainly lets him describe what he sees or experiences, very associative, sometimes very detailed and always with a lot of historical background information. Naturally, this reminds us very much of W.G. Sebald, and I'm not the first to make that link, and to some extent the comparison is justified. But Cole lacks the nostalgic layer of Sebald, it soon becomes clear that his approach is different.

Anyway, this is clearly a very intellectualistic book, with many high-cultural references, not only to American-European culture (classical music - especially Mahler, and also painting play an important role), but also to his Nigerian background in the scenes about his youth. The multicultural and metropolitan issues are therefore frequently discussed, and in the various short and longer meetings of Julius they are continually referred to by his interlocutors: identity issues, racism, globalization, loneliness, aging, euthanasia, and so on. Striking is the paradoxical alternation between clever, surprising and absurd, sometimes downright rancorous elements in those conversations, especially in the longer dialogues with the Moroccan, pseudo-philosopher Farouq, who runs an internet/telephone store in Brussels.

Gradually, small indications appear in the book that suggest that there is a meta-layer under the apparently arbitrary associations of Julius: he catches himself in inexplicable forgetfulness, ponders more and more about the dubious difference between normality and madness, and at the end of the novel, he is confronted with a shocking personal incident from his childhood that he had completely repressed. This incident and especially the way he doesn't react to the revelation gives his status of undercooled and passive observer a serious dent and puts a lot of what preceded in a different light. This turn also fits nicely with the many indications of trauma processing in the city of New York after 9-11: in many respects the Big Apple just has proceeded life as if nothing had happened. It is a beautiful illustration of the special complexity of this book, which only in a very superficial reading seems to treat about nothing.

For many readers, the lack of a recognizable story (with a beginning and an end) and the reasonably intellectual content of this novel may be a turnoff. But Cole certainly touched me with this rich, variegated and challenging novel. (3 1/2 stars)

[N · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part character study, part examination of loneliness and solitude juxtaposed within a bustling and multicultural modern New York; Cole's novel is also a part travelogue into the heart of a man whose secrets prevent him from opening up too much. The "twist" of the novel seemed out of place, but nonetheless, the book is a twisty, patiently shifting work, testing our own sanity in a city that is anything but open.

[Eugene · Rating 5 out of 5]

using a realist, pseudo-autobiographical style very reminiscent of sebald, the main character, Julius, wanders through an up-to-date and recognizable NYC, an accomplishment in itself, observing the marathoners and skyscrapers at columbus circle, the twin towers intact in the queens museum's diorama, conversations with cabdrivers infused with political subtext, bedbugs -- and uses that general observation to describe, repeatedly and profoundly, the immigrant's situation. maybe in fact the novel is the first since sebald to successfully tackle our moment of simultaneous globalization and alienation without resorting to parody or genre plot or any other distancing device. and for all the meandering of its narrative, this roaming belies a close-hewed line, and the book is not really a flâneur's accounting at all but a meditative monologue on history told to the slow-hearbeat pace of a stroll's footfall.

Farouq turned to me and said, It's very busy, as you can see. Not only for all the people making New Year greetings but also for a lot of people calling home for the Eid. He gestured to the computer monitor behind him, and on it was a log of the calls ongoing in all twelve booths: Colombia, Egypt, Senegal, Brazil, France, Germany. It looked like fiction, that such a small group of people really could be making calls to such a wide spectrum of places. It's been like this for the past two days, Farouq said, and this is one of the things I enjoy about working here. It's a test case of what I believe; people can live together but still keep their own values intact. Seeing this crowd of individuals from different places, it appeals to the human side of me, and the intellectual side of me (112).

the lesson here seems to be that there is less and less frequently a typical immigration story than that each immigrant has a unique tale as bizarre as it is wholly probable. and each of these, in julius's necessarily passing view, only half reveals its tangled provenance through scars and tics and layers of peeling disguise. cole shows again and again people who have been caught and hurled by history into their odd displaced places: a liberian in immigration prison, a dying english professor who had been in a japanese internment camp, rwandan dance clubbers, arab-european cafe leftists. these individuals are not always victims of history but are -- in their singularity, in their movements unreplicated by nations of others -- perhaps more uniquely aware of how history has determined their lives. and as cole's novel superbly illustrates (and as globalization intensifies) there will arguably be fewer and fewer citizens of states and more and more castaway members of diasporas.

