An open city

I really wanted to like Open City, by Teju Cole. The more I read about it during this year's Tournament of Books, the more I wanted to read it for myself. I even began cheering for it, and even though it lost the championship round, when next I passed through a bookstore and saw it, I had to have it. (Also, I think the cover is gorgeous!)

I was drawn in by its meandering approach. I thought, this is a novel I could write. I walk around my city and think about stuff all the time. The narrator wanders and drops into places and thinks. I didn't think that counted among major publishers as a novel these days. I could do that.

There are things I don't really like about Julius. He's a little self-righteous. He saves lives, he reminds us. He's a little too well read with too much cultured leisure for someone in their final year of residency. Pretentious (the character, the author, the book? — I'm not sure).

Despite his supposed worldliness, Julius (born and raised in Nigeria, a German mother — we never know why they are estranged) is very much American. When he visits Belgium, "I felt suddenly, an irrational shame at speaking French badly and Flemish not at all." This statement rankles. One should feel shame in this situation, it's most rational, isn't it? So I think it's at this point that my feelings about Julius, and the novel, coalesce into something more negative.

(And why does he always refer to his friend as "my friend"? Why is his friend the only character without a name? Is it the same friend thoughout?)

This review in the Guardian comes closest to expressing my distaste for Julius:

Part of the delight of Cole's book is how it exploits refinement until Julius reveals himself as a poseur through intellectual over-reaching, disclosing an irony for which readers may not be prepared. One instance of this comes when Chinese musicians in a park remind him "of Li Po and Wang Wei, of Harry Partch's pitch-bending songs, and of Judith Weir's opera The Consolations of Scholarship".

How to read Open City is obliquely signalled by these pretentious pratfalls. In the notes of the trumpet of another Chinese band, Julius hears the "spiritual cousins of the offstage clarion in Mahler's Second Symphony". I'm not a musician, but I suspect that's twaddle. But when he hears, in the same tune, the "simple sincerity of songs I had last sung in the school yard of the Nigerian Military School", and is returned, trembling, to a state of childhood innocence, the observation has the force of something genuine. The little emotional space to which no one else in the city is likely to have access is much more important than the public-facing attitudes of the cultural dandy.

I don't generally judge books, or movies, etc, by the virtues of their characters — I love a good antihero — but in this case, there's little more to the story than what Julius thinks about a broad range of topics. Nothing to hang it all together.

My final verdict: overrated. But. While I don't see myself pressing Open City into people's hands, I do wish there'd been people reading along with me. I'm not very interested in what people think of Julius, or his experiences. More interesting are the people he encounters, their hard experiences, and his tangents of thought (is this the point of the book? that Julius is in many ways, after all, immigrant status aside, privileged or lucky? that this earns him the right to be condescending and this is the controversial point on which the "story" hinges? his self-centredness?). I see this novel as a great springboard for other discussions, to talk about, for example, Idi Amin, or reverse racism, Zionism, Sharia, or immigration, or our relationships with our neighbours, or taxicab etiquette. In many ways it's a worthwhile book, for what it inspires me to think about, but not as a novel.

One might assume the title to be referring to New York, but it's Brussels that during WWII explicitly declared itself an open city to be spared bombardment. To be an open city reeks of defeat, surrender, hypocrisy, even collusion, and I realize now maybe that's what this post-9/11 novel is about.

My mind plays tricks on me

So with morning coffee I read chapter thirteen, about Julius stopping at a bank machine and freezing on his PIN, trying and thinking and just blanking some 20-odd times. My mom meanwhile is turning the house upside down looking for the soup packets she meant to send home with me — my favourite instant soup she'd set aside so it wouldn't be forgotten. Don't worry about it, I tell her. Like the kid's school pictures I spent the last 3 weeks looking for (and finding in a place I'd already checked twice), and disc 2 of season 3 of Doctor Who, the one with the Shakespeare episode, which inexpicably isn't in its DVD case — I'm still looking for it.

Chapter fourteen, Julius goes to visit the professor. But wait! Didn't he die? Julius had called, and a strange woman answered and told him he'd died. Did I imagine this? But if I don't know for sure whether I read this, I won't know for sure how to understand the next part of the story. Was it someone else who died? (I know the patient died, but the circumstances were different; I'm not mistaking that death for this one.) Why am I so sure it was the professor? Maybe it's not in this book at all, maybe it's some other book I was reading, but I haven't been reading anything else. Maybe I dreamt it. When I woke up with someone's name on my lips, maybe it's because I dreamt I phoned and learned he died, and for some reason I associated him with the professor.

I can't read forward until I know.

J-F ask for his mouse, knows I have the mouse, accuses me of hiding his mouse. He'd handed me the mouse and asked me to tuck into one of the bags. I don't remember this. I can describe the contents of my suitcase in detail, down to the kid's spare socks, the white ones with the blue and green flower shapes, in the back bottom left corner (when the suitcase is oriented as it's lying open in front of you) and the travel size body lotion and spare plastic bag tucked in the top outside pocket. J-F never remembers anything. J-F insists. I think he must be joking, but I can't be sure.

We pack the car. I find the GPS jammed under the seat. It's been "missing" since January. I assumed it had been stolen out of the car, since J-F often forgets to lock it. I spend the next several hours checking the book up to page 168. I skim backwards and forwards. It might've served my purpose better if I actually reread the book, carefully, starting at page one, but as a rule I don't read in the car, much as I would like to, because it's rude; not reading is a gesture of solidarity with the driver. But this isn't reading, it's looking for something. I don't dare turn past page 168.

No one died like I remember it.

I finally settle into bed, leave the day behind me. The kid left her necklace on my mom's dresser. Nothing to do but read forward. Let Julius visit the professor, who in my memory is already dead.

Chapter sixteen, Julius calls up the professor, and a woman, not Mary, tells him he died, and he hangs up, just like I remember it.

Why would I have read page 183 if I hadn't naturally arrived there? When did I do this? I never skip forward. When I test drive books at the store, I start at the beginning. It's not standard to excerpt pages from the latter portions of a book. Did I flip open to page 183 by accident? The contents registered themselves on my subconscious mind, while I consciously worked to erase them? My mind plays tricks on me.

How fleeting the sense of happiness

I became aware of just how fleeting the sense of happiness was, and how flimsy its basis: a warm restaurant after having come in from the rain, the smell of food and wine, interesting conversation, daylight falling weakly on the polished cherrywood of the tables. It took so little to move the mood from one level to another, as one might push pieces on a chessboard. Even to be aware of this, in the midst of a happy moment, was to push one of those pieces, and become slightly less happy.

— from Open City, by Teju Cole.

I am finding my groove with this book finally, liking it more, and reading it much more slowly.

This strangest of islands

This strangest of islands, I thought, as I looked out to the sea, this island that turned in on itself, and from which water had been banished. The shore was a carapace, permeable only at certain selected points. Where in this riverine city could one fully sense a riverbank? Everything was built up, in concrete and stone, and the millions who lived on the tiny interior had scant sense about what flowed around them. The water was a kind of embarrassing secret, the unloved daughter, neglected, while the parks were doted on, fussed over, overused. I stood on the promenade and looked out across the water into the unresponsive night.

— from Open City, by Teju Cole.

I am liking this book well enough, but not loving it the way I expected it to.

I am missing the feeling of being wholly captivated by the book I'm reading. Where are you, the-perfect-book-for-me-right-now?