The narrator of Teju Cole’s odd, sometimes striking, sometimes frustrating first novel is a med student named Julius who likes to wander through the streets of New York City, and the book is filled with arresting, strobe-lit glimpses of Manhattan, 'this strangest of islands' ...his glimpses of the city turn out to be fragments in a meandering stream-of-consciousness narrative that often reads like an ungainly mash-up of W. G. Sebald’s work and the Camus novel L’Etranger ...the author’s gift for portraiture, but other, more perfunctory exchanges with strangers have a solipsistic, dreamlike quality, as though these people were simply projections of Julius’s own sense of dislocation ...Mr. Cole’s failure to dramatize his alienation — or make it emblematic of some larger historical experience, as Sebald did with his displaced characters — impedes the reader’s progress while underscoring the messy, almost ad hoc nature of the overall narrative.
...Open City is a more mature work, or seems so given the self-confidence of the book’s narrator ... Here the narrator takes his time, describing different paths available to the city wanderer instead of writing about the one he has taken. Drawing the topography of New York City, he creates a space for the reader ... In Open City we inhabit post-9/11 New York as if we are left alone there to wander at will ...gives rise to an important question, one that Julius has been probing from the very beginning of the book: how much can the observer penetrate the depths of what he observes? ... In Open City, Julius, and his creator Cole, can be said to reach it, although some may prefer the imperfect sketches to the perfect painting.
This busy campaign for allies does a disfavor to Teju Cole’s beautiful, subtle, and, finally, original novel. Open City is indeed largely set in a multiracial New York (the open city of the title) ... the novel does move in the shadow of W. G. Sebald’s work. While Open City has nominally separate chapters, it has the form and atmosphere of a text written in a single, unbroken paragraph: though people speak and occasionally converse, this speech is not marked by quotation marks, dashes, or paragraph breaks and is formally indistinguishable from the narrator’s own language ...Cole has made his novel as close to a diary as a novel can get, with room for reflection, autobiography, stasis, and repetition ... More than anything, Open City seems a beautifully modulated description of a certain kind of solitary liberalism common to thousands, if not millions, of bookish types.
In his debut novel, Open City, Teju Cole, who was raised in Nigeria and came to the United States in 1992, tells the story of a young, immigrant medical student in New York City ... Not only is the main character stoic, but Cole imbues the novel with the existential feel of Sartre’s Nausea and the absurdism of Camus’s The Stranger ...his stoicism concerns the terrible history he recounts and the modern atrocities he witnesses. The reader will wonder near the novel’s end whether Julius himself might benefit from becoming the subject of his professional practice ... Open City is a quiet novel that somehow manages to scream. Despite all of his ruminating, Julius seems, like the world around him, to be in a state of psychological paralysis, unaffected by historical and contemporary atrocities.
The very first words in Open City, an indelible debut novel by Teju Cole, imply an inevitability, connecting the narrator’s past with his present task, that of explaining his place in the world... With every anecdote, with each overlap, Cole lucidly builds a compassionate and masterly work engaged more with questions than with answers regarding some of the biggest issues of our time: migration, moral accountability and our tenuous tolerance of one another’s differences ... Cole’s writing is assured, his ideas are well developed, and his imagery is delicious...his talent for juxtaposing the past and the present turns this book into a symphonic experience... His readers will be those who understand that all stories are interconnected, that literature is not mere entertainment, and that art is nothing if not an extended conversation spanning eras, nations and languages.
The wonder and the tragedy of flight come up again and again in Teju Cole's magnificent and shattering post-9/11 novel Open City... Plot is a minor consideration in the eloquent musings of the central character, Julius, a Nigerian-born, half-German psychiatrist on residency in Manhattan ... His solitary aloofness has its drawbacks, though. Ironically, given his keen sense of observation, he at times seems oblivious to events happening right under his nose... Julius is more preoccupied with the bird's-eye view of things. But at every turn, he must confront his own reality as foreigner in a terror-obsessed society... But like a lot of difficult journeys in life, the trip is as meaningful as the destination. Open City is a remarkably resonant feat of prose.