for these latter, in OPEN CITY, the question of belonging and authenticity as well as the proper and appropriate methods of political speech and protest are never far from mind. one of the most memorable characters in this regard is farouq -- who with his somewhat naive leftism plays foil to our ever-so-increasingly unreliable (and occasionally reactionary-ish) narrator. farouq is an employee at an internet cafe in brussels and from that vantage freely comments on global politics... one of the book's best provocations in fact is that it is a NYC book confronting the transforming moment zero of 9/11 by archly recounting a bar debate of arab intellectuals posturing resistance in brussels(!) ...if it wasn't so possible, it would be perfect satire.

Farouq's face -- all of a sudden, it seemed, but I must have been subconsciously working on the problem -- resolved itself, and I saw a startling resemblance: he was the very image of Robert De Niro, specifically in De Niro's role as the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather II... A famous Italian-American actor thirty years ago and an unknown Moroccan political philosopher in the present, but it was the same face. What a marvel that life repeated itself in these trivial ways, and it was something I noticed only because he hadn't shaved for a day or two...

What was the meaning of De Niro's smile? He, De Niro, smiled, but one had no idea what he was smiling about. Perhaps this is why, when I first met Farouq, I had been taken aback. I had subconsciously overinterpreted his smile, connecting his face to another's, reading it as a face to be liked but feared. I had read his face as that of the young De Niro, as a charming psychopath, for this most trivial of reasons. And it was this face, not as inscrutable as I had once feared, that spoke now: For us, America is a version of Al-Qaeda. The statement was so general as to be without meaning. It had no power, and he said it without conviction. I did not need to contest it, and Khalil added nothing to it. "America is a version of Al-Qaeda." It floated up with the smoke, and died. It might have meant more, weeks back, when the one speaking was still an unknown quanity. Now he had overplayed his hand, and I sensed a shift in the argument, a shift in my favor" (121-122).

near novel's end julius observes a woman davening and comments on prayer. his definition of it could easily also apply to the novel in general but especially to OPEN CITY itself -- an elegant, brainy, careful, and finally hopeful meditation:

I had made some tea, and I drank it as I watched the woman pray. Others are not like us, I thought to myself, their forms are different from ours. Yet I prayed, too, I would gladly face a wall and daven, if that was what had been given to me. Prayer was, I had long 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, of giving a name to the heart's desires, the fully formed ones, the as yet formless ones (215).

 

______________________
a link to an interview with cole on PBS' artbeat. here's a bit:

TEJU COLE: We don't experience our lives as plots. If I asked you to tell me what your last week was like, you're not really gonna give me plot. You're gonna give me sort of linked narrative. And I wanted to see how do we bring that into fiction without losing the reader. But of course, I'm not the first person to think about this. This is actually a problem that the Modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Wolfe solved pretty well. So part of my thinking was going back a little bit to re-inventing that particular wheel, which only seems innovative because most novels that are written today are being written on Jane Austen or Charles Dickens, 19th century novel.

pick it up from your local independent bookstore or the library.

[Dajana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Problem sa ocenjivanjem ovde je što ova petica i petica za Oza i ona za Rejesa nisu iste, i ne treba da budu. Ovo je petica za besprekorno pripovedanje, najbolji kraj koji sam čitala u poslednjih nekoliko meseci, političke komentare bez okorele ideologije, mnogo zanimljivih podataka koje sam saznala o umetnosti i istoriji itd.
Znate ono kad ljudi vole da idu u Tursku na mesta gde su snimane turske serije? I tako bih i ja išla na mesta gde je 'snimana ova knjiga' jer je snimana - Kol je fotograf i istoričar umetnosti, sa sjajnim poznavanjem Njujorka, njegove istorije i ulica. U pogovoru piše da je savremeni flaneur, ja bih samo rekla da je čovek koji ume da posmatra dok hoda od posla do kuće, i obratno. S obzirom na to da je junak crnac iz Nigerije, očekivali biste nekakav manifest o rasizmu - on tu temu, čini mi se, mnogo dublje obrađuje nego razni teoretičari, borci za prava itd. upravo jer vidi širu sliku i kontekst, boreći se za individualno mesto čoveka - u vezi sa tim su i simpatične anegdote o crncima koji svakom kažu 'brate moj' ako je crn, a jedna takva ljubaznost dovešće do toga da bude prebijen i opljačkan.

