Teju Cole: Open City (ILX Book Club #3, starts 27 June)

The Brussels section does seem thematically contrived, motivated by structural reasons rather than anything plot or character-driven - Brussels representing the once open city now closing down, just as New York/US is closing after 9/11. Seems a bit pat. Though I enjoyed the Farouq conversations, didn't really understand why Julius suddenly turned against him on the second meeting where they barely spoke, deciding that his philosophy was driven by rage or whatever.

2/3 through, so far really enjoying it. Trying not to read thread yet in case of spoilers or just so I can let my own thoughts warm up in the cerebral vacuum tubes. Two random notes

Think I saw a trailer at the Film Forum last week for a French movie about the kidnapping incident described in the Brussels section.

definition of a NIgerian slang word Julius uses
http://neologisms.rice.edu/index.php?a=term&d=1&t=2891

Half way through this now and I'm really enjoying it but I find the flatness of the narrative voice a bit odd when another character is telling his story - maybe it's because it's all filtered through Julius. Also I think Julius is maybe kind of a supercilious prick and I'm wondering if the slow revelation of his past is building up to anything that might shed light on that.

It reminds me of Netherland as well but, well, much better. NB I hate the narrator in Netherland.

The missus is also reading this and she also finds him a supercilious prick. I suppose his military schooling might contribute to this? Think I am a bit more impatient with the lonely-guy-just-thinking-baout-things narrative indirection.

Just finished section 1 last night - the concluding conversation with Farouq feels incredibly timely, post-Arab Spring.

I thought that as well (midway through Brussells at the moment). As a construction of ideas, and as a debate about immigration, I'm finding it fascinating. As a novel I'm not entirely convinced yet - I like the coolness of Cole/Julius's prose, and how he resists over-egging the pudding and going for more violence or drama in the character's experiences, but some of these stories feel a bit shoehorned in.

Re: supercilious prick, I'm not sure what the point of talking about his sexual liaison in Brussells was, if not to ostentatiously show off his unconventional taste in women. He does things like this a lot, usually about things he dislikes.

But this might all be leading somewhere. Curious to find out where the thing with his mother is going.

Stevie, please say "Jasmine Revolution" instead of "Arab Spring".

I might have another go at reading this book.

That is all.

Thought Jasmine Revolution was the new Thai eaterie in Crystal Palace. :/

Did he really want to find his oma? Or was dining with the grandmotherly Annette enough of a substitute?

Wonder what to read next after this in this vein? Netherland is obvious choice but thinking about going the Chinua Achebe route.

Second part doesn't seem to have any of the "oddities" mentioned upthread, does it?

Are we allowed to say yet FIRST HALF SPOILERS******* that in the first many of the people he meets and even the events he goes to are from the past or dead-obviously the bootblack and the Draft Riots, but also Farouq, because Julius pays him in centimes and the other phone guy in Euros. Dr. Annette Maillotte's age doesn't seem to add up and he meets her on plane after napping, even Polish poetry reading after Central Park nap seems from earlier era, the naps being like wavy heat shimmers before flashbacks. Another clue being that when it snows you can't tell what era it is. That part of meaning of title Open City is opening up doors and windows (wounds?) into the past?

D'oh! It's obvious when you say it now - though I'd assumed centimes was just an error. I was reading in a bit of a haze last night and the snow's presence was very confusing.

Some of the things are smaller shifts, like the centimes or the eighty year old doctor whose eldest son was 36

Not looking forward to The Sixth Sense-style movie version

A hundredth of a euro is a centime, no?

A cent, I think - still not convinced it's not just a typo

Like to think that given his art historian's photographic eye for detail that there are no typos. teju cole otm

OK, don't think Dr. Maillotte was an actual ghost like some others, given that she was reading a Joan Didion book that came out in 2005- her only method of time travel was being long-lived and still vital and able to tell her tale, like the guy from Berlin at the photo exhibit who looked in his sixties but was actually eighty-four.

And Wikipedia has the skinny on the centime:

In the European community cent is the official name for one hundredth of a euro. However, in French-speaking countries the word centime is the preferred term.

