Open city

I know that Teju Cole is a fan of Tomas Tranströmer's poetry, those brief flashes of the world pausing and becoming transparent before moving on again, giving us a moment of both vertigo-inducing insignificance and self-awareness enough to re-center the world around us.

I don't know to what extent Open City is deliberately influenced by that (and it would be far from the only influence if so) but there's very little in the novel that seems anything but deliberate. It meanders, but it meanders with razor-sharp precision.

Our story is simple: Julius, a Nigerian immigrant, spends his evenings and days off walking around Manhattan, musing about what he sees, interacting briefly with strangers and neighbours, remembering his childhood in Lagos, pondering his place in the current world, and all the layers of history that shape it - the obvious one for a New Yorker having happened just over 10 years earlier, but also all the more subtle, even forgotten ones that aren't openly acknowledged.

There was some kind of scuffle two hundred yards down the street, again strangely noiseless, and a huddled knot of men opened up to reveal two brawlers being separated and pulled away from their fight. What I saw next gave me a fright: in the farther distance, beyond the listless crowd, the body of a lynched man dangling from a tree. The body was slender, dressed from head to toe in black, reflecting no light. It soon resolved itself, however, into a less ominous thing: dark canvas sheeting on a construction scaffold, twirling in the wind.

The question of normality, and of its close cousin the norm, is everywhere here; Julius is a psychiatrist, his job is to make people with an "abnormal" view of the world see the world as the "normal" people do. On the other hand, he's also a person who's very aware that he doesn't fit into any neat categorisation. A mixed-race Nigerian, or a black-but-not-African-American American, constantly bumping into other individuals who don't fit the standard narrative, and gradually shifting the story to make himself not the outsider but the centre of the story.

We are the first humans who are completely unprepared for disaster. It's dangerous to live in a secure world.

This is, obviously, a welcome trend in literature recently; stories that don't treat those who don't fit into the most obvious Rich White Man Problems cliches as the Other, or contrast them against it, but make them just as valid a story in themselves. (I want to compare it to Americanah, then I cringe at how overly obvious the comparison is, and then I figure the obviousness of comparing hipster-approved Nigerian authors to each other is a point in itself and compare it to Americanah.) At the same time, while Cole dazzles us with his New York description porn and ridiculously well-balanced prose, all those moments of Tranströmerian intro(extro?)spection, there's the sneaking suspicion that as a reader, you're being trapped in his (Julius'? Teju's?) narrative, being taken for a ride. There's violence all over this novel, archeological layers of it in architecture, philosophy, psychiatry, art... and once or twice even poking through into the physical world. All of it accompanied with its cousin, justification. And normalisation.

Surrender, of course, played a role in this form of survival, as did negotiation with invading powers. Had Brussels’s rulers not opted to declare it an open city and thereby exempt it from bombardment during the Second World War, it might have been reduced to rubble.

All of this is to say that Open City is an incredibly well-crafted novel, one that I admire the hell out of. Whether I love it is another question - there's something about it that feels almost too perfect, too well-argued. Which may be the point, given that we've agreed to hear Julius out (and to want to hear Julius out). Teju Cole strolls in a way that authors haven't done in a long while, and it's part of the genre that you can't stroll in casual dress; there needs to be a slight formality to it. Open City is a brain-five, not quite a balls-five or a heart-five. But still one.