Ima svega, zaista, u ovoj knjizi, ali je sve samo ne dosadna, kako je nazivaju u nekim prikazima ovde. Jasno mi je zašto bi nekom ko ne voli umetnost ovo možda bilo zamorno, ali ne razumem zašto ne bi želeo nešto i da nauči (a od Kola je mnogo toga moguće naučiti).

Ovo je debitantski roman, i to kakav! Da i naši besni debi-tipovi kad dođe NIN-ova nagrada ovakav roman izbace, gde bi nam bio kraj.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

In OPEN CITY begleiten wir Julius bei seinen Streifzügen durch New York. Julius ist Anfang 30, schließt gerade seine Ausbildung zum Psychiater ab und streift auf ausgedehnten Spaziergängen durch die Stadt, ein Flaneur im 21. Jahrhundert.
Verbunden ist Julius durch Herkunft und Bildung mit Afrika, Europa und Amerika, ihrer Geschichte und ihrer Kultur. Er ist ein genauer Beobachter, der auch in unscheinbaren Details Stoff für Betrachtungen und Assoziationen findet. Er selbst sagt von sich, dass Unentschiedenheit eine seiner Schwächen sei, aber in seinen Betrachtungen begegnet sie dem Leser als die Unvoreingenommenheit eines Menschen, dem nichts selbstverständlich ist, als Offenheit, die die Qualität des Buches ausmacht.
Julius ist von seiner Freundin verlassen worden, und darin könnte man die Ursache für seine melancholische Grundstimmung vermuten. Doch es wird immer deutlicher, dass es das Gefühlt der Einsamkeit ist, die den Erzählton prägt. Einer Einsamkeit, die Julias immer begleitet und auch dann spürbar ist, wenn er in Gesellschaft ist. Trotz seiner nigerianischen Wurzeln väterlicherseits findet er in der Solidarität der Minderheiten in New York genauso wenig eine emotionale Heimat wie in der Zunft der Ärzte. Zu sehr ist Julius ein eigenständig denkender Mensch, der sich gängigen Bewertungsmaßstäben widersetzt, um sich von Gruppen vereinnahmen zu lassen. Zu sehr ist ihm bewusst, dass alles relativ ist und jedem Anfang schon ein Ende innewohnt. Blitzartig können während der Betrachtung Situationen kippen:
Als Julius einen Arbeiter beobachtet, der die Lüftungen in den U-Bahn-Wagen wartet, schweifen seine Gedanken sofort zu den Lüftungsgittern in den Vernichtungslagern, durch die das Zyklon B geleitet wurde. Und wie eng verbunden ist Mahlers Musik, die Julius so schätzt, mit Mahlers Wissen um den Tod. Die Nähe von Triumph und Tod versinnbildlicht sich in dem Moment, als Julius nach einem Mahler-Konzert durch die falsche Tür aus dem Saal tritt und sich plötzlich in tödlicher Höhe auf dem Außengerüst der Konzerthalle befindet: Er hat den Raum versehentlich durch den Notausgang verlassen, dessen Tür sich von außen nicht öffnen lässt. Es gibt zahlreiche dieser „Zufälle“, die denjenigen, dem sie zustoßen, etwas lehren können, wenn er es zulässt. Es gibt aber auch Momente, die Julius völlig überraschend den Boden unter den Füßen wegziehen mit einer Wucht, dass sich ihnen der Leser nicht entziehen kann. So zum Beispiel, wenn er nach einer Party am frühen Morgen aus einem Penthouse des Gastgebers auf sich spiegelnde Lichter auf dem Hudson blickt und plötzlich von einer Frau, die er attraktiv findet, mit einem unglaublichen Vorwurf konfrontiert wird, auf den man auch als Leser nicht zu reagieren wüßte.

