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Open City

3.51 of 5 stars 3.51 · rating details · 3,677 ratings · 693 reviews

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 cov...more

Hardcover, 259 pages

Published February 8th 2011 by Random House (first published January 1st 2011)

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Mar 08, 2013 Proustitute rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: american-literature, contemporary-fiction, 2013, five-stars, favorites

open city n. an undefended city; spec. a city declared to be unfortified and undefended and so, by international law, exempt from enemy attack.

Julius, a Nigerian psychiatrist living in Manhattan, is Teju Cole’s humane, aesthetic, and highly observant narrator in Open City, a debut novel that has earned Cole comparisons to such heavyweights as Proust and Sebald. While Cole’s project is similar in how he explores how our surroundings shape and inform our experiences, our subjective realities, and...more open city n. an undefended city; spec. a city declared to be unfortified and undefended and so, by international law, exempt from enemy attack.

Julius, a Nigerian psychiatrist living in Manhattan, is Teju Cole’s humane, aesthetic, and highly observant narrator in Open City, a debut novel that has earned Cole comparisons to such heavyweights as Proust and Sebald. While Cole’s project is similar in how he explores how our surroundings shape and inform our experiences, our subjective realities, and our relationships with others, the voice here is all his own even though some of the structural arrangements follow Proust—e.g., apart from the descriptions of Vinteuil’s “little phrase,” Julius’s description in Open City of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony is perhaps the most wonderful writing on music ever written—and Julius’s various meanderings about Manhattan (and also Brussels) echo sections of Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn with which I’m as yet only tangentially familiar.

The concept of the open city, which is emphasized in the novel during Julius’s visit to Brussels, is critical to Cole’s examination of how many city-dwellers thrive on feelings of safety: “We are the first humans who are completely unprepared for disaster. It is dangerous to live in a secure world.” This is especially prevalent in Julius’s post-9/11 Manhattan, and also in the many conversations he recounts—with relatives, with strangers, with patients, with Al-Qaeda sympathizers, with colleagues, with neighbors—that blend the Japanese-American internment camps of WWII, the Nazi occupation, the Vietnam War, and other domestic and global conflicts in order to consider how these relate to collective and individual cultural identities, especially at the level of dislocation and fracture, poised between living and dying: “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.”

Cole’s salient prose takes in the breadth of human experience while living in a city whose ever-changing architecture, public spaces, crowds, and landscapes go unexamined by so many who live there. By contrast, because he is an outsider, Julius takes in everything, and on his walks through the city he is as able to observe a car accident, relate being mugged, offer the history of beached whales and birds dazed and dead by the Statue of Liberty’s torch as intrinsic (but often forgotten) parts of New York City’s narrative, and also reflect on the emotional experiences of a life lived straddling two very different worlds—that of Nigeria and that of Manhattan, that of childhood and that of adulthood, that of becoming and that of still becoming, only more consciously so. Just as the city has depths and hidden stories (“What Lenape paths lay buried beneath the rubble? The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten”), so, too, do individuals, and Julius’s narrative is as much about coming to terms with his adopted city as it is with himself: “I wanted to find the line that connected me to my own part in these stories” as it is “unimaginable how many small stories people all over this city carried around with them.”

Open City is a profound meditation on how one should live one’s life with eyes wide open, taking in the inconsequential and relishing it for how it will later attach itself to our own subjective narrative, both in terms of how we view our lives looking back in time and also how we morph and change along with the cities we call our homes.(less)

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Feb 19, 2013 Elizabeth Adams rated it 5 of 5 stars

It's here.

Teju Cole's novel, Open City, published by Random House, launches today in bookstores and through online vendors, to numerous rave and perceptive reviews.

That will be no surprise to readers of my blog, The Cassandra Pages, who've been privileged from time to time to read Teju's essays here, illustrated with his photographs. I am absolutely thrilled about the publication of this debut novel (those of us who read Every Day is For the Thief know that he previously wrote a novella.) But re...more It's here.

Teju Cole's novel, Open City, published by Random House, launches today in bookstores and through online vendors, to numerous rave and perceptive reviews.

That will be no surprise to readers of my blog, The Cassandra Pages, who've been privileged from time to time to read Teju's essays here, illustrated with his photographs. I am absolutely thrilled about the publication of this debut novel (those of us who read Every Day is For the Thief know that he previously wrote a novella.) But regardless of marketing talk, and even regardless of my close friendship with the author, I feel confident in saying that Open City is a hugely accomplished novel that, I predict and hope, will mark the formal debut of a formidable literary career.

