Open City

A Novel

By: Teju Cole

Narrated by: Teju Cole

“The past, if there is such a thing, is mostly empty space, great expanses of nothing, in which significant persons and events float. Nigeria was like that for me: mostly forgotten, except for those few things that I remembered with outsize intensity.”

Along the streets of Manhattan, a young Nigerian doctor doing his residency wanders aimlessly. The walks meet a need for Julius: they are a release from the tightly regulated mental environment of work, and they give him the opportunity to process his relationships, his recent breakup with his girlfriend, his present, his past. Though he is navigating the busy parts of town, the impression of countless faces does nothing to assuage his feelings of isolation.

But it is not only a physical landscape he covers; Julius crisscrosses social territory as well, encountering people from different cultures and classes who will provide insight on his journey—which takes him to Brussels, to the Nigeria of his youth, and into the most unrecognizable facets of his own soul.

A haunting novel about national identity, race, liberty, loss, dislocation, and surrender, Teju Cole’s Open City seethes with intelligence. Written in a clear, rhythmic voice that lingers, this book is a mature, profound work by an important new author who has much to say about our country and our world.

Phenomenal

You really must hear this work in the author’s voice. He narrates it so well.

open city, open eyes

a great American novel. a story told with open eyes and a tender heart.

Author’s narration is special.

Mesmerizing meandering. The every day interactions in Manhattan and Brussels are wonderfully described. A provocative twist could make you need another listen.

Poorly read; a con job

A book read by the author is rarely done well. Tegu Cole’s voice is as boring as his book. Don’t waste you time or money on either Audible or book. This is marketed as a novel. It is far from it. It is either a fictional memoir or a collection of essays. I feel conned on both scores as I spent two days reading. Beginning, turning the pages, listening to the Audible, I kept wondering when this so called novel was going to get out of the introduction and get going. It never did, not in the beginning, middle, end of what is the usual novel that is expected. We have the narrative of Julius, a psychiatrist, describing walking the streets of Manhattan out of curiosity to see the people, streets, architecture, etc. He sees friends, talks to strangers, drinks coffee in diners, eats meals in restaurants, discovers monuments, walks all the way down to the where the inlet of the river and sea. Cole creates a character that is an unrealistic Renaissance man, a suffering son, assaulted on an isolated street, but also selfish, a man who it is claimed by a woman when they were teens, he had forced himself on her sexually which even now eighteen later still affected—a section perhaps included abruptly in the narrative as pretext to round Julius’s character out so he seemed less ideal and totally sympathetic. In the whole reading experience it was evident that the structure was artificial and unconvincing. It was neither entertaining nor illuminating. I resent reading this book. My advice is steer away from it.

Only if you like pretentiousness with no plot

This book has no plot. It is not appropriately even described as a “story”. The character just wanders around and muses in eye rolling intellectual masturbation for every second of the book as you wait miserably for some semblance of narrative. There are about 3 paragraphs toward the end that could have been a somewhat interesting potential plot point where (defying any willing suspension of disbelief) he is confronted about a rape he forgot he committed. But then it immediately moves on presumably with the intension of addressing this crime through the obscured symbolism of the final chapter.