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

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.

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?