I was fortunate to be able to read early chapters in draft form, and then the entire book in manuscript. Open City is not a plot-driven novel, though there is a dark story that gradually emerges. Julius, the protagonist, is an emotionally-distant psychiatry resident in a New York hospital, and also an immigrant: the son of a German mother and African father. In order to shake off the work of his days, he takes to wandering the streets of the city at night. In luminous prose we follow his mind as he seeks to make connections between himself and the places he visits, as well as observing his strange disconnection to emotions and people: his former girlfriend, his neighbors, people he encounters. Only in his relationship to an aged Japanese professor do we find glimmers of a different possibility: a warmth and mutual interest that almost approach tenderness.

Parts of the book also take place in Brussels and in Lagos; and in all these descriptions of urban places and human encounters, both brief and extended, we are drawn into Julius' brilliant obsession with facts and history that has already reminded many reviewers of W.G. Sebald, at the same time as we ponder what appears more and more to be a self-imposed, even protective, psychological distance: why? What is he escaping or blotting out, and what does this say about the state of all immigrants, particularly in today's America?

As alien as Julius' character is to my own, I found him completely believable. The book's dialogue is vibrantly written, and the descriptive passages beautiful and full of telling detail, all of which advance the story even though its movement is not always apparent: a subtlety that is actually more true to life than the exaggeration of plot and character of most novels and films we've come to take for granted.

For me, the greatest accomplishment of this book is there, in the writing itself: the use of language, and most particularly, the control of narrative tone. Not only does Teju arrive on the New York literary scene with a first novel of great maturity, but he's doing so with a narrative voice that is quiet, meditative, and open. By open I mean that rather than filling his sentences and our minds with cleverness or dazzle, with fast-paced plot and action, with the breathlessness that mirrors our frantic, modern, western lives, he has left space -- much like the rests in music -- that allow the words to breathe and the reader to think. Frankly, this is not the fashion, in any of the arts today. But Teju has stepped back from the front of the stage, and written in his own way. I admire that, and know that it is neither the easy nor certain path. This type of prose can only emerge from deep sensitivity, silence, thought, and great attention to the craft of writing.

Teju, we all wish you the very best today: for Open City, and for wherever your wanderings, pen in hand, take you in the future. Thank you for the gift of your words.(less)

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Mar 15, 2012 Jay Z rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: fic-lit

after finally reading this book and listening to the awed murmurings that accompany any mention of it, i'm mostly just awash in a sea of confusion. a lot of reviews point to how teju cole defies stereotype. i assume this refers to the stereotypical third-world oppression/poverty porn crap that's lining the shelves these days. though saying that a book defies stereotype isn't about how good the book is, it's about how bad everything else is in comparison. as compliments go, it's a piss-poor one....more after finally reading this book and listening to the awed murmurings that accompany any mention of it, i'm mostly just awash in a sea of confusion. a lot of reviews point to how teju cole defies stereotype. i assume this refers to the stereotypical third-world oppression/poverty porn crap that's lining the shelves these days. though saying that a book defies stereotype isn't about how good the book is, it's about how bad everything else is in comparison. as compliments go, it's a piss-poor one. there's also much admiration in reviews about this dude's loving descriptions of the inconsequential -- the rain, the pavement, the plastic seat in the subway. that sort of thing. but the ability to describe minutia in painful detail doesn't equal the capacity for profound thought. (unless you're michael cunningham but who is nowadays.)

teju cole's a decent writer, this much is obvious. the solitary narrator format would've been a total disaster in the hands of someone less skilled. the narrator's melancholy meanderings about the city paint the perfect picture of The Cultural Hybrid's disorientation and in this case also julius' urban isolation -- interrupted only by chance encounters with people who, for no apparent reason, want to tell him their entire life stories. and this is where the problems begin. there's nothing remotely realistic about this narrative, and the interactions julius has with drifters across different cities are self-conscious and unnatural. after being forced through one after another droning soliloquy about each stranger's life, the reader is struck with a paradoxical kind of annoyance. you know too much about incidental characters who appeared out of nowhere for no reason, and you don't know enough to get invested or to care for more information.

