RavePaste MagazineTeju Cole means modern-day New York as the “open city” in the title of his first novel. NYC is the very city that American readers still turning to fiction for answers to the questions of 9/11 have come to anticipate almost by reflex in the books they choose, particularly in the wake of well-known 9/11 novels... In Open City, narrator Julius keeps a detached scientific eye on the world ... He takes a good hard look at human pain, then neatly divides it into its categories and files it into compartments ...should rather be seen as a proclamation of our age’s disintegration of borders, as so many of its characters move back and forth between global souths and global norths, across oceans and back ... Through Julius’s historical notes on the world around him, Open City attempts to come to terms with some of the horrifying legacies of the blood-filled 19th and 20th centuries—the endless wars, the unending massacres.
