Teju Cole

 

After finding myself disappointed by Penelope Fitzgerald's Beginning of Spring, I was eager for something different, for something more complex and textured, and with, well, with far less dialogue. Enter Teju Cole's Open City, a masterful novel evocative of the work of W. G. Sebald. 

Like Sebald, Cole performs a magical feat, bending fiction to its limit: indeed, Open City is a work as much of literature as it is of history, philosophy, and geography. It is a novel in pursuit of all these things. And the result is a book which functions in much the same way as Austerlitz or The Emigrants. Cole pursues extended digressions in order to explore the history lurking just below his narrative: often, of course, that history is painful or distressing. And yet, it is covered by the present, by a geography, a population aware only of itself. 

Cole travels in Open City from New York to Brussels to Nigeria and back. Along the way, he interacts with intellectuals, doctors, revolutionaries, and family. He confronts his memories and is made aware, at anguished moments, of those he's forgotten. Like Sebald, Cole walks: this is his primary mode of exploration, and it is the time it takes to travel this way which allows him to reflect on these cities, these places and memories. 

Ultimately, for me, Open City is a book about immigration and the movement of people: across spaces, across time, across borders. The novel ends with a poignant symbol involving the Statue of Liberty: as beacon both of hope and of injury and despair. In Open City, Teju Cole has delivered something special -- not always perfect, not always realistic -- but special all the same. Add black and white images to this novel, and you'll have chapters (or moments, certainly) approaching the storied works of Sebald. I tip my cap to Cole.