James Wood on Teju Cole and Open City

A 2011 review of Cole's second novel

Teju Cole

From James Wood (New Yorker):

Publishers now pitch their books like Hollywood concepts, so Teju Cole’s first novel, “Open City” (Random House; $25), is being offered as especially appealing to “readers of Joseph O’Neill and Zadie Smith,” and written in a prose that “will remind you” of W. G. Sebald and J. M. Coetzee. This is shorthand for “post-colonialism in New York” (O’Neill), “lively multiracial themes” (Smith), “free-flowing form with no plot, narrated by a scholarly solitary walker” (Sebald), “obviously serious” (Coetzee), and “finely written” (all of the above). There is the additional comedy that Cole’s publishers, determined to retain the baby with the bathwater, boldly conjoin Smith and O’Neill, despite Smith’s hostility, advertised in an essay entitled “Two Paths for the Novel,” to O’Neill’s expensive and upholstered “lyrical realism.”

This busy campaign for allies does a disfavor to Teju Cole’s beautiful, subtle, and, finally, original novel. “Open City” is indeed largely set in a multiracial New York (the open city of the title). Cole is a Nigerian American; he grew up in Lagos, came to America in 1992, at the age of seventeen, and is a graduate student in art history at Columbia University. The book’s half-Nigerian, half-German narrator walks around New York (and, briefly, Brussels), and meets a range of people, several of them immigrants or emigrants: a Liberian, imprisoned for more than two years in a detention facility in Queens; a Haitian shoeshiner, at work in Penn Station; an angry Moroccan student, manning an Internet café in Brussels. This narrator has a well-stocked mind: he thinks about social and critical theory, about art (Chardin, Velázquez, John Brewster), and about music (Mahler, Peter Maxwell Davies, Judith Weir), and he has interesting books within easy reach—Roland Barthes’s “Camera Lucida,” Peter Altenberg’s “Telegrams of the Soul,” Tahar Ben Jelloun’s “The Last Friend,” Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “Cosmopolitanism.” [Read More]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief
• Teju Cole on Saul Leiter
• Teju Cole talks to 3:AM Magazine
• Why You Should Be Reading W. G. Sebald
• Burroughs, Lynch and Warhol: Photography Exhibition

Teju Cole, Every Day Is for the Thief

Fictional work available outside Nigeria for the first time

Teju Cole. Photograph: Chester Higgins Jr

From John Williams (New York Times):

On a recent visit to the International Center of Photography, the Nigerian-American author and photographer Teju Cole leaned forward to study an image by Robert Capa. It offered an aerial view of the Place de la Concorde in Paris, bustling with traffic, sunlight filtering through a blanket of clouds. Mr. Cole admiringly listed its elements and expressed a preference for expansive photos like this one.

He called them “all-over pictures, that contain everything,” in which the photographer is “cramming in life.” Mr. Cole’s critically acclaimed 2011 novel, “Open City,” in which a medical student named Julius takes long, solitary walks around New York City, ruminating on a wide variety of political and artistic questions, could be called an all-over book.

Next week, Random House is to publish “Every Day Is for the Thief,” a shorter work of fiction that Mr. Cole wrote before “Open City,” but previously available only in Nigeria, where it was published in 2007.

“Every Day” was inspired by a trip Mr. Cole took to Lagos after more than a decade away and is illustrated with several black-and-white photos from his travels. (Mr. Cole, 38, was born in Michigan, where his parents were studying. The family returned to Africa a few months after his birth, and he moved back to the United States when he was 17.) [Read More]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Teju Cole on Saul Leiter
• Teju Cole talks to 3:AM Magazine
• Why You Should Be Reading W. G. Sebald
• Burroughs, Lynch and Warhol: Photography Exhibition
• A Reluctant Subject: Portraits of Samuel Beckett

Teju Cole on Saul Leiter

Reflecting on the late photographer's work

Saul Leiter, 'Foot on El' (1954)

From Teju Cole (New Yorker):

Leiter was perhaps the most interesting of the fifties color photographers in his use of form. His bold chromaticism, off-center composition, and frequent use of vertical framing attracted attention—the work reminded people of Japanese painting and Abstract Expressionism—and he was included in “Always the Young Strangers,” an exhibition curated by Edward Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953. But Leiter didn’t court fame, and though he continued to work, his photographs almost vanished from public view. Then they came back to light in 2006, with “Saul Leiter: Early Color,” a monograph published by Steidl. The book brought him belated recognition, gallery representation, a stream of publications, and a new generation of fans. [Read More]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Saul Leiter's Typographic Fragments
• Gail Albert Halaban: Out My Window
• The Photography of Tom Palumbo
• Finding Edward Hopper's Nighthawks
• Edward Hopper's Sketchbook

Teju Cole talks to 3:AM Magazine

An interview by Max Liu

Teju Cole

Max Liu interviews the author of Open City, Teju Cole, for 3:AM Magazine:

Increasingly, novels are praised for how much of the culture they manage to include. Open City is entirely contemporary and worldly and it includes a great deal. What are the possibilities and pitfalls of literary inclusiveness?

In a sense, Open City is a kind of Wunderkammer, one of those little rooms assembled with bric-a-brac by Renaissance scholars. I don’t mean it as a term of praise: these cabinets of curiousities contained specific sorts of objects – maps, skulls (as memento mori), works of art, stuffed animals, natural history samples, and books – and Open City actually contains many of the same sort of objects. So, I don’t think it’s as simple as literary inclusiveness. That phrase, in fact, brings to mind David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Dave Eggers. They are keen to include and, in fact, itemize the present in all its gaudy multiplicity. My own literary interest is more about excavating the past, or sensing the past inside the present. This requires all kinds of exclusions and sleights of hand. There’s an admittedly antiquarian flavor to it, even though there’s enough of the present included to lull the reader. So, for a book set in 2006, Open City evades certain markers, while it embraces certain others. Julius doesn’t use a smartphone, and he doesn’t discuss contemporary US politics in any fine detail. [Read More]

Why You Should Be Reading W. G. Sebald

A 2011 article from The New Yorker

W. G. Sebald

Mark O'Connell (New Yorker) on why you should be reading W. G. Sebald (link via David Pearce): 'It is probably too early to predict the extent of the influence Sebald’s hybrid books will exert on the shape of the novel, but it isn’t an exaggeration to say that he erased and redrew the boundaries of narrative fiction as radically as anyone since Borges. British writers like Will Self and, in particular, Geoff Dyer, have been inspired by Sebald’s figurative and literal rambling. Dyer’s work—part essay, part travelogue, part fiction—sometimes reads like a less melancholy, more comic (and more English) variant of Sebald’s peregrinatory prose. One of this year’s most impressive novels, Teju Cole’s debut “Open City,” owes a clear debt to Sebald. James Wood, in his enthusiastic review in the magazine, commented on the way in which Cole moves “in the shadow of W. G. Sebald’s work.” On a more superficial level, Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 novel “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” adopted the trademark Sebaldian tactic of integrating photographs into its text.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• The Making of W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn
• Grant Gee, Patience (After Sebald)
• W. G. Sebald, Across Land and Water
• W. G. Sebald as Academic
• W. G. Sebald: Writing Pictures
• W. G. Sebald Interviewed on Bookworm
• Coetzee on Sebald and the Uncanny
• James Wood on Sebald's Austerlitz