Someone else say something please.

what sticks out to me is all the temporal dislocation (or maybe discontinuity between reader's view and Cole/Julius's view of time), the way time seems to slow down or jump or pause ... but it's all done with a ton of control. he's so artful that he can transition around so smoothly but still gives the sense that he is avoiding, hiding, withholding

I've slowed down markedly. I'm nearing the end but I feel like the density and complexity has crept up on me unawares; I now fear that I've missed a lot, and that unfortunately reading at night saps the attention that's really needed. The last few day's comments have changed my outlook too.

Also, it feels like a completely different book in the second half. The narrative has just gone; I'm left with the feeling of unrelated, nebulous yet somehow interconnected events, any of which may not even be happening, and lacking the key to make sense of the whole.

Second half is the return of the repressed, sort of

Wonder what to read next after this in this vein? Netherland is obvious choice but thinking about going the Chinua Achebe route.

while it may not be exactly what you're after id recommend john wray's 'lowboy' if you're looking for something nyc-based that access some of the same things that 'open city' does

Spent a tube journey this morning reading the chapters about bedbugs, feeling grateful we don't have wooden subway benches in London - but it felt a lot like a barely transformed New Yorker article. I kind of feel at this point he is piling up variations on the themes of invasion/integration/openness to decreasing effect.

I think I would have more patience for the lonely-guy-thinking-baout-things drift if there were some humour, wit, grief, anger or even irritation to push things along. Have plenty of time for uneventful essayistic writers like, eg, the early G Dyer. But Cole seems to have too successfully absorbed the Sebaldian sangfroid, and I have v little investment in Julius considering I've spent 3/4s of a book in his head.

Not reading it if there's no funny bits.

I can't recall a book that was less funny :/

Well it's certainly not up to the standards of our Excelsior threads, if that's what you're after

Finished. Now I need to think about it for a bit.

Never even occurred to me to think about whether the book was funny or not and if the answer was no to stop reading because there was so much else of interest going on, such as the stuff Romeo Jones describes above

Thought about it, know less than I did at the start. The twist in the penultimate chapter is a bit silently brutal, not at all sure what to make of it. Right now the whole thing reads most like a warning against a lack of structure to one's life, against having too much freedom.

History is full of bad things, done with good intentions and bad. Psychologically, only the results of the good intentions appear to be accessible to us.

Started it again, reaqlly enjoyed it. Took it very slowly, having a bit of a think occasionally.

Stevie makes me wonder, what is the least funny book I have ever read.

I could open the bidding with Gravity's Rainbow or Rushdie but there are many contenders.

Think I saw a trailer at the Film Forum last week for a French movie about the kidnapping incident described in the Brussels section.

So nobody else read this book? Or is it that they just haven't finished it?

I sure wouldn't want Julius to be my shrink (although I did actually find dark humor in the book ending with him becoming a fully trained and practicing doctor). J is pretty damn solipsistic. He'd probably look down on my tastes (I never got into classical and was a bit annoyed by "Elizabeth Costello" ... although I did a little googling on John Brewster and those paintings are pretty cool and creepy.) And aren't shrinks expected to evaluate their own lives instead of concealing/selectively remembering? I.e. The more events are not talked about, the more power they hold.
But I really liked the book, especially how Cole slowly reveals Julius to be an unreliable narrator. The big shocker revelation was pretty devastating (his silence and nonchalance ... jeez ugh), especially in light of the love/hate I had going for Julius, but the rape definitely ties in with his childhood traumas -- mom abandoning him, militiary school hell, dad's death. Kinda came out of the blue but makes sense.

Julius's reaction to the post office guy was funny too. I don't think the book is humorless.

Just finished it over lunch. I thought it was impressive, but I didn't particularly like it. Ultimately I found myself wondering "why is this a novel, rather than a collection of essays or whatever?" Actually, the bits where the drift was intended to have some emotional motive felt the most contrived to me: the trip to Brussels to supposedly search for his grandma and the revelation in the penultimate chapter. They seemed to be there purely to be "novelistic", to make it feel like there was some suspense or story or final revelation. Without them I could imagine the book existing as an exceptionally refined blog - went to the cinema, went to a gallery, had a picnic, went on holiday, listened to some Mahler and thought about things. I think I would almost prefer it that way! When I said the book was humourless I was really complaining about a lack of any kind of emotional engagement, and I think that is something I want from fiction - something that quickens the pulse in whichever way. I finished this thinking... well, that is interesting about Yoruba cosmology, or the slave history of Manhattan or pattern of bird collisions with the Statue of Liberty. But it didn't really move beyond the interesting.

