Open City (Cole)

Open City 
Teju Cole, 2011
Random House
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812980097


Summary
A haunting novel about identity, dislocation, and history, Teju Cole’s Open City is a profound work by an important new author who has much to say about our country and our world.
 
Along the streets of Manhattan, a young Nigerian doctor named Julius wanders, reflecting on his relationships, his recent breakup with his girlfriend, his present, his past. He encounters people from different cultures and classes who will provide insight on his journey—which takes him to Brussels, to the Nigeria of his youth, and into the most unrecognizable facets of his own soul.

Open City was named a "Best Book" on more than 20 end-of-year lists. These include: New Yorker ♦ Atlantic ♦ Economist • Newsweek/Daily Beast ♦ New Republic • New York Daily News ♦ Los Angeles Times ♦ Boston Globe ♦ Seattle Times ♦ Minneapolis Star Tribune ♦ GQ • Salon ♦ Slate ♦ New York magazine ♦ The Week ♦ Kansas City Star ♦ Kirkus Reviews (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—June 27, 1975
• Where—U.S.
• Raised—Nigeria
• Education—B.A., Kalamazoo College; M.A., University of London; M.Phil.,
   Columbia University
• Awards—Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award; International Literature
   Award (for the German transl.)
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City, New York


Teju Cole is a Nigerian-American writer, photographer, and art historian, best known for his 2011 novel, Open City. For that work, Cole won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.

Biography and work
Cole was born in the United States to Nigerian parents, raised in Nigeria, and moved back to the United States at the age of 17. He received his Bachelor's from Kalamazoo College, an M.A. from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and his M.Phil. from Columbia University.

He is the author of Every Day is for the Thief, a novella published in 2007 in Nigeria and in 2014 in the U.S. His anovel, Open City was published in 2011.

Cole lives in Brooklyn, New York City, and is currently the Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College. He is also writer in residence of the Literaturhaus Zurich from June to November, 2014. Cole is a regular contributor to publications including the New York Times, Qarrtsiluni, Granta, New Yorker, Transition, New Inquiry, and A Public Space. He is currently at work on a book-length non-fiction narrative of Lagos, and on "Small Fates." (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 6/16/2014.)

Book Reviews
With every anecdote, with each overlap, Cole lucidly builds a compassionate and masterly work engaged more with questions than with answers regarding some of the biggest issues of our time: migration, moral accountability and our tenuous tolerance of one another’s differences…Cole's writing is assured, his ideas are well developed, and his imagery is delicious…
Miguel Syjuco - New York Times


Little happens in this impressionistic novel, but that hardly matters. The book is full of so many beautifully phrased observations that it's easy to be simply mesmerized.
Nora Krug - Washington Post


This year, literary discovery came, for me, in the form of Teju Cole’s debut novel, Open City, a deceptively meandering first-person narrative about a Nigerian psychiatry resident in New York. The bonhomous flâneur who strolls Manhattan from top to bottom, reveals, in the course of his walking meditations, both more about the city and about himself than we—or indeed he—could possibly anticipate. Cole writes beautifully; his protagonist is unique; and his novel, utterly thrilling.
Clare Messud - Globe and Mail (Canada)
 

On the surface, the story of a young, foreign psychiatry resident in post-9/11 New York City who searches for the soul of the city by losing himself in extended strolls around teeming Manhattan. But it's really a story about a lost nation struggling to regain a sense of direction after that shattering, disorienting day 10 years ago. A quiet, lyrical and profound piece of writing.
Seattle Times


Beautiful, subtle, and finally, original…What moves the prose forward is the prose—the desire to write, to defeat solitude by writing. Cole has made his novel as close to a diary as a novel can get, with room for reflection, autobiography, stasis, and repetition. This is extremely difficult, and many accomplished novelists would botch it, since a sure hand is needed to make the writer’s careful stitching look like a thread merely being followed for its own sake. Mysteriously, wonderfully, Cole does not botch it.
James Wood - New Yorker


A complicated portrait of a narrator whose silences speak as loudly as his words—all articulated in an effortlessly elegant prose…Teju Cole has achieved, in this book, a rare balance. He captures life’s urgent banality, and he captures, too, the ways in which the greater subjects glimmer darkly in the interstices.
New York Review of Books


Reminiscent of the works of W.G. Sebald, this dreamy, incantatory debut was the most beautiful novel I read this year—the kind of book that remains on your nightstand long after you finish so that you can continue dipping in occasionally as a nighttime consolation.
Ruth Franklin - New Republic


Nothing escapes Julius, the narrator of Teju Cole’s excellent debut novel…In Cole’s intelligent, finely observed portrait, Julius drifts through cities on three continents, repeatedly drawn into conversation with solitary souls like him: people struggling with the emotional rift of having multiple homelands but no home.
GQ


Reminiscent of the works of W.G. Sebald, this dreamy, incantatory debut was the most beautiful novel I read this year—the kind of book that remains on your nightstand long after you finish so that you can continue dipping in occasionally as a nighttime consolation." –Ruth Franklin, The New Republic(Starred review.) America's standing in the world is never far from the restless thoughts of psychiatry resident Julius, a Nigerian immigrant who wanders Manhattan, pondering everything from Goya...to the rise of the bedbug epidemic.... [T]he picture of a mind that emerges in lieu of a plot is fascinating, as it is engaged with the world in a rare and refreshing way.
Publishers Weekly


One of the most intriguing novels you'll likely read, this debut...is riddled with ambiguity. By the end, there is so much disjuncture that readers will wonder whether the protagonist is the classic unreliable narrator.... Verdict: The alienated but sophisticated viewpoint is oddly poignant and compelling.  —Henry Bankhead, Los Gatos P.L., CA
Library Journal


For reasons not altogether clear, Julius’ walks turn into worldwide travel, and he flies first to Europe...and makes some interesting friends, then to Nigeria, and finally back to New York City. Along the way, he meets many people and often has long discussions with them about philosophy and politics.... [A] unique and pensive book [and] charming read. —Julie Hunt
Booklist


[M]asterful.... Rather than establishing momentum, the circular, elliptical narrative focuses on the everyday, though in Manhattan this encompasses muggings, car crashes.... A climactic revelation toward the end casts fresh light on all that has preceded.... Determining whether the novel's main character is hero, villain or somewhere in between might require the reader to start over with the book after finishing it.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)

top of page (summary)