Open City by Teju Cole

There’s a lot to say about Teju Cole’s absorbing, maddening, largely plotless novel Open City. Its protagonist Julius, a Nigerian-German medical student with a specialty in psychiatry, is touchy, moody, and self-absorbed, yet sometimes capable of tender concern, as in his meetings with a former professor who is now dying. 

As well-informed and opinionated in art, history, and classical music as he is in medicine, he can be unbelievably pretentious. Watching a group of Chinese dancers and musicians in a park, “I thought of Li Po and Wang Wei, of Harry Partch’s pitch-bending songs, and of Judith Weir’s opera The Consolations of Scholarship, which were the things I could best connect to this Chinese music.” Yet, noticing that many of the dancers wore red or pink, “I could not remember if red was lucky in Chinese culture.”

Among the many oddly detailed digressions in the novel are several pages about bedbugs, and a discussion—which actually concludes the book—of the numbers of birds that have died by flying into the Statue of Liberty. The very last sentence, in fact, tells us that 175 wrens were killed on the night of October 13, 1888.

As more than one reviewer has noted, Teju Cole’s book is reminiscent of W.G. Sebald in the way it dispenses with conventional plot and apparently treads the boundaries of fiction and autobiography. (Cole’s first novel Every Day is for the Thief, so far published only in Nigeria, includes black and white photos, as Sebald does in books like The Rings of Saturn.)

What holds the book together is the brooding, fussy, melancholy voice of its know-it-all narrator. (As if in reaction to his show of erudition, a reader of my library copy of Open City inked out the “m” in “whom” in the first line of page 154, where it is used incorrectly.)

The author’s nerve is impressive, as in a passage on page 146 that echoes the famous conclusion of the James Joyce story “The Dead.” A couple of pages later, a descent by plane into New York reminds Julius of the scale model of the city in the Queens Museum of Art.

I was saddled with strange mental transpositions: that the plane was a coffin, that the city below was a vast graveyard with white marble and stone blocks of various heights and sizes. But as we broke through the last layer of clouds and the city in its true form suddenly appeared a thousand feet below us, the impression I had was not at all morbid. What I experienced was the unsettling feeling that I had had precisely this view of the city before, accompanied by the equally strong feeling that it had not been from the point of view of a plane.

Then it came to me: I was remembering something I had seen about a year earlier: the sprawling scale model of the city that was kept at the Queens Museum of Art. The model had been built for the World’s Fair in 1964, at great cost, and afterward had been periodically updated to keep up with the changing topography and built environment of the city. It showed, in impressive detail, with almost a million tiny buildings, and with bridges, parks, rivers, and architectural landmarks, the true form of the city. The attention to detail was so meticulous that one could not help but think of Borges’s cartographers, who, obsessed with accuracy, had made a map so large and so finely detailed that it matched the empire’s scale on a ratio of one to one, a map in which each thing coincided with its spot on the map. The map proved so unwieldy that it was eventually folded up and left to rot in the desert....

On the day I had seen the Panorama, I had been impressed by the many fine details it presented: the rivulets of roads snaking across a velvety Central Park, the boomerang of the Bronx curving up to the north, the elegant beige spire of the Empire State Building, the white tablets of the Brooklyn piers, and the pair of gray blocks on the southern tip of Manhattan, each about a foot high, representing the persistence, in the model, of the World Trade Center towers, which, in reality, had already been destroyed.

Jane Jacobs’ building

Jane Jacob’s Death and Life of Great American Cities is known, among other things, for its description of the street ballet she observed from her home on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village. In a few pages, she describes the comings and goings of various people on various errands, and illustrates the diversity you find in a healthy local community.

While I sweep up the wrappers I watch the other rituals of morning: Mr. Halpert unlocking the laundry’s handcart from its mooring to a cellar door, Joe Cornacchia’s son-in-law stacking out the empty crates from the delicatessen, the barber bringing out his sidewalk folding chair, Mr. Goldstein arranging the coils of wire which proclaim the hardware store is open, the wife of the tenement’s superintendent depositing her chunky three-year-old with a toy mandolin on the stoop, the vantage point from which he is learning the English his mother cannot speak.

Later on she makes a similar point about the diverse enterprises that can thrive in older and cheaper buildings, but could never afford the cost of doing business in new ones.