then there is julius himself. if you're going to spend 250 pages locked inside one man's relentless contemplation of himself and how he relates to his surroundings, he'd better damn well be likeable, or at least interesting. julius is neither. with each passing page, you feel less and less sympathy for him. he keeps both, the world and the reader at a safe distance. all you know about him is that he's half-german/ half-nigerian, collects deeply personal information about people he doesn't particularly care about, makes snap judgments about them based on that information, and is too resigned/tired/bored/indifferent to engage with them in any meaningful way. he seems totally estranged from his family, which is not surprising given what a sullen git he is. he does seem to like his dead grandmother though, which is not surprising because you can't be a sullen git with a corpse. he's besties with his dying professor who, shockers, dies in the end. julius' response to the death of potentially the only person on the planet who likes him? "Oh Christ."

towards the end of the novel, we're treated to a piece of disturbing information about julius. [SPOILER ALERT, not that it matters.] he may or may not be an occasional rapist. i don't really understand the point of this little plot twist in an otherwise plot-free book. is it meant to shake our foundations, or what we thought we knew about the character? if that's the intended purpose, it misses the mark because even after hours of walking the streets with our mirthless narrator, he remains a stranger. the scraps of information he feeds us about himself engender neither sympathy nor a desire to know more.(less)

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Jan 07, 2013 Stephanie Sun rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: ebook, obama, cultural-catchup-in-2013

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...more 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. (less)

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Apr 07, 2012 Kim Katusha added it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012

Enkele dagen terug kwam ik toevallig de volgende quote tegen: 'Whenever she walked, and sometimes she walked for hours, she only found the past.' (uit: The Easter Parade; Richard Yates) Ik was vrij verheugd: dit is een perfecte omschrijving van de hoofdpersoon van het boek dat ik net uit had gelezen — Open Stad van Teju Cole. Het boek dat zo'n indruk maakte dat mijn hoofd enkel zeer enthousiaste woorden, maar geen volledige zinnen, kon vormen. Laat ik het nog maar een keer proberen.

Julius maakt...more Enkele dagen terug kwam ik toevallig de volgende quote tegen: 'Whenever she walked, and sometimes she walked for hours, she only found the past.' (uit: The Easter Parade; Richard Yates) Ik was vrij verheugd: dit is een perfecte omschrijving van de hoofdpersoon van het boek dat ik net uit had gelezen — Open Stad van Teju Cole. Het boek dat zo'n indruk maakte dat mijn hoofd enkel zeer enthousiaste woorden, maar geen volledige zinnen, kon vormen. Laat ik het nog maar een keer proberen.

Julius maakt ogenschijnlijk doelloze wandelingen door New York. In deze stad, die duidelijk nog steeds gebukt gaat onder de schaduw van 9/11, komt hij mensen tegen die hem hun levensverhaal vertellen (veelal immigranten, net als Julius zelf), bezoekt hij musea, gaat hij op visite bij een oud-professor, en ziet hij overal vogels. Nog steeds weten we weinig tot niets over onze hoofdpersoon: hij observeert, hij is ten slotte psychiater, maar vertelt weinig over zichzelf. Expres, misschien wel. Ik hield vast aan de gedachte dat zijn wandelingen niet doelloos zijn, maar een manier van zijn onderbewustzijn om zijn verleden te onderzoeken en daarmee meer grip te krijgen op zijn toekomst. Julius lijkt, ondanks zijn intelligentie, zichzelf niet te begrijpen. Onbewust gaan zijn gedachten naar zijn jeugd, en dan krijg je het gevoel dat Open Stad wel echt iets wil vertellen. Het is niet enkel een eindeloze stroom van gedachten en betekenisloze ontmoetingen, maar een heel slimme constructie van het leven van een mens. Een leven heeft geen plot, het is een kwestie van meebewegen met wat komt. Die stroming, en in dit geval een onderstroom, beschrijft Teju Cole. De lezer wordt beloond bij het lezen van ieder woord, that's a promise.

