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Review
'Impressive ... intricately woven ... a remarkable debut novel, one that's as effortless as a stroll around Central Park.' --Sunday Times
'There is something beguiling about this very articulate flâneur picking his way through the snares of consciousness ... agreeably strange and suggestive.' --Financial Times
`A melancholy, beautiful meditation on modern urban life ... reveals Teju Cole as one of a talented new generation.' --Hari Kunzru
'A novel to savour and treasure.' --Colm Tóibín
'Beautiful, subtle, and finally, original.'
--James Wood, New Yorker
'There is something beguiling about this very articulate flâneur picking his way through the snares of consciousness ... agreeably strange and suggestive.' --Financial Times
`A melancholy, beautiful meditation on modern urban life ... reveals Teju Cole as one of a talented new generation.' --Hari Kunzru
'A novel to savour and treasure.' --Colm Tóibín
'Beautiful, subtle, and finally, original.'
--James Wood, New Yorker
Book Description
A stunning and acclaimed debut novel following a young man's journey from Nigeria to Manhattan.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
22 of 22 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Open City is an exceptional novel.
Its intense, detailed and specific narrative, unravelling inside the mind of one man, Julius - a young Nigerian-German doctor completing his residency in psychiatry in a New York hospital - brings the city of new York hauntingly to life in a different, slower, deeper way from anything I've ever read. From this detail and specificity, it reaches out widely to the global flows of our fluxing, ungraspable world, personified by the various immigrants and asylum seekers he encounters. It reaches in, too, to touch the reader's mind and senses and emotions. For this restrained, intellectual voice, you realise, is piercingly sensitive - it gets to you!
This is not one for the fan of plot-heavy pageturners, perhaps. Julius spends much time alone, walks a lot and thinks a lot, about art and memory and history. He sees a lot, as loners sometimes do, and has strange, surprising, significant encounters, often with other immigrants, as loners sometimes do.
His story, perhaps, goes nowhere much. And yet, in his actual journey to Brussels, his journeys of memory back to Nigeria, and in the mouths and memories of those he meets from far-flung places, it goes to Africa, to Europe... and to places in the heart.
It travels too, through his observations and reflections, in time, political and cultural history. Full of seeming digressions, it digresses in fact not at all, but is a seamless deepening through detail of the whole picture and atmosphere of today's global city.
And it goes to a sharp inner twist that you will not forget.
It's a book to love, and to reread many times.
Its intense, detailed and specific narrative, unravelling inside the mind of one man, Julius - a young Nigerian-German doctor completing his residency in psychiatry in a New York hospital - brings the city of new York hauntingly to life in a different, slower, deeper way from anything I've ever read. From this detail and specificity, it reaches out widely to the global flows of our fluxing, ungraspable world, personified by the various immigrants and asylum seekers he encounters. It reaches in, too, to touch the reader's mind and senses and emotions. For this restrained, intellectual voice, you realise, is piercingly sensitive - it gets to you!
This is not one for the fan of plot-heavy pageturners, perhaps. Julius spends much time alone, walks a lot and thinks a lot, about art and memory and history. He sees a lot, as loners sometimes do, and has strange, surprising, significant encounters, often with other immigrants, as loners sometimes do.
His story, perhaps, goes nowhere much. And yet, in his actual journey to Brussels, his journeys of memory back to Nigeria, and in the mouths and memories of those he meets from far-flung places, it goes to Africa, to Europe... and to places in the heart.
It travels too, through his observations and reflections, in time, political and cultural history. Full of seeming digressions, it digresses in fact not at all, but is a seamless deepening through detail of the whole picture and atmosphere of today's global city.
And it goes to a sharp inner twist that you will not forget.
It's a book to love, and to reread many times.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A young doctor takes breaks from his busy psychiatric residency and, later, private practice by walking the streets of New York and traveling briefly to Brussels. Julius's rich, diary-like account of his interactions with the cities' people and structures, salted with his incomplete self-knowledge and unresolved past, amounts to Open City, an engrossing meditation and celebration of language.
I'd rather share my experience with Open City than review it. After reading the novel, I began (a bit like Julius, who settles into a flâneur's perspective during his walks) running into lengthy, insightful, and deservedly positive reviews of it in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The New Statesman. Not much I can add to what they say.
Observation and language worked like plot to carry me along, mind and spirit, though Julius's wanderings. Julius often feels reflective and associative, much like anyone reading, and subject to crosscurrents of art, music, literature, his own fine-tuned senses and city life. Consider the synchronicity in this paragraph after Julius describes a performance of Gustav Mahler's Ninth Symphony at Carnegie Hall:
"In the glow of the final movement, but well before the music ended, an elderly woman in the front row stood, and began to walk up the aisle. She walked slowly, and all eyes were on her, though all ears remained on the music. It was a though she had been summoned, and was leaving into death, drawn by a force invisible to us. The old woman was frail, with a think crown of white hair that, backlit by the stage, became a halo, and she moved so slowly that she was like a mote suspended inside the slow-moving music. One of her arms was slightly raised, as though she were being led forward by a helper - as though I was down there with my [grandmother], and the sweep of the music was pushing us gently forward as I escorted her out into the darkness. As she drifted to the entrance and out of sight, in her gracefulness she resembled nothing so much as a boat departing on a country lake early in the morning, which to those still standing on the shore, appears not to sail but to dissolve into the substance of the fog."