I found myself wondering "why is this a novel, rather than a collection of essays or whatever?"
i kind of thought this too while reading it, but i guess the revelation at the end made me want to go back and re-read -- i think that the explicit knowledge of julius as an extremely unreliable narrator would maybe inform every page the second time around, in a way that it doesn't when you're first reading it.

It reminded me in a general way of the late David Markson, where there is a lot of interesting factual material presented but you still can feel the pull of the emotional undertow beneath the surface, related to that sense of avoiding or hiding Romeo Jones was talking about.

That's pretty close to my response, Stevie, except that I'd say highly impressive. It does irk me, though, that a high order or layering and allegory should nearly always be at the expense of plot. It can be done - the Hollinghurst book I read a couple of months back had more than Open City, but it was hardly Steven King.

I found the narrator very off-putting, and yes, a "supercilious prick," but not in an entertaining way. I didn't buy that a fairly young man was lugubriously walking around NYC, sounding like the ghost of Henry James and yearning for nothing more than to spend time with an elderly Japanese professor. I thought the segment with the Haitian shoeshiner who turns into a historical bootblack was interesting, but I don't think Cole set this up convincingly enough.

In the Brussels section, the narrator's interactions with Dr. Maillotte were fairly interesting, but the dialogue between Julius and Farouq read like an embarrassing college seminar. I thought the part where Julius seduces a woman who in his mind has the misfortune be fifty, wants to tell her it can't happen again, but somehow stops himself, and then goes home to bed and reads Camera Lucida was sort of ridiculous.

The big reveal toward the end from Moji seemed incongruous. I guess I could go back and read the whole book again with this in mind, and try to ferret out the hidden meanings . . . but I think that Cole relies too much on sprinkling his work with cultural references without really doing enough for the reader. If I'm being generous I could say that Julius's reading of Barthes above is a commentary on the "Death is a perfection of the eye" lead-in to Part 1, but I don't really want to work that hard.

Julius is Nobody's Fool

I didn't buy that a fairly young man was lugubriously walking around NYC, sounding like the ghost of Henry James and yearning for nothing more than to spend time with an elderly Japanese professor.

"The ghost of Henry James" ...ha, yes! that's it exactly. But I found his manner to be funny--it's such a put-on--like when he makes pains to distinguish himself from people who "antiscientiffically" think that all hot weather is direct evidence of global warming.

It's kind of a deadpan Adam West-style performance.

^^^good blurb for the paperback edition

He is like a grad student who has OD-ed on Sebald I think - and this could have been made funnier, if there were really some interesting narratorial unreliability going on, like in Pnin or something.

I did wonder whether his penchant for classical music stations from Europe, Dutch painting, etc etc, was some kind of wry comment on contrary Occidentalism - as opposed to the Orientalism that Julius and Farouq discuss.

I thought it's maybe a bulwark against his drives that he seems to have submerged? Also maybe some commentary on the primacy of Africa versus the erudition of Europe, which would be really creepy.

Um,...

Julius has definitely made a break. The American/Western Julius and his younger African self are like 2 different identities and I guess his taste is a reflection of his allegiance to the former and repression of the latter (and Saito is a kind of corrollary) ... but seems to be more to it than that

Julius is dead by the end, right?

How so?

He's musing about Mahler's final work, and then standing on a precarious fire escape in a storm, and then being invited on a strange boat sailing away by strangers, and leaves us with an story of disoriented birds flying to their death. Not that that last bit couldn't mean all number of things, but combined it certainly felt like a surrealistic death sequence to me.

It had passed me by, but the moment you mentioned it I thought of the climb onto the George Washington Bridge at the end of the penultimate chapter, and the climb down, with the bit in the middle left unsaid like every other transition in the book.

Thought he might be dead too, but then he seemed to live on. Then thought it might be some Jacob's Ladder or Life On Mars stuff going on.

Presumably Julius's interest in classical music/Dutch painting are a reflection of Cole's own. Cole has a professional interest in Dutch art and you don't write as knowledgeably about classical music as he does unless you have a deep interest.

