Book Review : Open City. By Teju Cole

I read Teju's book, "Open City" sometime ago. This is his first novel, he wrote a novella sometime ago, but released in Nigeria. Teju' I suspect, is one the novelists to watch out for internationally. His novel has a style that is not very common.

Here is a review from the economist.

Bird’s eye view
Teju Cole, a Nigerian-born novelist, is a surprising new voice in fiction
Jul 30th 2011 | from the print edition

Open City. By Teju Cole. Random House; 272 pages; $25. Faber and Faber; £12.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk




ON HIS voyages of discovery across New York, Julius, the hero of Teju Cole’s first novel, “Open City”, sets off by night from the Cathedral of St John the Divine down the path to Morningside Park, from which it is only 15 minutes to Central Park. Or else he meanders from Morningside Park west to Sakura Park and then northward along the Hudson river to Harlem. Along the way he opens up for the reader new vistas on love, race, identity, friendship, memory, dislocation and Manhattan bird life.

Julius’s nocturnal wanderings stand in contrast to his busy days at the hospital where he is finishing a psychiatry project researching affective disorders in the elderly. It is “a regimen of perfection and competence” that neither allows improvisation nor tolerates mistakes. Without drawing breath, the author acknowledges the idea of walking-as-therapy and moves on, his eyes set on a more distant horizon.

Like his hero, Mr Cole was raised in Lagos. He went to America in 1992 when he was 17. It was a moment when many Nigerians despaired of their country. A brief interregnum of inept civilian government had been squeezed in between two long periods of increasingly corrupt military rule that, despite repeated hollow promises, showed no sign of coming to an end. Anyone with resources or contacts tried to leave, and in the early 1990s clever, educated, young Nigerians, like Mr Cole, or Julius, his alter ego, were turning up in their thousands in Europe and America.

Mr Cole’s independent spirit seems to have taken flight in America. He became a photographer and a professional historian of early Netherlandish art, as well as something of an expert on the brutal Dutch colonists of Manhattan Island. “Open City” is dedicated to the “protector of my solitude”. Julius lives alone and walks alone, conscious of how much he is affected by the light of the seasons. This solitude is important for it makes the reader his only companion.

As part of the journey they visit Professor Saito, whom Julius describes as “the oldest person I know”. The professor had once taught Julius English. He has lost his gay lover and is now waiting to die, living out his days in a flat inhabited by Polynesian masks and large-hipped carers. The short time left is a palpable regret. The reader is also offered a meditation on the singular portraits of John Brewster, who, profoundly deaf, painted mostly children who also couldn’t hear, and an introduction to an albino whale that swam into the Hudson in 1647, bringing, the local residents believed, a message from the deep.

Such an arcane form of narrative will be familiar to readers of W.G. Sebald, a German writer who, until his death in 2001, mused so much about his British home in Norfolk. In lesser hands it would surely end up disjointed and pretentious. Mr Cole, though, is an exceptional writer. “Open City” has been a surprise word-of-mouth bestseller since it was published five months ago in America. It is about to come out in Britain, and later in France and in Spain.

There are three reasons why the book is so compelling, and the quality of translation will be vital if this success is to continue in other languages. In the precision with which Mr Cole chooses words or phrases he is not unlike Gustave Flaubert, who sometimes took a week to write a single paragraph. Thus New York’s horses are “blindered”, its flocks of birds “take auspices” as birds did in Roman times, the traffic on Sixth Avenue “with its rush-hour gladiators testing each other’s limits” are a stark contrast to the quietude of the American Folk Art Museum where Julius first encounters Brewster’s portraits.

Secondly, like the Ethiopian-born writer, Dinaw Mengestu, another African who has become American (and also a rising star), Mr Cole has no time for clichés and generalisations. Julius rails against a film director who thinks that French-speaking Mali and Anglophone Kenya are interchangeable. This is not pedantry, but a quiet insistence that Africans can no longer be lumped together as one. When Julius flies to Europe, it is not to his mother’s homeland, Germany, but to Belgium, a nation with a long and complex history involving Africa. By the time readers follow Julius to Lagos, they no longer see Nigerians as nationally feckless, but as sympathetic, complicated individuals.

Last, and most important, given how contemporary novelists are criticised for repeating the achievements of those gone by rather than adequately portraying the modern world, is that Mr Cole is an original. James Wood, a British critic who teaches at Harvard, is one of a number of reviewers who have singled out Mr Cole’s work. “Open City”, he says, is as close to a diary as a novel can get, an unusual accomplishment for which “a sure hand is needed to make the writer’s careful stitching look like a thread merely being followed for its own sake.” It could so easily have failed. Instead, it is a clear-eyed and mysterious achievement, a modern meditation that is both complex and utterly simple.

Other review links below.


http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2011/02/28/110228crbo_books_wood?currentPage=all

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/02/07/open-city-by-teju-cole-review.html

 

I was happy reading about this book on this site

I am also glad more than one magazine felt its impact in 2011.

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2101344_2101086_2101097,00.html


http://www.thedailybeast.com/newswe...daily-beast-writers-favorite-books-20110.html

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2011/12/the-year-in-reading-james-wood.html