The floor of the building in which this book is being written is occupied also by a health club with a gym, a firm of ecclesiastical decorators, an insurgent Democratic party reform club, a Liberal party political club, a music society, an accordionists’ association, a retired importer who sells maté by mail, a man who sells paper and who also takes care of shipping the maté, a dental laboratory, a studio for watercolor lessons, and a maker of costumer jewelry. Among the tenants who were here and gone shortly before I came in, were a man who rented out tuxedos, a union local and a Haitian dance troupe. There is no place for the likes of us in new construction. And the last thing we need is new construction. What we need, and a lot of others need, is old construction in a lively district, which some among us can help make livelier.

The building above, by the way, is in Greenwich Village but is not (unless by chance) the one she wrote about. The picture is borrowed from Discount Hotel Deals.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Having read The Power Broker and then Wrestling with Moses, the story of Jane Jacobs’ struggle with Robert Moses, it seemed only logical to follow up with Jacobs’ own The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Death and Life is a big book, but Jacobs helpfully summarizes her prescription for healthy cities in four points.

To generate exuberant diversity in a city’s streets and districts four conditions are indispensable:

1. The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two. These must insure the presence of people who go outdoors on different schedules and are in the place for different purposes, but who are able to use many facilities in common.

2. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.

3. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained.

4. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there. This includes dense concentration in the case of people who are there because of residence.

Death and Life was first published in 1961, yet many of its observations seems startlingly current. On page 180, she argues the importance of social capital, an idea developed at length in Robert Putnam’s 2001 book Bowling Alone. Here is Jacobs:

If self-government in [a good city neighborhood] is to work, underlying any float of population must be a continuity of people who have forged neighborhood networks. These networks are a city’s irreplaceable social capital. Whenever the capital is lost, from whatever cause, the income from it disappears, never to return until and unless new capital is slowly and chancily accumulated.

In a chapter called “Gradual Money and Cataclysmic Money,” Jacobs describes the devastating effects of Robert Moses-style big-money development projects. She contrasts this with the positive impact of money invested gradually over time, which helps add the new businesses and housing stock a neighborhood needs without uprooting the people and destroying the businesses and human connections already there. It’s a philosophy now summed up in the Slow Money movement.

Jacobs’ comments on the use of eminent domain for the benefit of private enterprise would also be very familiar to those involved in the battle over the Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn (a few blocks from where I live). She quotes the following from a 1960 report to the mayor by management expert Anthony J. Panuch.

A druggist purchased a drug store for more than $40,000. A few years later, the building in which his store was located was taken in condemnation. The total sum which he eventually received was an award of $3,000 for fixtures and that sum had to be paid over to the chattel mortgagee. Thus his total investment was completely wiped out.

If taxpayers were made to pay the cost of these developments rather than those whose homes and businesses are in the way, she argues, it would be obvious how unprofitable they are.

It is nice, to see, by the way, that the Modern Library was not too stuffy to use the charming cover photo of the author enjoying a cigarette in a local bar. However you feel about alcohol and tobacco, it’s an excellent illustration of the informal, ever-changing social contacts that make a neighborhood safe and interesting.

A history of the car bomb

Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb is a grimly fascinating little book about a terrorist device pioneered by the Italian anarchist Mario Buda, who blew up a horse-drawn wagon (and the horse) near the Manhattan offices of J.P. Morgan in September 1920. Despite this early debut, the car bomb really came into its own after World War II.

Written by Mike Davis, the MacArthur-winning author of cheerful volumes like Dead Cities and Planet of Slums, this is more than a laundry list of who blew up what and where. It is a well-informed (though sloppily edited) survey of the activities and motivations of a dizzying array of terrorists.

In contrast to the old, unitary menace of the Soviet Union and its allies, Washington [by the mid-1990s] now faced a chaotic spectrum of enemies, spontaneously generated by the contradictions of globalization as well as by the blowback of past policies: rogue assets like Sheik Rahman, megalomaniac militiamen like McVeigh, self-organized Islamists like the Riyadh bombers, super-Capones like Escobar, and remnant Maoists like Sendero Luminoso—and then there was the enduring spectre of Hezbollah’s Imad Magniyah, the General Giap of urban guerrilla warfare.... What they had in common was access to vast reservoirs of anti-Americanism (incubated by cluster bombs, refugee camps, and oil corporations) and the brutal skills diffused by the CIA’s and [Pakistan] ISI’s car-bomb academies (although correspondence courses were increasingly available via the Internet).

