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.
