After reading Teju Cole’s Open City, I finally understand why this book has received so much praise. Largely following the experiences of Julius, a young Nigerian-German immigrant, as he walks around Manhattan and intertwines his experiences and the city’s history through his narration. Cole’s descriptions of New York neighborhoods and landmarks feel incredibly textured, and as the novel progresses, Julius’s observations form a rich literary map of the city. One of Cole’s early descriptions of Manhattan ends up informing much of the novel, and stands out as strikingly true for anyone who lives in New York:
Every neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shutter shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks.
Yet even as Julius explores the complex life of the city, the interactions he has with the people around him reveal the incredible solitude that accompanies urban life. In an early moment in the novel, Julius learns that one of his neighbors has died and uses the moment to ruminate on the sense of separation that coexists with the intense proximity to others:
A woman had died in the room next to mine, she had died on the other side of the wall I was leaning against, and I had known nothing of it. I had known nothing in the weeks when her husband mourned, nothing when I had nodded to him in greeting with headphones in my ears, or when I had folded clothes in the laundry room while he used the washer. I hadn’t known him well enough to routinely ask how Carla was, and I had not noticed not seeing her around. That was the worst of it. I had noticed neither her absence nor the change–there must have been a change–in his spirit. It was not possible, even then, to go knock on his door and embrace him, or to speak with him at length. It would have been false intimacy.
However, though Cole points to the struggles that accompany life in New York, the novel also captures the overwhelming allure of the city. Though said by a character describing Mecca and Medina, one of Cole’s bits of dialogue speaks volumes about urban life:
There’s a spiritual energy in the topography, through which one can endure the physical limitations.
Julius’s observations, whether they concern New York or deeper philosophical inquiries, were so powerful and moving that I found myself highlighting every other page. Cole has some serious commentary to make on race, family, and contemporary American society, and he expertly weaves serious cultural criticism into narration without reading as forced. Open City is an overwhelmingly powerful debut, and like so many other people I know, I will be asking everyone I know to read it.