This paragraph underlines a couple of the book’s key points: First, that many of the terrorists that trouble us today were spawned by misguided US policies, or were actually trained by the US. Second, that the variety of terrorists is such that taking out a leader like Bin Laden—however satisfying that may feel—will not solve the problem.

The discovery by terrorists that fertilizer and fuel oil can be used to create extraordinarily powerful car bombs also makes it clear that no amount of bomb-sniffing technology or safeguards on C-4 and Semtex will prevent future car bombs.

How powerful is an ANFO (ammonium nitrate fuel oil) bomb?

Timothy McVeigh ... spent less than $5000 on fertilizer, racing fuel, and van rental fees to blast the front wall off the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and kill 168 people in Oklahoma City in 1995.... Experts were flabbergasted at the radius of destruction: “equivalent to 4100 pounds of dynamite, the blast damaged 312 buildings, cracked glass as far as two miles away and inflicted 80 percent of its injuries on people outside the building up to a half-mile away.” Distant seismographs recorded it as a 6.0 earthquake on the Richter scale.

Davis’s conclusion: Barring “socio-economic reforms or concessions to self-determination,” which he considers unlikely, “the car bomb probably has a brilliant future.”

Demjanjuk in Sobibor

The New York Times reports that retired American autowork John Demjanjuk has been convicted in Munich for being one of the Ukrainian guards who helped kill thousands of Jews at the Nazi death camp of Sobibor in Poland.

The case against Mr. Demjanjuk involved about 15 trains known to have arrived between April and July 1943 from the Westerbork concentration camp in the Netherlands, carrying 29,579 people. Prosecutors initially charged Mr. Demjanjuk with 27,900 counts based on the theory that some must have died in transit or been spared for a time to work at the camp. By the end of the trial on Thursday, that figure had been revised to 28,060 counts.

About 250,000 Jews were killed at Sobibor, most of them poisoned with exhaust fumes.

What was it like for the Dutch Jews who were shipped to Sobibor? As it happens, not long ago (after many years of procrastination) I read Escape from Sobibor by Richard Rashke. Since the book was first published in 1982 and may be a bit hard to find, I will quote at some length.

The passenger trains from the Netherlands began to back into Sobibor every Friday. On each transport, there were between one thousand and three thousand Jews, and by midsummer there would be nineteen trains full.

The Dutch had no idea of where they were or what lay ahead. Even though Sobibor was one year old, the British and American strategy not to publicize the death camps had worked, Jan Karski notwithstanding. The Dutch Jews never doubted that they were going to a work camp, as the Nazis had told them. Most had never seen a German kill a Jew, nor personally experienced real Nazi brutality. The Germans had simply rounded them up for Westerbork, a transit camp in Holland, and then onto eastbound trains. Westerbork wasn’t exactly home. But it was clean, there was food, families stayed together, and there were no daily whippings or “games” to cause suspicion and panic. It was all part of Himmler’s master plan to keep western Jews submissive and quiet until they were inside Camp III, naked and shorn. A few Dutch Jews had been in a concentration camp at Vught, a kindergarten compared to Sobibor.

The Dutch bounced off the trains in furs and silk dresses or woolen suits, carrying their valuables. Unlike the Polish Jews, they were, for the most part, middle to upper class, well educated, not Orthodox, and totally western—a soft bunch, unused to cutting hay and felling trees or to the stark terror of Nazi brutality.

With the arrival of the Dutch like the crocuses of spring, the Nazis expanded the work force to keep up with the sorting of clothes piling up in the sheds. The Dutch selected to sort, cook, wash and iron clothes, or to work in the vegetable garden were mostly young, naive, rosy-cheeked men and women. On their first day in camp, they would sing Dutch songs, the girls and women swaying their hips or dancing to the rhythm, as if they were on a picnic in the Polish forest, happy that the long, tiring train ride was finally over. The fire that brightened the night sky and the strange sweet smell that filled the air did not arouse their suspicions.

But once they learned the truth, few survived the shock. They gave up or grew weak and sick or made fatal mistakes through carelessness or indifference. The Nazis liked to pick on them, perhaps because of the traditional rivalry between Germany and the Netherlands, or perhaps because the Dutch were weak and educated. They had not been prepared for Sobibor by ghettos, typhus, starvation, fear and hatred, slow death, bullets, whips, gas chambers, the murder of mothers and fathers, sisters and lovers. Most of them died within two weeks of their selection, only to be replaced on the following Friday.

Rashke notes that throughout his book he uses “selection” to mean selected by the Nazis for work, rather than the more common meaning of selected for death.