Open City is een prachtig boek. Het vraagt om tijd en ruimte, want een echt plot heeft het niet. Maar het is het waard. Omdat het (ook al) geen echt einde heeft blijft het in je hoofd rond dwalen, zeker de verontrustende laatste scène. Een natte, winderige nacht; Julius staat op een boot en staart naar het Vrijheidsbeeld. Hij denkt aan al de dode winterkoninkjes, en vele andere vogels, die zich lieten misleiden door het licht van het Vrijheidsbeeld. Verontrustend? Bijna deprimerend. Julius' (onbewuste?) poging zijn eigen psyche te helen lijkt mislukt. Misschien zit ik er echter wel volledig naast, en leeft hij bijna gelukkig verder in zijn wereld van kunst en muziek. Negeren is misschien wel zijn medicijn; volledig ongelukkig oogt hij namelijk nooit.

Whenever he walked, and sometimes he walked for hours, he only found the past.

"(..) de melodie deed me zozeer denken aan de ochtendlijke bijeenkomsten uit mijn jeugd dat ik de plotselinge verwarring en gelukzaligheid ervoer van iemand in een statig oud huis met in de verte een spiegelwand, en de onmiskenbare aanblik van een wereld die zich verdubbelt. Ik kon nog onmogelijk zien waar het tastbare universum eindigde en de weerspiegeling begon. Deze navolging tot in de details van elke porseleinen vaas, elke dofglanzende plek op elke gevlekte teakhouten stoel, strekte zich uit tot aan de plek waar mijn spiegelbeeldige ik half omgedraaid was blijven staan, net als ik. En mijn dubbelganger begon precies op dat moment met hetzelfde probleem te worstelen als zijn al net zo beduusde origineel. In leven zijn, zo scheen me toe terwijl ik daar stond met al mijn verdriet, was zowel het origineel zijn als de weerspiegeling, en dood zijn, dat was alsof je werd afgescheiden en alleen nog maar weerspiegeling was." p. 235 (less)

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Aug 18, 2011 Eugene rated it 5 of 5 stars

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 i...more 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.
(less)

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Apr 10, 2012 Randa rated it 3 of 5 stars

I'm almost done reading this gem- read half of it en route to Tel Aviv Airport. When I was denied entry into Israel (so much for "open" cities), I read almost the other half on the way home.

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Mar 24, 2012 Ellie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, literary, nyc, favorites, 2012-individual-challenge, africa

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 narra...more

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Sep 11, 2012 Lisa rated it 5 of 5 stars

I really really loved this book. I haven't felt like this about a book since I read White Teeth which I also loved with two "reallys." The author perfectly captures what it is like to walk the streets of this city and the cast of characters that one meets along the walk.

The book follows the Nigerian doctor-narrator as he meanders through New York City and Brussels and also follows his stream of consciousness thoughts about the people and things that he encounters. His thoughts flow from race to...more

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Apr 03, 2013 Lee added it · review of another edition

"Here we all were, ignoring that water, paying as little attention as possible to the pair of black eternities between which our little light intervened. Our debt, though, to that light: what is it? We owe ourselves our lives."

If great lines like that abounded or even showed up every ten pages, I might have overcome the semi-interesting appropriation of Sebaldian technologies and suspended disbelief. As is, I didn't believe in the project, or saw it too explicitly as a writing project, and ther...more

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Jan 19, 2013 Kima rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 throu...more

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Apr 29, 2012 Debra rated it 5 of 5 stars

This was the most perfect book I have read in a long, long time until I reached the end.
The tone of Cole's voice, his honesty and integrity, the vantage point of his view of the world, the subtle lyricism of his words, the generosity of spirit beneath the surface along with his critical eye towards the true injustices. it all added up to a tremendous first novel. Cole captured the rhythms of New York and the sites and sounds we all know there so well, neighborhood by neighborhood. He revealed hi...more This was the most perfect book I have read in a long, long time until I reached the end.
The tone of Cole's voice, his honesty and integrity, the vantage point of his view of the world, the subtle lyricism of his words, the generosity of spirit beneath the surface along with his critical eye towards the true injustices. it all added up to a tremendous first novel. Cole captured the rhythms of New York and the sites and sounds we all know there so well, neighborhood by neighborhood. He revealed his depth of international understanding during his protagonist's travels in Europe, his memories of Africa, his parents and their German and Nigerian background, his grandmother in Belgium. He covered vast historical territory, yet the book is anchored in the beat of the present, and as you grow to trust his voice, page by page, you realize you would gladly travel with him anywhere he would care to go. He has been compared to W. G. Sebald and it is an apt comparison, but Cole opens an insightful window into the 21st century where Sebald halted at the end of the 20th. The migration patterns of the world became like birds in Cole's talented hands that suddenly formed patterns we could decipher in the complicated air we live in. His erudition in so many subjects: art, literature, world history, art history, medicine, and his eye as a photographer cast a secondary spell in each scene. You can see how much I was enjoying reading it! I wrote all of the above before I reached the last chapter and though it does not void my feelings about the rest of the book, there is a startling revelation and that has left me feeling betrayed by the voice I had come to trust. And I've been disturbed about it ever since. Unlike the weak surprise of 'lack of atonement' in the last chapter of Atonement, the casual detachment about a cruelty disappoints me in the deepest reservoirs of character---not the characters of books, but the generosity of spirit that gives a person character. I look forward to Cole's first book, Every Day is for the Thief, to be reprinted---described as a Sebaldian combination of photos with his lyric narration.
This book has my my qualified heartfelt and thoughtful recommendation minus the last chapter!(less)