Doch in den dunklen Räumen zwischen den toten, leuchtenden Sternen gab es andere, die ich nicht sehen konnte, Sterne, die existierten und Licht aussandten, das mich noch nicht erreichte, Sterne, die jetzt lebten, strahlende Sterne, die ich heute nur als Leerstellen wahrnehmen konnte. Ihr Licht würde irgendwann die Erde erreichen, lange nachdem meine Generation und die Generation nach mir aus der Zeit geglitten waren, vielleicht erst dann, wenn die ganze Menschheit längst ausgelöscht sein würde. In diese dunklen Räume zu schauen hieß, einen Blick in die Zukunft zu werfen.

OPEN CITY ist ein Buch, dass ich einfach nur großartig finde und mit durchgängiger Begeisterung gelesen habe. Es ist so einzigartig, wie jeder Mensch einzigartig ist. Sollte ich es trotzdem in eine „Tradition“ stellen, würde ich es in eine Reihe stellen mit Proust und Sebald, vielleicht auch Camus.

[Karen·]

I rise at six from tangled sheets and open every window to the cool morning air, a breath of life after the stifling heat of the past few days. I stand on the edge of the terrace a moment and savour the chill on my skin, a refreshing tonic that gently dispels the dread of oily days. A quick glass of clear, cool water, dress, and I am out, heading for the park and the fields beyond the allotment gardens. The world feels new-made and virginal to my pounding feet in their vibrant green running shoes. Loosen those shoulders, swing those hips, flex the arms, breathe: in one-two-three, out one-two-three, in one-two-three, out one-two-three. At the pond, I slow as a thrush, intent on a writhing worm, barely notices my approach. I could almost reach out and stroke that plump, creamy breast, each dark spot slightly ragged round the edges. Its bright brown eye gives me a sardonic look and the thrush is gone, the worm securely gripped in its beak.
The moon still hangs in the bright orb of the sky, a half button of cloudy white against the endless, fresh-washed blue. Rabbits slowly see-saw, gently bobbing their white flashes as they escape the figure crunching towards them. They have already registered that there is no real danger there. I note with pleasure while passing that the farmer has left a wide margin alongside his field of rye for yellow and pale purple to stand proud against the green.
Progress is good. My legs feel supple today, they could carry me for hours. Elated, I decide to share my pleasure; as I pass a lady walking her dog, I make an innocuous and fairly inconsequential remark about the beauty of the morning. In return, the scraggy beast at the end of its leash launches itself at my ankles, but nothing can touch me today. A hop, a skip, a wave. I do not understand her words, but recognize the apologetic tone.
Yesterday was cooler, so the litter bins in the park are overflowing with the detritus of the evening before. Jackdaws and magpies, those champions in the race of adaptation, are picking through the pizza boxes. They caw a raucous complaint and lazily flap away, not far, ready to return to their squabbling feast as soon as I am gone.
Back home everything is still quiet. The excavation works outside - renewing those underground utilities - have not started yet, the diggers are quiet, waiting. I put on water for tea, and pour it out into my favourite mug with the colourful rowing boats and seagulls on the side and dream of the sea...

Later, I have to phone. No, I can't say, I don't know, but I'll get back to you Karen, in say half an hour? As I wait I idly pick over some of the papers on my desk, lay out the contract that needs to be signed for next term's work, file away some, throw away some. As the time ticks slowly by, my eyes light on this bright yellow cover, the book I have looked out for the next book group meeting. But it is not until September, I don't need to start it just yet.....

[Ratko · Rating 5 out of 5]

Радња романа прилично је једноставна – млади афроамериканац, специјализант психијатрије, као контрапункт свом стресном послу у болници започиње бесциљне (да ли?) шетње Њујорком. Подлога је урбани њујоршки пејзаж – његове галерије, концертне дворане, улице, паркови, подземна железница... Може се у позадини осетити живост метрополе. Међутим, он не само да корача, он и запажа људе, догађаје, ствари које се одвијају на улицама и, уопште, на јавним местима. Слике искрсавају једна за другом. Неке су изузетно упечатљиве, попут фотографије (аутор се и сам бави фотографијом). Све то изазива реминисценције на детињство и прву младост проведене у Нигерији и своју добростојећу, али дисфункционалну породицу. Расцепкани делови сећања нижу се и постепено граде једну заокружену целину.
Осим тога, Џулијус (тј. аутор), шетајући есејизира на најразличитије теме. Има ту свега – од глобалног загревања, до антиглобализма и тероризма, миграција, образовања итд. Поједини есејски делови или реченице које се стављају у уста ликовима током дијалога делују извештачено и „натегнуто“, па ми је унеколико неубедљив. Ипак, мора му се признати знатна ерудиција.
И, оно што даје још једну посебну димензију овом роману је – музика. Класична музика подлога је за шетње и контемплације. Она омогућава да све лагано тече и прелива се, без видљивих шавова.
Одлично написано. Препорука свакако.