Blends and juxtapositions like these, and the love of seeing a good mind observe like a good lens and absorb like good film, caused Miguel Syjuco in his NY Times review to call the novel "a symphonic experience". Experiencing this kind of joy and honesty book-wide has been the literary (and maybe the musical!) high point of my year. What critic George Steiner said about Lawrence Durrell fifty years ago applies at least as well to Teju Cole: "He stands in the tradition of the fullness of prose. He is attempting to make language once again commensurate with the manifold truths of the experienced world."
I'd rather share my experience with Open City than review it. After reading the novel, I began (a bit like Julius, who settles into a flâneur's perspective during his walks) running into lengthy, insightful, and deservedly positive reviews of it in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The New Statesman. Not much I can add to what they say.
Observation and language worked like plot to carry me along, mind and spirit, though Julius's wanderings. Julius often feels reflective and associative, much like anyone reading, and subject to crosscurrents of art, music, literature, his own fine-tuned senses and city life. Consider the synchronicity in this paragraph after Julius describes a performance of Gustav Mahler's Ninth Symphony at Carnegie Hall:
"In the glow of the final movement, but well before the music ended, an elderly woman in the front row stood, and began to walk up the aisle. She walked slowly, and all eyes were on her, though all ears remained on the music. It was a though she had been summoned, and was leaving into death, drawn by a force invisible to us. The old woman was frail, with a think crown of white hair that, backlit by the stage, became a halo, and she moved so slowly that she was like a mote suspended inside the slow-moving music. One of her arms was slightly raised, as though she were being led forward by a helper - as though I was down there with my [grandmother], and the sweep of the music was pushing us gently forward as I escorted her out into the darkness. As she drifted to the entrance and out of sight, in her gracefulness she resembled nothing so much as a boat departing on a country lake early in the morning, which to those still standing on the shore, appears not to sail but to dissolve into the substance of the fog."
Blends and juxtapositions like these, and the love of seeing a good mind observe like a good lens and absorb like good film, caused Miguel Syjuco in his NY Times review to call the novel "a symphonic experience". Experiencing this kind of joy and honesty book-wide has been the literary (and maybe the musical!) high point of my year. What critic George Steiner said about Lawrence Durrell fifty years ago applies at least as well to Teju Cole: "He stands in the tradition of the fullness of prose. He is attempting to make language once again commensurate with the manifold truths of the experienced world."
Format:Paperback
Exquisitely written - or slick New Yorkerese? 'The tall girl who brought my coffee had a Parisian rather than Bruxelloise affect.' Cole makes even Brussels feel like New York. Farouq: 'There is a spiritual energy in the topography' - he then goes on to cite Paul de Man. Write what you know - but here life and fiction mesh uncomfortably. 'She had not touched her waterzooi.' Cole, who has no doubt lived in Belgium, knows what this is; we, who haven't, don't. Narrator: I noticed a copy of Simone Weil's essays. I picked it up. My friend turned from the window. She's wonderful on the Iliad, he said. Godard did this sort of thing with wit and, above all, fire. Colourless, bloodless (even the obligatory sex scene halfway through is perfunctory), pointless and ABOVE ALL humourless (they don't half take themselves seriously, these Manhattanite masters of the universe - unless they're Jewish, with black humour in their DNA). I liked the fact our hero didn't drive (the one true luxury in NYC is you don't have to) but confess I didn't get past the mugging scene (standard default plot device #2) so I'll never get to what another reviewer called 'the sharp inner twist that you will not forget' - I had already lost the will to live
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Oddball
I feel odd not giving this book a fantastic review like others.
It started off a bit slow then Cole managed to capture my interest along the way with some wonderful... Read more
It started off a bit slow then Cole managed to capture my interest along the way with some wonderful... Read more
Published 3 months ago by JO
Another modern novel.....zzzzz
Deliberately cryptic. Meandering. The flaneur psychiatrist walks around NYC and Brussels (once in a while Nigeria gets a look in). Read more
Published 3 months ago by J. Reynolds
A Magnificent Stream-of-Consciousness Novel That Is Also a Most...
"Open City" is an astonishingly mature literary debut from New York City-based art historian and photographer Teju Cole and one well deserving of its ample critical acclaim for... Read more
Published 4 months ago by John Kwok
Excellent novel by an individual voice
'Open City' is Teju Cole's first novel, and it sets a standard that will be hard to keep up. Critics have been scrabbling for superlatives and reaching for comparisons with authors... Read more
Published 5 months ago by Paul Bowes
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