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Dec 27, 2012 Michele White rated it 4 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I gave this book four stars, but I closed the book unsure how I felt.

Here's what I mean: I Cole's prose is strong and unexpected, especially as compared to much of the fiction I've read recently, and because I remained so engaged with the story despite it being mostly prose-, not plot-, driven. As someone who lives in NY and who has been to Brussels a few times, it was fun to have walks in those cities described to me, especially with such a detailed eye, one that looks not just at the surface (...more

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Jan 18, 2013 Carolyn Taylor rated it 3 of 5 stars

In many ways this is an extraordinary book, but often, annoying. In part it is a travelogue, a detailed account of a man wandering Manhattan, and travelling to Brussels and Nigeria, giving a blow-by-blow account of every trivial detail he sees and experiences. The reader is introduced to a variety of points of view of many people who are brought to life, only to be quickly dropped: the Queen of Sweden, Ghanaians, Nigerians, Belgians, the hypocritical United States. Their commentary on social and...more

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Jan 17, 2013 David Carr rated it 4 of 5 stars

Like other readers here, I was drawn by critical acclaim to read this book, and I come away from it with some admiration. This reflects my evolution as a reader: I pause to applaud good sentences more often than ever, I appreciate a novel where a protagonist's darting mind and eye are opened for us to see, and I deeply admire the "structure" of walking, observing, and thinking. The city is also of course a place for hiding and wearing masks, for designing the anonymity that hides identity; the r...more

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Dec 27, 2012 Deena Dinat rated it 4 of 5 stars

Much has been said about the novel's depiction of urban dislocation, and the disparate sense of self in the globalised world, and so I will say no more about that. What I found far more interesting, however, was the novel's sensitive (but occasionally angry) exploration of imperialism, exploitation and history. It's no accident that the novel takes place in New York and Brussels. Both are (or, in the case of Brussels, were) centres of power and wealth. Brussels was more obviously connected with...more

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Dec 11, 2012 Amanda rated it 5 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. ***Review talks about sexual violence

This book was great to me. My basic understanding of what this book would be, was a guy living in New York walking around and talking about what is around him. I thought it might be a good distraction to my current busybody, but then I felt like it was the most relevant book to my brain that I had read in a long time. It's equal parts politics and, relating and, just being in different places and trying to make sense of them. This made me feel hopeful that th...more ***Review talks about sexual violence

This book was great to me. My basic understanding of what this book would be, was a guy living in New York walking around and talking about what is around him. I thought it might be a good distraction to my current busybody, but then I felt like it was the most relevant book to my brain that I had read in a long time. It's equal parts politics and, relating and, just being in different places and trying to make sense of them. This made me feel hopeful that there is a solution to my compartmentalizing-different-parts-of-my-life problem. It was a glowing example of how move by continuously weaving all the parts.

Chapter 20 threw me for a gigantic loop because it talks about the main character, who I have grown to like, as a perpetrator of sexual violence. He combines all this philosophy and psychology all throughout, talking about how people move through the world from his observer's perspective. He acknowledges that there is no neutrality, so his worldview seems close to mine. So I built this level of trust with respecting his voice and held him without judgment as a solid person. And then he is confronted with raping a friend's sister as a teen, and my trust foundation goes smash! I'm wondering now, if him describing being mugged by two teens was some kind of retribution anecdote.

When I first read the chapter in which he is confronted, I thought that he was totally blowing off the person by saying that different people remember different things. But then I reread it, because I did not want to believe that the character that I liked would say that, and I don't know. I wanted more information about how he continued to engage or disengage with himself as a perpetrator.