[Nasim Marie Jafry · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Open City' has been showered with five star reviews - and Cole has received numerous awards for it. Such lavish praise weighs heavily on you as a reader, you feel almost guilty for not absolutely loving the book. I confess to being bored, I found Julius, the main character, a young Nigerian (half German) doctor who walks the streets of New York to unwind, unlikeable, over-earnest, he has virtually no sense of humour. There are no moments of lightness.

This gets weary.

My impression is that the writer has tipped every observation he's ever had onto the carpet, and strung them together to make a novel - the 'random' characters that Julius meets are just mouthpieces for these observations, no real point, and they appear too briefly for us to care about them. I honestly found myself wishing that Julius would just go into a store and buy some groceries without having profound, weighty exchanges with whoever he finds to talk to. I wanted the guy in the store to say, Have a nice day, and for that to be that. Also, Julius' working life is so pushed into the margins, I didn't believe he actually is a doctor/psychiatrist (though I read that Cole himself studied medicine for a year).

There are moments when you *are* engaged, the writing is immaculate though not compelling - if that makes sense. I keep seeing comparisons with WG Sebald, whom I've never read, and I wondered too if you need to have appreciated Sebald to fully appreciate this novel. I've looked up Teju Cole's website and I love his photographs, just wish I could have liked the novel more.

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wonder why so many people view sickness as a moral test. It has nothing to do with morals or grace. It's a physical test, and usually we lose.

I have thought about this book recently, likely during a fortunate time between my reread of Austerlitz and my recent discovery of Robert Macfarlane. I am not sure why I didn't pen a review of Open City earlier, especially when I read Cole's essays a few years ago. I truly love authorial approaches to walking and thinking. Whether that's Baudelaire--or Benjamin or Sartre parsing the great flaneur or more modern iterations like Iain Sinclair or Cees Nooteboom. Of course we nod and think of Sebald.

I love this book though the reveal haunts me. I love the depictions of NYC and the gleaming traces of conversation which follow the protagonist on his journey.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Imagine taking a walk with Ka, from Orhan Pamuk's Snow, except that this is New York City, not a remote Turkish town, and instead of walking with a poet, you are walking with an academician. Take a walk (or several) through New York City, past Wall Street Station to Bowling Green, "under the trees, past the creak of children's swings...to make out the sound of an erhu." Walk through the park at Seventy-Second and exit towards Sheep Meadow, past the "cluster of taxis at Fifth Avenue and Central Park South," and then stand "under the eaves of a building on Fifty-Third Street" to view "the entryway of the American Folk Art Museum."

Take this walk with Julius, a disillusioned medical school graduate, researcher, and psychiatric resident, who finds his walks therapeutic, "a release from the tightly regulated mental environment of work" so that when he walks,

every decision - where to turn left, how long to remain lost in thought in front of an abandoned building, whether to watch the sun set over New Jersey, or to lope in the shadows on the East Side looking across to Queens...was for that reason a reminder of freedom.

Meet with Dr. Santiano, English Literature professor emeritus, hear mentions of Barthes's Camera Lucida, or Jelloun's The Last Friend, enjoy a carafe of Beaujolais, and listen to Bach's Coffee Cantata. Enjoy all of those things you do when you want to open the window into a world of unmarred creativity and culture, or perhaps you want to forget. Maybe disassociate. Could this be it, are you in a state of disassociation, Julius? Is this the "callousness" your friend mentions when she tells you about how you harmed her? "How petty seemed to me the human condition, that we were subject to this constant struggle to modulate the internal environment, this endless being tossed about like a cloud." What was your turning point, Julius?

I became aware of just how fleeting the sense of happiness was and how flimsy its basis: a warm restaurant after having come in from the rain, the smell of food and wine, interesting conversation, daylight falling weakly on the polished cherrywood of the tables. It took so little to move the mood from one level to another, as one might push pieces on a chessboard. Even to be aware of this, in the midst of a happy moment, was to push one of those pieces, and to become slightly less happy.

