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In Kolyma Tales, his memories of life in Stalin's prison camps, Varlam Shalamov wrote that one of the most horrifying aspects of Stalin's rule (and, one suspects, of any autocratic system) is how arbitrary it is. A dictator takes power in the name of the people, makes laws in the name of the people, convinces everyone that what's happening is for the people to protect them from dangerous elements without and within ... Except in reality, it didn't matter what you did. Anyone could be convicted of anything at any time on any pretext.

Sofia Petrovna, then. Written in 1939 after Chukovskaya's husband was disappeared and executed, kept in a drawer for decades, only published in her home country after 50 years. The titular woman is a widow with one single son. She works in a publishing house, typing up manuscripts for the betterment of the people. She believes in the ideas, in the union, in the leader who only wants what's best for everyone even if he has to be firm sometimes. Her son is the perfect Soviet citizen, born with the revolution, well-read and intelligent and contemptuous towards enemies of the revolution ... and one day, he's arrested. (For terrorism, as it happens.) What specific act of terrorism? Where is he? What will happen to him? What can she do? No one will tell her. But she has to fight; after all, he must be innocent, he can't be like all those others who really are guilty, it must be a mistake, this isn't the corrupt imperial Russia anymore, this is a free country where everyone is equal and there are laws to protect the innocent and courts dedicated to finding out the truth. That's the whole point. If that's not true, then what is?

It's easy to draw parallels to Kafka as Sofia circles round and round that question, but there's just as much an Orwellian sense of dread here, a feeling that doesn't just apply to dictatorships. Everyone plays their part in building a society built on fear and intolerance, and the less you want to see it, the more you stare yourself blind at what happens on the other side - whether it's being grateful that things aren't as bad as in Germany, or being outraged at having to wait in line at the magistrate's office with mothers of actual criminals - the less the actual dictator actually has to do. People are all too willing to be a cog, to help drive the machine that eats them.

Then again, the perhaps strongest image here isn't necessarily the holes it smashes in high-flying ideals, but that image of a mother, aging years in months, starving in her one-room apartment next to hundreds of cans of her son's favourite food, waiting for the day he'll come home again. Any day now, any day now.

I remember

and let me just stop myself right there. It's much too easy to write gag reviews of Perec, to adopt the trick of any particular book and write the review the same way; review A Void without using the letter E, etc. It's precious and clever and just don't. Because Perec is so much more than just a clown and he deserves more respect than that.

I Remember, then, is a series of memories, written exactly like that:

I remember Xavier Cugat.

I remember the 121.

I remember only two or three of the seven dwarves; Grumpy, Dopey, Doc.

...and so on and so on, 479 of them, summing up Perec's life from age 10 to roughly age 25 (though some memories, like the Baader Meinhof gang or Sharon Tate, were obviously more recent when he wrote them down in the mid-70s). Each memory is presented as just a flash, a simple, clear statement, huge events like the liberation of France or insignificant details like the name of a kind of candy get equal treatment. Some are completely mysterious 60 years later, at least without googling them. Some are memories of things he doesn't remember. Some are objectively wrong. Some... or rather many, to the surprise of no one who's read Perec, are puns of varying degrees of obscenity, or mnemonic devices. Some are unanswered questions.

As often with Perec, the simple act of putting all of these together is part of what makes it any more than just a collection of nonsense sentences. Those two words at the beginning of each sentence, "I remember", tells us: there's a story behind all of these. They all shape a person. They all clutter everyone's subconscious. 479 hooks baited with nothing more than our curiousity to want to know more, and having to substitute our own memories for his unspoken ones.

I read it on my book-reading app, grin at appropriate moments, go "hmmm, that's clever" at appropriate moments, wonder briefly if I'm supposed to take it as anything more than a story about a hitman in the modern world and the second-to-second process of living in a disconnected world.

I finish it, press "Mark as CLOSED" and move on. It remains on my phone, and thereby in my life.

• What the hell are we supposed to do about Haňt'a?
  
  - What do you mean?
  