I guess my favorite thing about this book is how human it is. I'm not talking about human in a bland "people make mistakes kind of way," but more like a, if you have enough information about a person and sit with them for a long time, their complexities become colored in and fleshed out. I think this makes me want more information and makes everything more gray, which seems to be the best working practice and solution that I have at the moment for trying to navigate the relationships and cultures that I participate in.

This book made me think about novels. Like what does a novel intend to do? And though I am mostly a toasty philistine, and align myself against most objective commentary about most things, this book hit a sort of "this is what it is really like for a person to live at this period of time" note for me. Mostly because my brain moves in similar ways. Thanks Teju Cole. (less)

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Nov 15, 2012 Everyday eBook rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Everyday by: John Abrahams

Open City, Teju Cole's first novel, is maddening and fascinating, ambitious and deceptive. It's difficult to describe because so little happens -- and what happens is extremely ordinary. While reading it, I found myself thinking of Frank O'Hara's poem "The Day Lady Died," about the dissonance between the absolute ordinariness of a typical day and the shock and urgency of a certain memory. For Cole, even the urgent memories become filtered through time; we know they should shock us, even when it'...more Open City, Teju Cole's first novel, is maddening and fascinating, ambitious and deceptive. It's difficult to describe because so little happens -- and what happens is extremely ordinary. While reading it, I found myself thinking of Frank O'Hara's poem "The Day Lady Died," about the dissonance between the absolute ordinariness of a typical day and the shock and urgency of a certain memory. For Cole, even the urgent memories become filtered through time; we know they should shock us, even when it's hard to do so.

Open City is written in the voice of Julius, a young psychiatrist, in a style that could almost be a diary. The first sentence begins with the words "And so," as if we had just joined him in the middle of his life, without context. As he walks around New York City, we encounter a series of seemingly random people: an aging Japanese professor, a museum guard, a Haitian bootblack, an immigrant waiting to be deported, and so on. Out of each connection, we come to learn more about Julius, raised in Africa of a Nigerian father and a German mother. We also come in contact with bits of our collective shameful past, whether buried figuratively (in memories of a Japanese internment camp from World War II) or literally (the African burial ground in lower Manhattan, where slaves were once interred).

Cole brings in a wide range of ideas and cultural influences, with references that include Cannonball Adderley, political theory, and Yoruba creation myth. Julius, as a scientist, interacts with his world with a detachment that is troubling, until -- or because? -- we see ourselves in it. He is an invisible man, largely unseen by those around him, whether he is describing the virtually all-white audience at a Mahler concert or the elderly man who passes by after Julius has been savagely beaten by muggers. Cole is asking us to think about what we see in our own lives, and whether we are prepared to notice and take responsibility for injustice when it presents itself, as it always does.

Earlier this year, Cole set off a bit of a firestorm after a series of Tweets and an article in The Atlantic about what he termed the "White Savior Industrial Complex." He suggested that many white people still jump to conclusions about Africa and Africans in a way that some people, enthusiastic to "help," find hard to hear. Taking responsibility is usually a complex topic, and this author doesn't spare himself or his lead character. Cole's Open City will reward those who appreciate moral complexity, as seen through the eyes of a character who himself reflects all the complexity of America in the twenty-first century.

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Nov 14, 2012 Carrie Obry rated it 3 of 5 stars

I give Open City 5 stars for what it accomplishes on a literary level. On the level of a reader enjoying a work of fiction, it doesn't go quite as far for me and lands around 3.5 stars. What I like most about it is how Teju Cole captures the amazing, yet disconcerting feeling of living everywhere and nowhere all at once. I've you ever lived alone in New York City, trolled its every street, and felt both inspired and alienated by the experience, you'll relate deeply to this book. Home is all arou...more

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Oct 15, 2012 Sandra rated it 3 of 5 stars

I love erudite writers, such as Oliver Sacks and Patrick Leigh Fermor. I enjoy looking up new vocabulary, new locations and, in this case, new (to me) composers. I plunged into this with gusto.

