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.

The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen

You’re never too old to read about buried treasure. At least I’m not. (And J.M.G. Le Clézio wasn’t too good to write about it.)

Prompted by io9’s list of 25 Great Books by Legendary Scientists, I recently read The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen by Howard Carter and A.C. Mace. In this passage, they describe their first glimpse inside.

Slowly, desperately slowly it seemed to us as we watched, the remains of passage debris that encumbered the lower part of the door way were removed, until at lat we had the whole door clear before us. The decisive moment had arrived. With trembling hands I made a tiny breach in the upper left hand corner. Darkness and blank space, as far as an iron testing-rod could reach, showed that whatever lay beyond was empty, and not filled like the passage we had just cleared. Candle tests were applied as a precaution against possible foul gases, and then, widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in, Lord Carnarvon, Lady Evelyn and Callender standing anxiously beside me to hear the verdict. At first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold—everywhere the glint of gold.

Along with Indiana Jones moments like these, Carter and Mace have a lot to say about the care they took in mapping and photographing each item in the tomb before removing it—and their techniques for preserving three-thousand-year-old fabric that would crumble into dust with a single touch. Previous archeologists (never mind the tomb robbers) had been considerably less careful, in some cases entering sealed doors with the help of a battering ram. 

Djibouti by Elmore Leonard

While working on A Basket of Leaves, for which my goal was to find at least one interesting book about every country in Africa, a few countries were special challenges. Equatorial Guinea. Chad. But there were only two cases where I was so defeated that I ended up talking about an excerpt from a book rather than a whole book. One was the little island country of São Tomé and Príncipe. The other was Djibouti, for which I discussed a chapter from Charles Nicholl’s excellent biography of Rimbaud in Africa, Somebody Else.

It was a great pleasure, then, to find that master storyteller Elmore Leonard had set his latest novel in Djibouti. The book concerns a tough young documentary filmmaker named Dara; a 72-year-old ex-merchant sailor named Xavier (her assistant); a billionaire with a surprising knowledge of guns and explosives; some Somali pirates; a couple of Al Qaeda fanatics; and a tanker full of liquefied natural gas. What could go wrong?

Elmore Leonard isn’t known for wasting time with description. ("Don’t go into great detail describing places and things” is the ninth of his ten rules of good writing.) But along the way you do get some local color. Here is Xavier guiding Dara through the city.

“Now we comin to the Central Market, biggest one in town, the mosque standin over it. Rows and rows of stalls sellin shit—clothes, chickens, all kind of fruit and vegetables. Look at the outfits, the colors on the women. Lookit over here, the table of meat.”

Dara was shooting it.

“It’s moving.”

“That’s the flies on the piece of goat loin, all movin around to get a bite. Look at the girl there, holding branches of leaves, cellophane around the bunch. She sellin khat. Only good two days so you keep it out of the air.” Xavier reached over to touch Dara shooting the rows of stalls, the women sitting under umbrellas. “Look at those guys, the wads in their jaws. Suckin on khat, known as the flower of paradise. All day they be chewin and suckin. They fly it in from Ethiopia, deliver ten eleven tons of chew every morning. Keep the men happy.”

The Fate of Africa

If you’re looking for a well-written, evenhanded, comprehensive political history of Africa since 1960 that clocks in at under 700 pages (without the notes), it would be hard to do better than Martin Meredith’s The Fate of Africa. Still, to read this book from cover to cover would be a weariness of the flesh, and would present a more discouraging picture of Africa’s future than I think is warranted. (It is not for nothing that the book is subtitled “From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of Despair.")

Having said that, Meredith does take care to enliven his story with bits of local color and colorful characters such as the Bey of Tunis, a man who seems worthy of a biography, or at least a novella.

Frustrated by the resistance of the white community of 250,000 to any political reform, nationalists organised violence across the country. In this struggle the Bey of Tunis played no role. An eccentric figure who filled his palace with clocks and kept a private troupe of dwarfs, he spent much of his time indulging his passion for astronomy and alchemy, mixing secret brews and potions in his laboratory.

Of the many beys of Tunis, Meredith is apparently referring to the last, Muhammad VIII Al-Amin. More details about him are available in a Time magazine article from 1957:

With a down payment of 100,000 francs to buy himself a new uniform (weighing 60 Ibs. before being loaded with medals) and a promise of $2,500,000 a year in salary and allowances for himself and his family, aged El Amin played his part to perfection. He was regal and dignified at hand-kissing ceremonies, built fancy palaces and went roaring through town in a royal limousine with a screaming siren (reports have it that El Amin Bey had a foot pedal in the back of his car with which he himself could sound the siren). Most important, El Amin kept himself out of political mischief by spending his days tinkering with old clocks and watches and later, when his hobbies turned more modern, with an expensive X-ray machine and a do-it-yourself kit for making blood tests on his relatives.

I’ve been blurbed!

Stopping into McNally Jackson on my lunch hour the other day, I noticed that Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, a fine novel about the Ethiopian revolution that I reviewed last March, is now available in paperback. I turned it over to read the blurbs, and there at the bottom was a short quote from the Christian Science Monitor—that is, me.

Ambitious and accomplished.... Intelligent and moving, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze provides a window into a complex and ancient country.

It was a strange feeling. I’ve never been blurbed before, as far as I know. Maybe if I start including phrases in my reviews like “Best book of the decade!” and “Couldn’t put it down!” and “Luminous and heartbreaking!” it will happen more often.