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Nigerian immigrant Julius, a young graduate student studying psychiatry in New York City, has recently broken up with his girlfriend and spends most of his time dreamily walking around Manhattan. The majority of Open City centers on Julius’ inner thoughts as he rambles throughout the city, painting scenes of both what occurs around him and past events that he can’t help but dwell on. For reasons not altogether clear, Julius’ walks turn into worldwide travel, and he flies first to Europe, where he has an unplanned one-night stand and makes some interesting friends, then to Nigeria, and finally back to New York City.
Along the way, he meets many people and often has long discussions with them about philosophy and politics. Brought up in a military school, he seems to welcome these conversations. Upon returning to New York, he meets a young Nigerian woman who profoundly changes the way he sees himself. Readers who enjoy stream-of-consciousness narratives and fiction infused with politics will find this unique and pensive book a charming read. –Julie Hunt, Booklist
Review
Its intense, detailed and specific narrative, unravelling inside the mind of one man, Julius – a young Nigerian-German doctor completing his residency in psychiatry in a New York hospital – brings the city of new York hauntingly to life in a different, slower, deeper way from anything I’ve ever read. From this detail and specificity, it reaches out widely to the global flows of our fluxing, ungraspable world, personified by the various immigrants and asylum seekers he encounters. It reaches in, too, to touch the reader’s mind and senses and emotions. For this restrained, intellectual voice, you realise, is piercingly sensitive – it gets to you!
This is not one for the fan of plot-heavy pageturners, perhaps. Julius spends much time alone, walks a lot and thinks a lot, about art and memory and history. He sees a lot, as loners sometimes do, and has strange, surprising, significant encounters, often with other immigrants, as loners sometimes do.
His story, perhaps, goes nowhere much. And yet, in his actual journey to Brussels, his journeys of memory back to Nigeria, and in the mouths and memories of those he meets from far-flung places, it goes to Africa, to Europe… and to places in the heart.
It travels too, through his observations and reflections, in time, political and cultural history. Full of seeming digressions, it digresses in fact not at all, but is a seamless deepening through detail of the whole picture and atmosphere of today’s global city.
And it goes to a sharp inner twist that you will not forget.
It’s a book to love, and to reread many times. – Jean Morris, Amazon.Com Customer Review
An Immigrant’s Quest For Identity In The ‘Open City’
NPR Book Review – February 13, 2011 (Excerpt)
Ever since he moved to New York a little over 10 years ago, author Teju Cole knew that he wanted to write about the city, with the general structure of a character walking and walking around the metropolis and making discoveries. After the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, he says, he suddenly found the freedom to write this story. The result is Open City, a debut novel that has met with high praise and is being called a new landmark in post-Sept. 11 fiction.
“My view of writing about those things [like Sept. 11] is that you can best write about it by writing about other things,” Cole tells NPR’s Audie Cornish. “And by understanding that catastrophic trauma is not new in this city.” [Read the full article...]
Queen of Misfortune
A Lady Jane Grey Novel by Peter Carroll
Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same ‘stranger’ who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]
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