I read this on the wave of the great Everyday is for the Thief. At first, it seemed that Cole is the king of non-story fiction: there is no structured plot in sight. In Everyday is for the thief, it resulted in a great impression of Nigerians' psyche. However, Open City only showed me a closeted ess...
In “Open City”, Teju Cole attempts to play with our perspective by showing that America is a great distraction from the true essence of humanity: suffering. The inevitable end to this illusion is a death of historical perspective with dangerous consequences. How it’s dangerous exactly, I’m not entir...
Open City, Teju Cole's début novel, is a strangely wonderful perambulatory reading experience: insightful, lyrical, decidedly modern and politically prescient. However despite it's numerous successes the overall novel feels a bit like an attempt. In Barthes' "The Death of the Author" he writes (whic...
One of the most elegant writers I've read.
Here's a short review (because a GoodReads server glitch just lost a longer review and I'm not going to rewrite the whole thing):Teju Cole handles the formless, plotless, rambling novel with considerably more grace than I would have expected in a first-time novelist. Narrator Julius has a strange pe...
The Book Report: The annus horribilis of Julius, a Nigerian psych resident in Manhattan. He is estranged from his mother, his only surviving parent; never knew his German maternal grandmother; is alone and adrift in the cold (too cold for his tropical self) and cruel city. He responds to his recent ...
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