Do not seek responses from Julius because you will not get them. You will come across some of the most beautiful scenery and stunning or shocking moments, but you won't have too much of a close conversation. The narrative perspective is apathetic and when you think you will find respite in the character's interaction with Dr. S (or even the neighbor, Seth) the professor does not appear as much as one would prefer. When Julius mentions his psychiatric patients, you do not get full character portraits like one admires from Forna's The Memory of Love. I was looking forward to this. And although you sense that the perspective mirrors the narrator's state of mind, like in Mott's Hell of a Book for instance, you also don't have the balance of a different perspective (like Mott's The Kid) to reveal the narrator because obviously something else is stewing beneath the surface and the beautiful walks, travel, and art are only the covering. What you do get is a scholar who pontificates his way to expressing emotional truth while questions remain unanswered: what was his internal response to the harm he did to his friend when they were younger and living in Nigeria; where does his relationship stand with his German mother; why the break up with Nadège; why did he envision Michael Jackson's Thriller at his father's funeral; is he grieving, regretting, coping, dealing with mental illness, or perhaps all of the above? Perhaps being elusive or subtle is an intention of the novel. I'm not sure. One thing I know with clarity is that when you follow Julius on his walks, you are in the hands of a person of letters who will expertly guide you with elegant prose that may lean esoteric in one instance and glow in another.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Open City, Teju Cole's début novel, is a strangely wonderful perambulatory reading experience: insightful, lyrical, decidedly modern and politically prescient. However despite it's numerous successes the overall novel feels a bit like an attempt. In Barthes' "The Death of the Author" he writes (which feels to me too perfect a description of the present novel to ignore):

The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centers of culture. Similar to Bouvard and Pécuchet, those eternal copyists, at once sublime and comic and whose profound ridiculousness indicates precisely the truth, of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture which is anterior, never original. His power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them

Often authors are discussed in terms of their "influences": the seams of borrowed thread which prop up at odd corners of the text: which flash a bit of foreign color, tantalize our collective literary memories. Cole's novel is very much a tapestry of these imitations. This is not to say that the novel is not well written, or unoriginal, but that what it borrows exceeds what it bears. "Sebaldian," "Proustian," even a bit of a Barthesian or Benjaminian ("Benjaminisch"? "Benjaminig"?) cultural skepticism and lyrical insight: all of these influences are present, but they feel a bit to bare. Sebald's Rings of Saturn is the closest mother of Cole's Open City:

But the fact is that writing is the only way in which I am able to cope with the memories which overwhelm me so frequently and so unexpectedly. If they remained locked away, they would become heavier and heavier as time went on, so that in the end I would succumb under their mounting weight.

If one were to replace "writing" with "walking" it would believably be an excerpt from Cole's novel. The novel's texture is one of sinusoidal dips into memory from the present: there is little plot in the present (and in fact, little plot which directly concerns the protagonist, Julius), but a deep plenitude which lies in the past. "Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis" said Flaubert in a letter to George Sand, a sentiment which is manifest manifold in Open City, wherein the city may very well be the city of the dead, a necropolis of memories walking among the living: always boiling at the surface, constantly re-forming the present.

To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone.

For Cole, the past is a reflection of the present: a point-for-point double, a mime. As one ages, as there are many aged and aging figures in Open City: from Prof. Saito to Dr. Mailotte, the equilibrium between the power of reflection and the power of the living self shifts: in death one is all reflection, all past and no present. In this view, we are all eased into death by our memories, and when we die out memories live without us: shadows on the edifice of time.