Julius, our narrator, is damaged and strung out between cultures. He seems unable to make personal relationships, aside from the one with his beloved Dr. Saito. But even that meeting, for the reader at least, is when Dr. Saito is advanced in his illness. The one person who might have been able to make Juli...more

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Sep 28, 2012 D'wayne Hodgin rated it 3 of 5 stars

For style, it gets a 5 star. I love the style; that the first ten pages had NO SENTENCE FRAGMENTS was amazing. The thoughts are in full sentences; the narration is in full sentences. The only few fragments in the text are part of dialogue--either direct or indirect. Cole's use of juxtaposition especially is masterful, without sentiment or artistic manipulation--just pure 19th century clean prose. For achievement, however, it gets a 3. Though the book attempts to capture in Julius the grief/depre...more

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Aug 21, 2012 Gerard rated it 3 of 5 stars

Teju Cole’s Open city is an interesting novel about young Nigerian doctor Julius sth who lives in New York City and presents his story as an account of his walks through that city where he observes buildings, scenes, and people, goes into their cultural and historical backgrounds and significance, and interacts with several of them in more intimate ways. Julius is a psychiatrist with an art historical interest, which motivates many of his observations and comments, and explains both his empathy...more

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Jul 25, 2012 Bolaji Olatunde rated it 4 of 5 stars

Race and Racism, slavery, corporate immorality during the slave trade, homosexuality, cultural confusion of a “half-caste” youth, the Middle East crisis, post 9/11 America, mental illness, class clashes in post-colonial Nigeria, the loneliness and madness of city life, failed romance, the Liberian civil war, classical music – all, and more, find a place in the novel.

Open City is a brilliant, stimulating philosophy tome masqueraded as fiction. It is no book for the dilettante. A lot happens in j...more

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Jul 25, 2012 Nasim rated it 3 of 5 stars

'Open City' has been showered with five star reviews - and Cole has received numerous awards for it. Such lavish praise (almost) weighs heavily on you as a reader, you feel guilty - flawed even - 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 impress...more

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Jul 16, 2012 Jess rated it 3 of 5 stars

Open City is philosophical. At first, I thought it was one of those novels that is a series of essays in disguise, which I find irritating. However, a bit a strangeness kept breaking through, making me wonder if I was taking the philosophy too much at face value. By the end of the novel I came to believe that the psychiatrist who tells this story was the ultimate unreliable narrator. Either that or Cole has such unexamined problems with women as to render him unreadable.

This seems to me to be a...more Open City is philosophical. At first, I thought it was one of those novels that is a series of essays in disguise, which I find irritating. However, a bit a strangeness kept breaking through, making me wonder if I was taking the philosophy too much at face value. By the end of the novel I came to believe that the psychiatrist who tells this story was the ultimate unreliable narrator. Either that or Cole has such unexamined problems with women as to render him unreadable.

This seems to me to be a novel about someone who is failing the people around him, doesn't admit this to himself, and yet worries about it. Most of the people he fails are women. The extent to which he is failing them doesn't break through until near the end of the novel, but hints come up throughout.

I am quite surprised that none of the reviews I've read of this novel in major publications touch on this aspect of the book. Without taking into account the shocking revelation made about the narrator at the end of the book I don't know how all these reviewers were able to make sense of the book for themselves.

Here is a quick rundown of bizarre things that I would like to think of as elements the author used to craft a strange and unreliable narrator, rather than a world where women barely exist and those who do can be easily dismissed:
The first mention of any woman in this novel is of an abrasive and annoying feminist whom the author's friend does not like.
The narrator has a severely depressed woman as a patient. He leaves her in the care of another doctor while he is out of town, leaving word at his office that he is unreachable. Later in the novel it comes to light that she is dead. The reader is left to figure out from clues that she committed suicide while he was away. He seems to have no emotions about this.
He spends quite a bit of time telling various anecdotes about saving people, the woman with a baby who he pushed out of the way of careening traffic, the boy he saved from drowning, etc., while never dwelling on this death of his actual patient.
He casually mentions his own suicidal thoughts
He is estranged from his mother and gives no reason for this.
He spends time and money to go to Belgium ostensibly to find his maternal grandmother but makes no effort to actually find her once he is there.
He has a girlfriend, but the reader never actually meets her. This relationship ends, again with no reason given.
He has a general lack of emotional response to everything.