There's nothing necessarily inconsistent about detesting Western colonialism and (apparently) buying into its claims to superiority in the arts. I guess it would have been a more or less orthodox position for black liberals a generation or so ago. But it seems out of synch with the times now, and I'd have thought Cole would have ruffled some feathers. I'd be interested in what he had to say. It's almost impossible to know what he thinks about anything from the novel itself, except that he's broadly liberal.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/10/perplexed-perplexed-on-mob-justice-in-nigeria/264006/

This thread is really good; dunno if pride is the right emotion, but I am proud we managed to put it together.

didn't realize there was a thread about this book. strange how people are reading much more plot into it than i did -- i suppose its flatness and digressiveness sort of invites this need to impose a more coherent structure.

i read it more as a series of moods, and the core theme as someone who wants to believe in this essentially liberal vision of a broad cross-cultural community, and can read the traces of history around him but even so he's constantly trying to reduce them to just history, and the story is not so much of an open city, as someone wanting to open themselves to the city, to feel like they can melt into its layers of accreted meaning and diverse milieux, be loved, accepted, and also to some degree ignored everywhere they go. and the tension is that this is a uniquely personal, dreamlike, trancelike vision/state that is both alluring and impossible. so for me the mugging was the most thematically blunt/revealing scene in terms of the whole thematic content of the book, and more than anything else it related to the arguments at the internet cafe.

the sections on just neighborhoods in new york felt very strange to me, because i recognized them so well. it felt like it wasn't doing any work at all, even though i saw that there was more than just walking around and describing stuff.

But as a whole the particular skein not of locations but dislocated that he pulls together did feel fresh to me, and important.

Even though the book would have functioned perfectly fine without it, I still feel like the rape accusation is the pivotal moment. Totally changed my view of Julius and the reliability of his narration (which I'd been wondering about all through the book anyway). In retrospect how like how flatly it's handled and that there is zero internal monologue about it (in a novel that's like 99% internal monologue), and lets you draw your own conclusions.

teju cole, internet troll

https://twitter.com/tejucole/status/351742607635910656

How can people not get that?!

by not knowing who teju cole is to have a set of assumptions to begin with i imagine

this guy is kind of the nabisco of twitter and of 'being actually well known'

This book is good because it seems plotless until the disturbing plot twist at the end. And the last chapter when he just reverts back to his guileless droning on about Mahler as if nothing has changed just made me feel nauseous.

http://www.okayafrica.com/news/teju-cole-mixtape-africa-in-your-earbuds-64/

nice

Yeah this was a bit too much lonely guy thinking baout things, though very nicely written. I will probably never read it again but if I were to, given the revelation at the end and some of the other gaps in his commentary (e.g. the suicide of V which perhaps happened during his lengthy vacation, and if it did would surely trigger a modicum of guilt in a normal person) I'd see if he ever treats a single person with more than a basic level of humanity, or if he ever displays a shred of personal psychological insight - or does he behave like a robot throughout?

what happened to Klata? Was there any drama or did he just silently vanish one day?

Looks like he drifted away in 2016, did a farewell lap with an entire George Michael tracks poll, and then popped up once in June 2020 to cheer the Liverpool premier league win.

Ismael Klata wrote this on thread Ilxors u miss on board I Love Everything on Jun 10, 2016

Hello everyone. I'm doing alright, and more touched than I probably really should be by the mention - but it does mean something to me, particularly when I probably haven't posted since the last World Cup.

I can't really remember why I drifted away. I got busy I guess, and had to cut some things out and get on with real life. I barely have an online presence in any respect now. I ran out of puff I suppose; I remember not really enjoying it, I don't really remember why. It certainly wasn't the creative writing thing - that went really well I thought. But writing is another thing I've had to leave behind.

Plus I'd been here a long time and was starting to repeat myself too often. As if to prove the point, I just had a read of Nick's 'best first listen' thread and was tempted to make a double return by adding another voice for Discovery, among others - but I had a vague feeling, checked back and found I'd made an identical post about five years ago. Nobody needs that.

Anyway much <3 to all. I do still have the occasional lurk from time to time - I've even put in the odd ballot when there's a poll I dig.

Otherwise I'm exactly as you'd expect, sitting on my couch enjoying my man Giroud ripping it up at the Euros. Aren't ITV's Art Deco credits lovely?