  - I mean that the old coot has completely misunderstood his job. How hard can it be? He’s supposed to sit in his cellar, have all the literature that we deem unnecessary or untimely delivered to him, put it in his hydraulic press and compress it so it can be recycled to print new books.
  
  - And? Are you saying he doesn’t do that?
  
  - Well sure, he does, at least for the most part, but... he reads them first! What’s the point of destroying dangerous or outdated books if someone still reads them? He sits there in his cellar, compressing the world’s literature into little bite-size bricks that almost give him indigestion, but he keeps reading them with a complete lack of respect for proper control by authorities or experts. And he even seems to have the gall to hint that we treat people the same way he treats the mice that nest in his piles of books.
  
  - The nerve of some people. We just want what’s best for everyone. What does he do to the mice?
  
  - Throws them in the press along with the books. Squish.
  
  - Damn. Oh, remind me again: what are we supposed to do with the books we print on the recycled paper?
  
  - Recycle them and print new ones, of course. But more efficiently. We need books that pass through the system easier. The goal must be a literature that’s as smooth and free of fibers as possible, the sort of literature that we could just as easily drive directly from the printer’s to the recycling plant since it doesn't really make any difference whether or not someone reads it.
  
  - So is that what happens in Too Loud A Solitude?
  
  - That’s a strange way of putting it. “Happens.” A book is just a stack of papers and ink, it doesn't “happen.” The problem is that the wrong books might give people the idea that they can make things happen.
  
  - Are you saying Haňt'a is dangerous?
  
  - Oh no, not him personally, he’s much too old and has his head too full of old philosophers for that. But it’s a matter of principle: readers are untrustworthy bastards. That cellar Haňt'a works in is just supposed to be a place of work, a dusty, noisy, industrial building, and instead it becomes sort of a metaphor for all the knowledge we’d rather people didn't have, all the thoughts we’re trying to stop them from thinking...
  
  - Careful. You’re getting pretentious.
  
  - I know. Sorry. I should probably read a murder mystery or something. Instead I read Too Loud A Solitude, and I can’t get rid of it. It’s somewhere down there in my cellar, and it won’t go away.
  
  - Right. So... let’s just toss it in the hydraulic press. Problem solved.
  
  - We can’t.
  
  - What do you mean we can’t? It’s only about 100 pages.
  
  - Exactly. It’s already so compact, you can’t really compress it any more. And I think it might be too great to fit in the press anyway.
  
  - Can’t we burn it?
  
  (- Manuscripts don’t burn.)
  
  - I'm sorry, what did you say?
  
  - Oh, um... nothing. Let’s just have Haňt'a retire, OK?

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.

The thinness, the repitition of history. Palimpsests.

The unfathomability of loss, of absence.

The war to end wars. It's very much a novel of the War on Terror, while nothing in it is about that. War becomes a permanent state of fighting itself. Parse that sentence anyway you want.

Wormholes. Illusions. Tricks.

Magicians. Mechanics. Nurses.

The Spitfire Mark XI doesn't have any guns. It just has a camera, to document what happens, to remember. It's powered by a Merlin engine.

The Adjacent is a terrifying novel. A frustrating novel. It's one of the most beautiful novels I've read in a while. It makes very few attempts to explain itself; it just weaves, cuts, overwrites, repeats, retakes, dreams.

...Which is really 3.5, maybe even 4 on deliberation. It is "just" a ghost story, and as such one that's been done before (equal parts Hound of the Baskervilles and The Turn of the Screw), but it's a very effective one, making subtle use of the time it's set in (post-WW1, in a society that's barely recovered from being thrust into the modern age and is still catching up) and the illusion of control over things beyond our reach; the fog rolls in and obscures things, whether we want it to or not, unless it refuses to. Also, props to Hill for letting the text be part of the story - Kipps tells the story in the language of his time (mostly very well captured by the Swedish translator too), as if to point out to us, the readers, that we cannot change it, that we can only watch in dawning horror and hope the fog will hide the worst bits.

Exile, othering, self-deception, victimisation; it's a story worth telling, and Unigwe captures it in flashes, moments, in short stories that sometimes make me wish she'd flesh them out more and sometimes makes me think she gets it just right.