Book 3: Open City by Teju Cole

Last year, I read Teju Cole's Every Day is for the Thief and really enjoyed it. I was excited to learn about Open City but I'm afraid that my excitement didn't last past the first few pages of the book.

Teju Cole’s Open City is about Julius, a German-Nigerian physician, who resides in New York City. Julius, who has a somewhat supernatural ability to pay close attention to the mundane, wanders around the streets of New York reflecting on bed bugs, birds, his childhood in Nigeria, past and present relationships, culture, music, art and everything in between. Julius’s character is unlike any human being I have ever encountered which makes it very hard for me to believe that he is a real person. He is the type that has a well-informed opinion on just about anything. Being a full-time medical doctor in a busy academic center, it is quite preposterous how knowledgeable he is in not one but several other subjects such as history, classical music, art and philosophy to name a few. He remembers random lines from poems or books he read many years earlier. Even his friends or strangers he encounters are not "regular" folks but rather, folks with especially heightened sense of intellectual curiosity and vitality. Ah..who are these people? Or should I say, are these real people or are they simply projections of Julius’s imagination?

Albeit, in the last two chapters, the author tried to portray Julius as a human being but by then it was too late. Even the seemingly real interactions at this point in the book appeared abrupt and forced. However, it was in these last few pages that I found a quote I’ll definitely ponder on for a while. I would like to share it with those who will not make it to this part of the book:

"Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him. Perhaps this is what sanity is: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. "

Overall, I found Teju Cole’s Open City monotonous, flat and boring. Flipping the pages was like pulling teeth--I was un-engaged for the most part and prayed earnestly that the book should end. I applaud myself and anyone else who reads this book cover to cover. We get 5 bows for making it through and Teju Cole gets 2 bows for helping us realize our resilience and patience.  

Rating: 2 bows

 

Teju Cole’s Open City is available on Amazon

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