What Cole achieves, which breaks from his strong literary traditions in Sebald and Proust, is a distinctly American flavor. The "American issue" is race, has always been race, and Cole's novel is concerned as much with race and Deleuzian "difference" as it is with memory and walking. Throughout the book there are a number of unusual conversations about race, that take place casually: in the street, at the telephone booth, etc. and Cole's view seems basically to be culminated in Farouq: "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." Throughout the many disparate narratives: of war, violence, discrimination and revolution, the policy of civil disobedience is called into question over and over, and the narrator is especially attuned to the diversity which is around him. His view of the world is one which is sinister, sometimes cruel, but which he seems vaguely removed from: not that he sees himself as an exception, but rather as an observer. He does not dwell on his own hardships very much, but rather absorbs the pasts and hardships of others. When we are confronted with an episode of his past in which he is decidedly cast as the villain, as the oppressor, as the active-aggressor, he evades it, he picks it up and drops it. His mental response to Farouq's observation on the victimized Other is: The victimized Other: how strange, I thought, that he used an expression like that in a casual conversation. The novel, for it's many strong points, lacks in credulity of dialogue, at least for those of us whose days are not filled with metaphysical conversations with strangers on airplanes and subways (I doubt many of my subway companions could pronounce Deleuze, let alone carry an extended discussion on him - but maybe I take a lower-brow subway than most). Cole's novel at it's best is when he is walking around, thinking to himself, communing with his memories and his active senses (particularly auricular), his musings and meanderings in the same stride with no destination.

The novel is prescient in many ways: political, social, psychological, but it's epiphanies and flourishes of style lack consistency, lack rhythm: Cole attempts to fit in too much, and his own diversions are occasionally his undoing. However, some of his observations are tremendously moving:

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 those stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic. Who, in the age of television, hasn’t stood in front of a mirror and imagined his life as a show that is already perhaps being watched by multitudes?

The spectacular media loves to remind us that ours is the age of narcissism, spectacle, illusion. I can think of no more astute way to define our modern normalcy than a self-styled heroism, a moral impunity, and a constant flirtation with the dream of celebrity. What is often lost in our modern era is the self-communion, the walks about town, the mental and psychological ordering and re-ordering which we must do when we are humbly ourselves: when we are Odysseus, but Odysseus in Ogygian exile. Julius is often alone within himself, even in crowds he is the isolated observer: but his spectatoriship is false, a defense against his own memories which at turns haunt and amuse him. He retreats into the memories of others, into larger-than-self issues such as race, war and oppression, to escape the tiny daemon of his own villainy.

As humans we escape into routine, into obsessions and compulsions which distract us, which we feel better inform us: for Julius walking through New York City (and briefly, Brussels), or observing auspices in the migrations of birds, for Bellow's Herzog it is letter-writing; we all have our retreats, our ticks which mark time for us, keeping us within our bounds of normalcy. Julius's New York is alive for him with details, small horrors, small miracles: the City is alive with change, blood pulsing beneath the surface, ever changing and ever maintaining it's identity like Argo's ship. We are all Argo's ship: we must change, we must shed our sorrows, we must outgrow our pleasures, but we must remain ourselves: we must not shed our memories of what we are, of what created us and of what we have created, or we become wherries whirling in the open sea, lost and unprotected.

[Gabrielle Grosbety · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Open City there is a pondering, melancholic focus on the dissociative space between the body and the self and the jarring shift between sound and silence in the cityscape. The narrator, Julius, seems to drift aimlessly, yet purposefully, through the passage of time as he observes and feels tuned in to his internal chatter, but liberated by the freedom the city affords him. His anonymity empowers him, as he can be anyone and anything he desires, which gives him the fulfilling creativity to write his own narrative. However, where the city frees him, it also sets him adrift, depending on who he is sharing the space with or what he is transiently feeling/experiencing at the time. The streets are alive with possibility and shock the senses with the amount of life they contain, and Julius can feel this aliveness unequivocally, which overwhelms and disorders his inner world and sanctuary of peace. However, the more he remains among the streets, he grows to feel like they can take him anywhere. He sees beauty in spontaneity and choosing his destination rather than the stillness that usually comforts him.

However, this could all be nothing but a dreamy façade, because as the narrative progresses there is a striking push and pull between the real and pretend, as who Julius genuinely is versus how he wants to be perceived wrestles increasingly with one another. His character comes to be quite unlikeable and insensitive to others, which seems to go decidedly against the grain of his profession as a psychiatrist. He is also in denial about his emotions, in favor of avoiding painful, hard to confront truths, and disconnects from them to the point that it inflicts pain on and minimizes certain people around him.

While he continually observes and interacts with people, he doesn’t seem to truly see them, as he pompously intellectualizes, through making sure to emphasize all the complex, mechanically and thematically, works of art, fiction, and areas of politics he dabbles in. The way he describes his surroundings in fact seems increasingly hard to decode as what he is saying is remarkably at odds with what is actually happening. He becomes a progressively unreliable, hard-to-bear narrator as the novel tended to meander as aimlessly through some scenes as Julius did down a maze of winding streets.

