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

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

I keep thinking about V. He picks up V's book to try to get to know her better, get a sense of her mindset, but the book is just a piece of dry and impersonal academic history so he's left grasping for straws which is comparable to what I felt like was doing while reading OC. AND ... at some point, he talks about V's obituary but he just mentions it in passing. How'd she die?! Another lapse/omission that's tied to a heavy emotional moment.

Yeah, the thing with V. is weird. I had forgotten about her until he all of a sudden brings her up again at the end.

I thought that the quotes at the beginning of parts 1 and 2 were supposed to guide or inform the reading somehow. "Death is a perfection of the eye": we see what we want to see, and then "I have searched myself": some sort of Julius's coming to terms with himself. Also I think this plays into Julius's mentioning of Freud's theories of incorporation versus introjection.

I thought the references to other things were the most interesting part of this book . . . but I think they should have gone a lot farther, rather than serving as just cultural markers. Dr. Maillotte reads "The Year of Magical Thinking" on the plane . . . but this only warrants about a one sentence explication. The Heliopolis part was interesting, but didn't really go anywhere. I guess it's just like the title of the book--a tangential reference that requires the reader to fill in the gaps.

Speculated that V. had committed suicide while under Julius's care or while he was away in Belgium. Obviously I'll never know, since Julius doesn't tell and no other character came to tell us. I'd ask Julius's friend, but I don't even know his name.

Ha, good call. This is turning out to be like the "Tree of Life" of books--so many mysteries.

hm, i think i just assumed that V had committed suicide? maybe it's not spelled out, but that outcome is certainly foreshadowed, isn't it?

Yeah, I assumed suicide too with V ... which goes along with my theory of emotional block/omission since she was one of the main characters, and the only one of his patients, that had a big affect on him (I imagine he'd feel lots of pain and guilt if it was on his watch). And I don't believe that V or really anyone would commit suicide because of historical atrocities that she has no control over. Which is another missing piece. I'm imagining them just talking about history during a session, nerding out on the details while never getting to the root of V's issues.

My take on "death is a perfection of the eye" ... brought to mind the talk of September 11th and the "perfect" spectacle that was created. There was the mention of no bodies being seen, except for a few jumpers you could hardly make out. Also, the layers of NYC. One layer--the graveyard--dies and another layer--"perfect" skyscrapers-- appears and no trace of the former layer is left.

The part 2 quotation: "I have searched myself" ... I don't know about that one. Just struck me as ironic.

one "funny" part of this book was Julius forgetting his pin number. but mainly because that had just happened to me, and set off a tiny existential crisis of my own.

^^ oh yeah, that was funny (see!) and he thinks of himself as a pathetic old man. I thought J was a little obsessed with aging. and he keeps misreading people's ages too.

I thought how he acted after forgetting the PIN was so stupid ... He doesn't even contact anyone to make a new PIN or anything ... He just goes around blindly waiting until he remembers it.

Yeah, he was kind of obsessed with hanging out with older people.

I did read this but haven't sufficiently gathered my thoughts to post a response. Stylisically impressive, for sure, and on the whole an enjoyable and interesting read, but it didn't cohere as a work of fiction for me. Even as a novel of ideas it seemed to fail the test of having something fresh to say.

I was intrigued by Julius's(and I think by reasonable inference Cole's) attitude to Western art. Nowadays hostility to Western political/economic imperialism is usually accompanied by rejection of the "cultural imperialism", but Julius's seems to more or less swallow the claims of Western "high" art whole. What he resents is being unable to feel like an insider even though he is something of a connoisseur. There is something quirky about the the way that cuts across the current orthodoxy, and I'd have liked to understand his position better.

Finished this a couple of weeks ago but I've been away and haven't had time to post my thoughts. I didn't like the second half (everything post-Brussels) very much at all. The twist was unbelievably clunky and I didn't buy either the drama of that moment or the girl's reasoning for hanging out with Julius at all. By the end it was starting to read like a collection of Wikipedia entries, with all the unreliability that implies.

Also Julius is dead by the end, right?

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'm not sure, I read this as the novelist pushing back against aesthetic choices the reader might be tempted to ascribe to Julius. I don't think his tastes would be especially uncommon for a middle class mixed-race academic, even one who isn't as pretentious and self-regarding as Julius.

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.