The Poetry of the Unsettled

A protagonist of great sensitivity and disaffection earns debut novelist Teju Cole formidable comparisons

Teju Cole’s debut novel, Open City—admired by that indomitable literary institution James Wood, and a fixture in every Must Read List of 2011—has charmed its way into countless book bags and Kindles since it was first published nearly a year ago. The meditative, erudite, historically conscious voice of its solitary flâneur, Julius, has earned his creator comparisons with Walter Benjamin and WG Sebald. The book’s concerns—migration, identity, anomie—are, however, resonantly contemporary.

The novel’s protagonist, Julius, is a biracial psychiatrist, completing a fellowship at a hospital in New York. The novel unfolds in his steady, placid voice, as we accompany him for about a year on restive walkabouts around New York and briefly, Brussels—the latter, in part, inspiring the title. He observes, ‘Had Brussels’s rulers not opted to declare it an open city and exempt it from bombardment during the Second World War, it might have been reduced to rubble.’ For the length of the book, his exquisite thoughts on Peter Maxwell Davies, Claudel, John Brewster, and the layers of history compressed beneath the pale concrete of a sidewalk in downtown Manhattan weave through his conversations with friends and acquaintances—subsumed by his voice, and appearing without quotation marks.

Julius is an observer of great visual sensitivity, and his language is marked by a poet’s quiet precision. As he passes through New York’s parks, museums and stores, we gain a vivid sense of place: backlit cyclists framed by tall glass windows; drab-coated old and middle-aged men in record stores ‘going through the CD bins with something of the patience of grazing animals’; crowds hurrying into subway trains that look like ‘movable catacombs’. We apprehend the post-industrial landscape’s particular gloom, with its unvaryingly ugly buildings and culverts ‘furred’ with weeds. This is also, indelibly, a post-9/11 landscape. As he passes its ruins, he remarks: ‘The place had become a metonym of its disaster: I remembered a tourist who once asked me how he could get to 9/11: not the site of the events of 9/11 but 9/11 itself, the date petrified into broken stones.’

We learn, slowly, of Julius’ character and personal history. He speaks of growing up in Nigeria, being estranged from his German mother for many years, of his father dying when he was 14. We learn that being alone, for him, is the closest he comes to fulfillment. He is fond of slipping into a ‘sonic fugue’, listening to Mähler, and he enjoys imposing an aesthetic order on the world. A woman vacuuming the floor of a church in Brussels ‘possessed her secrets fully, as did those women that Vermeer painted in this grey, lowland light’; another, in the subway, resembles a ‘black-on-black Velázquez’, and a gathering in a Brussels bar forms ‘an exact Cézannesque tableau’. Even his father’s funeral has scattered and reformed in the image of paintings of burials by El Greco and Courbet.

He has few social attachments. There is a girlfriend, Nadège, but the relationship fades when she moves away. On his Brussels trip he tries, unsuccessfully, to reconnect with his grandmother, whom he met once in Nigeria. Aside from an unnamed academic friend whose fondness for jazz he doesn’t share, Julius’ most significant bond in the course of the book is with Professor Saito, who taught him early English literature—and is dying of cancer.

Despite his sensitivity as an observer, Julius isn’t open to those around him, and is especially resentful of those who make ‘claims’ on him—usually pretensions to reflexive solidarity. When a taxi driver upbraids him for not greeting him when he entered the vehicle, saying, “Hey, I’m African just like you, why you do this?”, he feels anger well up within, ‘the anger of a shattered repose’. When a postal worker warms up to him as a ‘brother’ from ‘the Motherland’, and insists on treating him to his less-than-inspiring poetry, he makes ‘a mental note to avoid that particular post office in the future’.

He accompanies Nadège’s church group to a detention facility for undocumented immigrants, where he meets a young Liberian waiting to be deported, who tells him of the harrowing circumstances he escaped to get to America. But Julius remains at a disdainful remove from notions of selflessness, observing that most women in the group he went with had ‘that beatific, slightly unfocused expression one finds in do-gooders’.

Religion is a particularly troublesome sticking point. In the most subtly delineated encounter in the book, he strikes up an acquaintance with a young Moroccan named Farouq, who runs an internet café in Brussels. Farouq is an admirer of Walter Benjamin, Deleuze, Said and Malcolm X. Julius is at first intrigued by his ‘old-fashioned radicalism’, but when Farouq complains of being discriminated against by the university that rejected his dissertation for plagiarism,  calls Saddam Hussein ‘the most moderate’ of Middle Eastern dictators, and declares, “For us, America is a version of Al Qaeda,” Julius dismisses him as ‘one of the thwarted ones’.

The themes of displacement and social turbulence are echoed elsewhere in the book, and just as Julius is a sort of reticent confessor to us, many find themselves confessing to him. Such as an elderly Haitian man shining his shoes in the ‘underground catacombs of Penn Station’, who tells him of fleeing Haiti’s endless killing and ‘bodies on the streets’. Or his patients, who share their sadness and fears—real and unreal—with him.

‘Can a person whose feelings are so many and so lovely be at the same time so unfeeling?’ The Swiss writer Robert Walser, a famous walker from another age and an influence on Sebald, could’ve been speaking about Julius in his 1926 text on the poet Brentano. But Julius embodies a very 21st century feeling, shared by pan-continental souls that belong anywhere and are unsettled everywhere.

identitymigrationTeju Cole