Teju 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.
Ever since he moved to New York a little over 10 years ago, author Teju Cole knew that he wanted to write about the city, with the general structure of a character walking and walking around the metropolis and making discoveries ... The result is Open City, a debut novel that has met with high praise and is being called a new landmark in post-Sept. 11 fiction ... The central conflict of the book, Cole explains, is what happens to a mind that takes things in — and one that's sensitive to what's going on around it ... Julius exhibits that porous, open-minded quality by walking all over his adopted town simply to talk with strangers and learn their life stories ... Most of the people Julian talks to in the novel are immigrants, or at least somewhat culturally outside the mainstream.
For Manhattan residents, current or past, the initial joy of reading Teju Cole’s Open City comes from pure, unadulterated recognition ...the approach that Cole will take throughout the book: a matter of fact, nearly fussy exactitude that attempts to fully situate the reader in Julius’s reality at all times ... What makes Cole’s book and style distinctive is the evenness with which he distributes his observations, the almost purely descriptive consistency with which the narrator treats street scenes, conversations, memories, and even emotions ... When he combines his observations about the city with a piece of historical or cultural insight, the effect is transformative, and Cole’s facilities as a prose writer are on full display.
Most novels move beyond metaphor toward something resembling a plot; Teju Cole’s Open City does not. Rather, it is itself a single metaphor: aimless wandering as a reading experience ... Though the influence is visible, Cole refrains from copying the stream-of-consciousness style of Joyce or the minutely detailed explorations of Baker, and instead works with his own method that interweaves writing style with subject matter into the cloth of a familiar yet original protagonist ...isn’t so much a story as an inquiry, and Cole focuses on the means of action rather than its ends. From this rare perspective, the act of storytelling is accomplished through the details of smaller episodes, not a linear progression of scenes ... Cole’s achievement is that he has crafted a novel that needs no beginning, middle, or end because it so humbly imagines actual life: a string of events that follow each other without any perceptible rhyme or reason.
Teju Cole's Open City is neither a melodrama, nor is it about a city that has technically been declared 'open' during wartime. The novel is set in New York City, no more than a couple of years ago, and narrated by a Nigerian psychiatrist on a research fellowship ... As a narrator, Julius is aloof, exact, learned and a little bit chilly. His need to find that line that connects him is real, because for all his powers of observation, he construes himself as an outsider and impartial observer in all things, including his own history. But there are threads that connect him to the city and to the people in the city, some of which prove to be less than pleasant ... This weighty moment in the history of a city, its days and nights, its landmarks and its inhabitants buzz exquisitely, so many fireflies trapped under the glass of Cole's crystalline prose.
But Teju Cole's first novel, Open City, isn't solely preoccupied with the race divide. Though he seems to amble aimlessly, Julius is something of a cartographer of the city's 'others,' whether the separation was imposed, chosen or simply embodied ... His stream-of-consciousness reflections focus on the identities, personal and national, refracted throughout the city ... Against such an illumination, in another novel the city would serve as a mere setting. Cole, though, all but foists it on us in case we might be tempted to narrow our view or even look away.
Teju Cole's disquietingly powerful debut Open City does none of the above. It's light on plot. It's exquisitely written, but quiet; the sentences don't call attention to themselves. The narrator, a Nigerian psychiatry student, is emotionally distant, ruminative, and intellectual ... In its patient, cumulative way, the novel paints a startlingly dim picture of our present moment, our age of permeable borders and teeming heterogeneous cities ... All of this is comes at the reader in a slow burn. The novel is never boring, but it moves deliberately, and Julius' emotional life remains just out of reach ...Julius' forgetfulness and drifty wanderings come to seem like willed acts of erasure; he has reason to blot out his past.
