Open City by Teju Cole

Previously published in the Herald magazine. 

Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole is very active on Twitter. He mostly tweets versions of news reports he has converted into the style of neo-Impressionist Félix Fénéon. That Fénéon was known as an anarchist who wrote a more literary version of what is now known as ‘flash fiction’, seems to have had no effect of Cole’s writing outside of his tweets. And the more’s the pity.

Open City is Teju Cole’s second book, but his first to have been published outside of Nigeria. A German-African psychiatry fellow from Nigeria walks the streets of New York City, except when he walks the streets of Brussels for a few weeks. At this point it feels as if something may actually happen – Julius seems to be searching in some vague way for his German grandmother, but on arriving in Brussels he continues to be aimlessly, just moving along with the general flow of things. While the book is ultimately about race, belonging, identity, events or actions don’t move the story along – in fact, it’s a mere shadow of a story, a token almost. What story there may be is lost in the details, buried under nothing more than a ‘literary’ version of a heavy, claustrophobic ‘infodump’. The prose of Open City is an unbroken stream of words with no quotations no changes in tone or style even if the active voice is not that of the main narrator. Admittedly, the prose is clear, without a single detail missing.

Let’s think about that again – not a single detail is missing. Not about where Julius goes or what he does, who he speaks with or how many beers he drinks; not about bed bugs, or sperm whales; not about a completely 17^th century Dutch settler or the exact location of each child of the stranger he meets on a plane. Some of Julius’s reflections and thoughts on so many, many varied topics are so pretentious they border on absurd. Surely these are simply insights into the narrator’s character, rather than serious opinions the writer wishes to share? Leave that aside - why is this interesting to anyone at all? What does this have to do with the story? Wait…what was the story again?

An unreliable, elusive narrator can potentially be intriguing. Cole is far off the mark with Julius, who has plenty of information and opinions to share and plenty to hide, but he is never interesting. Eventually a secret is revealed that changes the reader’s perspective of Julius but it is not enough, not nearly enough and much too late in the novel. That this reveal is met with a complete lack of reaction from Julius is only vaguely repulsive and not nearly interesting enough.

A bad book is not nearly as offensive to an intelligent reader as a boring book is. Perhaps there are critics who find Open City’s ability to frustrate a reader into boredom as a sign of Teju Cole’s language skills but I was left feeling cheated of time and empty of emotion. And to me, that’s not a sign of a good book at all. At finally finishing Open City, I have chosen never to read a word Teju Cole writes again. I no longer follow him on Twitter.