While the prose is undoubtedly well-written, and at times insightful, much of it is inner rumination, void of quotations, and doesn’t deviate from Julius’ perspective much, which began to be disengaging and wear on me at certain turns. However, if you’re looking for a character study with a narrator that makes you question if we can only paint ourselves to be the hero of our own narratives if we are the sole writers of them? then this read has you set for the makings of that.

[Ben Hinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Teju Cole takes us into the mind of "Julius," the narrator throughout the entire journey that is Open City. Right from the onset one thing rings clear: Teju Cole's masterful use of words and phrases to poetic effect. And this perhaps is the strongest asset of the novel. I enjoyed some of the themes touched on through some of Julius's interactions (e.g. classism, racism, the power of propaganda). There were some beautiful contrasts (e.g. Robert DeNiro's smile and Farouq), and some great observations (e.g. past influencers like Fela Kuti having "something in them awakened after seeing the worst that America could do to its marginalized peoples" and New York City's past history with the slave trade). The novel also brought back some past time memories for me when Julius recounts some of his experiences at home living in Nigeria (e.g. saving the minerals for special occasions, etc). And the novel does have some funny moments (e.g. the ending of the bed bug saga). But for all its good points, I also felt the novel lacked alot of depth and character development. For example, he kept bringing up his meetings with Professor Saito, but we never got to see any real bond develop between the two, or between Julius and any character for that matter, so it was hard for me to get invested in the worlds and interactions Teju Cole created (if Julius doesn't seem to care, why should I?). Also, the novel did not leave me with a sense of destination. What's the point of it all? Just listening to Julius go on about his observations on every little thing? Beautiful as Teju Cole's writing is, I began to get bored and getting through the book seemed more of a challenge than fun for that reason. I thought after reading most of the novel, how great it would have been if there was a plot-line guiding the main character's excursions (e.g. Julius could have been trying to solve an international riddle, or hot on the trail of a musician he loved that suddenly vanished...something to push the story along and build anticipation rather than simply the musings of an upper crust medical student. Nonetheless, I thought the prose throughout the book was absolutely beautiful, probably the most skilled use of grammar I have ever read to date, and the entire reading experience felt like watching a movie with excellent actors but no plot. The book is saved by the poetic and crafty use of language, and some of the social/historical themes covered.

[dianne b. · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was hoping for more with this (after the pretty wonderful Every Day is For the Thief) but this jumble of ectopic anecdotes was less. I found this scattered writing gossip-sprinkled and cleverly told, but desperately searching - as fuel ran low - for a landing strip in degraded territory. And I was further punished with a terrible ending.

Clever. Yes. And sometimes historical, even ironic. But as flat as an Indiana cornfield.

When I was a beginning choreographer I remember learning how important it was to keep the level of movement changing. No matter how lovely or unique, how perfect the execution, or beautiful the music, every dance and every story needs an arc.
Otherwise there’s nothing to grab a hold of.

Here we follow a man, classically intelligent- we are to believe - training to be a psychiatrist (irony?) at Columbia - but so out of touch with himself that his maybe girlfriend is engaged to another by the time he bothers to contact her again? Who, when confronted with a grotesque allegation, doesn’t respond, at all? And so we, too, are not sure, except for some preceding psychobabble - what his role really was, either. A man who finds out a close, even beloved, mentor is dying, so he doesn’t return? Like to say goodbye, or find out what happens? Or even when a memorial or funeral is, and is then surprised to find he’s dead? And we are to believe he is a physician? That? I'm tired.

This character brought to mind someone having a near death experience. It was as though he simply watched his life from an elevated viewpoint in the corner of the room, jotting down notes, making historical and literary connections. Then I thought: Could this be a treatise on the brutality of NYC? Nah, Teju Cole still lives there.

Maybe this character is ice disappearing in tepid water -
Wait, that’s it:
“...what remained most strongly was the sensation of being all alone in the water, that feeling of genuine isolation, as though I’d been cast without preparation into some immense, and not unpleasant, blue chamber, far from humanity.”

That I think I understand.