Teju Cole’s Open City follows the peripatetic ramblings of its narrator through the streets of New York City ... Julius is good company: erudite, clever, with a wide-reaching interest in almost everyone and everything. He seeks out new experiences and finds much to remark on ... As Open City continues, an air of sadness settles over the story ... Julius, who is hypersensitive to the traces time leaves behind in an urban landscape, is less attuned to the traces time leaves behind on people, who also bear marks left by prior experiences ...provides a mirror image of this earlier plot, as Julius looks for familiarity in cities not his own. Though more overtly fictional, it also expands upon Cole’s idea that the past is always with us.
Along with seemingly profound reflections on cultural forms, descriptions of these walks constitute most of Open City, the first full-length novel by Teju Cole, which has been much praised in the United States for its prose style and for its take on the city as a site of power, desire and community ...action is the wrong spoor by which to pursue this book. What comes strongest off it, instead, is a cosmopolitan range of reference. Moments of genuine narrative are most often the springboard for a jump into book chat, music trivia or historical disquisition ... The environment of which Open City is mostly mimetic is the hall of semiotic mirrors inside our heads, and the proliferating data now so easily accessed by our fingertips.
In one way, it hardly matters –– editors at The New York Times already dubbed Open City one of the 10 best books of any kind published last year. Cultural arbiter James Wood announced in The New Yorker that Cole's work was 'beautiful, subtle' and 'original' ...unfurls in the voice of Julius, a resident in psychiatry at a Columbia University-affiliated hospital ... The observational intelligence that suffuses Open City is the type that inspires a reader to look sharp. The book begins slowly, its voice unforced and associative, but its power gathers ... Cole's approach is frequently compared to W.G. Sebald's, but the fluidity and contingency put me in mind of Virginia Woolf's ... This fullness is a fullness of the interior life. Plenty of readers looking for plot might complain that nothing happens. They would be wrong –– both technically, and metaphysically.
A masterful command of narrative voice distinguishes a debut novel that requires patience and rewards it ...has a former girlfriend, some medical colleagues, even a few friends, but none emerge as fully fleshed characters in a novel that consists mostly of Julius’s restless wanderings throughout the city, where he withstands the crush of a very diverse populace while remaining very much alone. If Julius is the only character the reader really gets to know, even he seems disembodied, a stranger to himself ... As Julius traverses boundaries of neighborhood, country, chronology and race, the reader begins to wonder about the perspective of a protagonist who seems so disaffected. Rather than establishing momentum, the circular, elliptical narrative focuses on the everyday... Determining whether the novel's main character is hero, villain or somewhere in between might require the reader to start over with the book after finishing it.
...Sebald’s influence can still be felt in Open City’s narrator, Julius, a Nigerian psychiatrist performing his Harlem residency ... Where Sebald forced readers to construct a narrative out of nothing more than thematic tissue, Cole eventually undermines Julius’ reticence with a twist that breaks through his chilly facade: He’s given the expedient identity of an unreliable narrator ...that distanced voice is the book’s great achievement: much of the narrative simply records Julius’ thoughts on art exhibitions, museums, concerts, and reading material ... All the unbroken high-mindedness can be difficult to keep up with, but it’s worth it ... Unconvincing twist aside, Open City is lucidly detached in a manner that needs no apologies.
Possibly the only negative thing to say about Cole's intelligent and panoramic first novel is that it is a more generous account of the recent past than the era deserves ...from the restless thoughts of psychiatry resident Julius, a Nigerian immigrant who wanders Manhattan, pondering everything from Goya and the novels of J.M. Coetzee to the bankruptcy of Tower Records and the rise of the bedbug epidemic. In other words, it is an ongoing reverie in the tradition of W.G. Sebald or Nicholson Baker...above all he ruminates, and the picture of a mind that emerges in lieu of a plot is fascinating, as it is engaged with the world in a rare and refreshing way.
