Open City, English edition

9781400068098|excerpt

Cole: OPEN CITY

PART 1

Death is a perfection of the eye

ONE

And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city. The path that drops down from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and crosses Morningside Park is only fifteen minutes from Central Park. In the other direction, going west, it is some ten minutes to Sakura Park, and walking northward from there brings you toward Harlem, along the Hudson, though traffic makes the river on the other side of the trees inaudible. These walks, a counterpoint to my busy days at the hospital, steadily lengthened, taking me farther and farther afield each time, so that I often found myself at quite a distance from home late at night, and was compelled to return home by subway. In this way, at the beginning of the final year of my psychiatry fellowship, New York City worked itself into my life at walking pace.

Not long before this aimless wandering began, I had fallen into the habit of watching bird migrations from my apartment, and I wonder now if the two are connected. On the days when I was home early enough from the hospital, I used to look out the window like someone taking auspices, hoping to see the miracle of natural immigration. Each time I caught sight of geese swooping in formation across the sky, I wondered how our life below might look from their perspective, and imagined that, were they ever to indulge in such speculation, the high-rises might seem to them like firs massed in a grove. Often, as I searched the sky, all I saw was rain, or the faint contrail of an airplane bisecting the window, and I doubted in some part of myself whether these birds, with their dark wings and throats, their pale bodies and tireless little hearts, really did exist. So amazed was I by them that I couldn t trust my memory when they weren t there.

Pigeons flew by from time to time, as did sparrows, wrens, orioles,

Teju Cole

Reminiscent of the works of W. G. Sebald, this dreamy, incantatory debut was the most beautiful novel I read this year the kind of book that remains on your nightstand long after you finish so that you can continue dipping in occasionally as a nighttime consolation. The New Republic
 
A psychological hand grenade. The Atlantic

A meditative and startlingly clear-eyed first novel. Newsweek

Magnificent . . . a remarkably resonant feat of prose. Seattle Times

A precise and poetic meditation on love, race, identity, friendship, memory, [and] dislocation. The Economist
 
[Teju] Cole writes beautifully; his protagonist is unique; and his novel, utterly thrilling. The Globe and Mail
 
Lean and mean and bristles with intelligence. The multi-culti characters and streets of New York are sharply observed and feel just right. . . . Toward the end, there s a poignant, unexpected scene in a tailor s shop that s an absolute knockout. Salon

I couldn t stop reading Teju Cole s debut novel and was blown away by his ability to capture the human psyche with such beautiful yet subtle prose. Slate
 
An indelible debut novel . . . [It] does precisely what literature should do: it brings together thoughts and beliefs, and blurs borders. . . . A compassionate and masterly work. The New York Times Book Review

The cool, concise prose of Open City draws you in more quietly, then breaks your heart. Who knew that taking a long walk in Manhattan could be so profound? New York
 
Beautiful, subtle, and finally, original . . . Cole has made his novel as close to a diary as a novel can get, with room for reflection, autobiography, stasis, and repetition. This is extremely difficult, and many accomplished novelists would botch it, since a sure hand is needed to make the writer s careful stitching look like a thread merely