Most reviews say that this book reads like a diary. If so, it is an intricate novel and the diary of a very troubled man.
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Jun 11, 2012 Belinda rated it 5 of 5 stars

Reading “Open City” by Teju Cole evokes for me the same experience as viewing “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” the post-impressionist masterpiece by Georges Seurat. The painting depicts a composite scene of weekend life in 1880s France, a whole created from small clusters of figure groups and scenery. A closer examination shows each figure and element to consist of tiny dots of color, placed side by side, each dot slightly modified by the hue-related qualities of its neighbor...more Reading “Open City” by Teju Cole evokes for me the same experience as viewing “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” the post-impressionist masterpiece by Georges Seurat. The painting depicts a composite scene of weekend life in 1880s France, a whole created from small clusters of figure groups and scenery. A closer examination shows each figure and element to consist of tiny dots of color, placed side by side, each dot slightly modified by the hue-related qualities of its neighbor.

And what does an old painting share with a modern novel? The narrative of “Open City” develops as Julius, the main character, takes walks throughout the city. The larger art work is the novel, but its vignettes are contained like Seurat’s figure groups in small parcels, and closer inspection peels back the “how” to reveal the dots of “why.”

Cole is achingly spare with the “how” and “why” of Julius. He keeps his reader on a need-to-know basis, the tiny details – sometimes only a few words in passing – quietly shared. For example, we know Julius and his mother are estranged, but the root of this disconnect is not discussed. You learn early on Julius is Nigerian, but it is a few stories before you learn his mother is German.

It’s as if Cole wants you to make an assumption about his characters, start building a relationship with them based on your POV, and then Cole will later insert a key piece of information – for example, Julius is bi-racial and comes from a well-to-do family – and then forces you to reassess what your attitudes based on this new information.

Cole is creating a literary experience of what Seurat achieved in his painting. The tableau appears to be filled with hues of violet, except what you’re really seeing is how blues and reds bounce off each other and create a fuzz of lavender. While black Americans often reach out to Julius as a “brother,” the undercurrent of tension is that he has as much Caucasian European heritage as he does African. And, he’s not an American.

This methodically slow reveal of character obviously annoyed some readers, some of whom who wrote reviews complaining of a meaningless, stream-of-conscious plot, and some gave up on the book after a few chapters.

This is a shame because you cannot know or understand the whole of the book without catching the little details and pieces that slowly congeal to give you an almost-complete picture of Julius. His is a complicated life, with shards of race, identity, memory, friendship, music, art, history, intellect and denial that push up against each other in an uncomfortable friction to create who he is. Details emerge until the very end of the book, and it’s through that more complete lens that the reader should reflect on the novel as a whole.
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May 05, 2012 Christina G rated it 3 of 5 stars

Open City's stream of consciousness style reminded me of some of those European classics that I read back in high school, where a man wanders about, occasionally interacting (but never connecting) with others, and thinking a lot. But Cole's work is distinctly modern, with post-9/11 musings on race, colonialism, and immigration. I've followed Teju Cole on Twitter, and as I expected, the writing here is great. But two things kept me from really enjoying this book:

1. I've never been to New York (o...more

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Apr 29, 2012 Ian rated it 4 of 5 stars

Teju Cole's absorbing novel Open City, published in 2011, draws the reader inexorably into the life of the narrator, Julius, a young Nigerian doctor doing his residency in New York City.The time is several years after 9/11. Recently separated from a lover of long standing and having lost contact with his family, Julius finds solace walking the streets of the city, the walks acting as a panacea for the strict regimentation of his life and the state of personal isolation in which he finds himself....more

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Apr 24, 2012 Mom rated it 3 of 5 stars

A young Nigerian doing a residency in psychiatry in post 9/11 New York City walks the city in his free time. We follow his mind as it wanders from history, to art, classical music, memories of his life in Nigeria, his travels in Belgium, his recent relationships. He meets people, has interchanges with them, and then they disappear.

At one point, the narrator thinks: "The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events floa...more

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Mar 07, 2012 Jillian Goldberg rated it 5 of 5 stars

This was an extraordinary reading experience. I would like to read it again, and make notes. It is different than most books I have read, in many ways. The use of English and the style of writing is almost archaic: measured, thoughtful, precise, deliberate, formal....the sentences and the thoughts held within them, glow with intelligence. There are many references to classical and cultural literacy, many of which were beyond my level, but I enjoyed them nevertheless. The narrator, a Nigerian bor...more

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About Teju Cole

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 histor...more

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Quotes from Open City

“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.” — 10 people liked it

“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.” — 6 people liked it

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