‘Open City’ is…Julius

©Joseph Omotayo
@omotayome

·         Reviewing Teju Cole's Open City

Open City is more than a book of one purpose streamlined plot and a contrived theme setting; it is further broader than that. With its loosed plot, there is really no story in the mainstream sense. The book is deep with intelligences meeting at different mental ports of the main character's emotional reflexes, intellectual recounts, aimless personal wanderings and physical social interactions. There are allusions of great intellectual stimulations flying off at each page. An important note to prospective readers of this book would be; Open City does not patronize details to you with end to end interruptive annotations of where you may have been confused; it really doesn't. That is one thing I admire about the way the book is written. You are to follow it through rapt study. That is never to submit the sentences are complex. The words are relaxed that you pick them at your own pace. You wouldn't find Open City in a boxed space of what it wants itself to be. In fact, the book never panders to the reader's mindset for a particular interpretation and appreciation; it takes you in, makes you wander amidst your own speculations and direct belief and hopefully takes you to where you say; Oh! This is what Open City is. It is as psychological and mentally stimulating as that. You have the personal responsibility to go on an adventure of discovery with Julius, the main character, as he roves through cities {New York and Brussels}, giving breath to places and things that speak of many historical memories.

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Julius is the book. Open City is Julius. A sapient character of an observing kind, Julius lights up New York and makes the nerve of the city come alive. He knows everything about it; the paintings in the gallery, the movies in the cinemas, the monuments and statutes that are mundane features of the city, the historical topography and the invisible melancholic voices throbbing from various reconstructed sites. If I had accepted reading Open City without studying Julius; that would simply have meant going through inchoate sentences. Julius is the core of the book. He is the God, for all other things take a minor category in his scholarly world. Nothing eludes Julius' close observations. From music to paintings, cinemas, books and historical facts, he dissects things down to the trivial of details. In his voice, the past is relived. Unlike the normal conversations in novels that carry the distinctness of individual character with sound-bites and quotes, dialogues in Open City are made in Julius internal monologues. This gives him an infallible pristineness. Nobody is as faultless as Julius. When you meet him you would remember I said so.

Farouk almost put Julius' erudite soundness to task. He initially awes Julius as he generously arranges knowledgeable analogies and names into small talks; engaging Julius in academic thinking. He stretches Julius's brilliance to tautness. But when he slipped, Julius nails him and quickly concludes his fatal faultiness in arriving at serious decisions. Farouk has at the first meeting in the café coined a word to describe Mohamed Choukri as an autodidact, but changes the appropriation of the same adjective to his self at their subsequent meeting, claiming he had used it so in their previous talk. Julius is a man of memories – triffling and significant; little slips off his memory. Farouk instantly becomes the victim of his own words.

Farouk speaking with Julius at an earlier interaction;

"To be a writer in exile is a great thing. But what is exile now, when everyone goes and comes freely? Choukri stayed in Morocco, he lived with his people. What I like best about him is that he was an autodidact…. He was raised on the street and he taught himself to write classical Arabic but he never left the street. " {p104}

This is where Farouk falls;

"But my deeper project is about what I said last time, the difference thing. I strongly believe this, that people can live together, and I want to understand how that can happen… But as I told you, I am an autodidact, so I don't know what form this other project will take." {pg. 113}

Open City's characters lavishly command meaningful significances in ordinary pleasantries. No attention is given to explanations and apologetic refrains. There is a way allusions are embedded into conversations that you just want to know why they are so important to have been mentioned. An exploratory instance is where Farouk, Khalil and Julius engage themselves in discussion at the bar in Brussels. Historical peoples and places become the very instruments of dialogues which are unfurled in Julius' internal monologues. There is the Holocaust, the 1940s Auschwitz concentration camp, the ethnic rivalry of Delaware and Iroquois, Finkelstein's and Noam Chomsky's dissimilarity. Henri Cantier's Decisive Moment, Nabokov's Pinn, Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello and various relevant theories of; Zionism, anti-Semitic, Piety, Ummah, etc.  Google is your partner in this reading. You wouldn't only be reading Open City as you browse through piles of valuable references. At least, without the Internet, Encarta program will do some assists.

I was more than astonished when I venerated Julius in a side notepad. I asked myself questions and conversed with my thoughts; how did Julius get to know of the various buildings formerly occupying the site World Trade Centre was built on? How was he so informed of the streets that passed through this place; some of which dated back to late 1800s? About music, paintings, books and places; doesn't he seem to know so much? This character must be a genius or his creator, Teju Cole, is.

If I had the chance to converse with Julius, I would vehemently question his anecdotal narrative of Obatala and his creation. There are numerous shades being added to the story of Obatala, Eledumare and iseda omo eniyan daily. I have gathered some, check here, here and here. With the popularity of Internet, these shades are constantly overshadowing the truth of this Yoruba creation story. A day will come, when historians will be left with only doubts and the frustration of tracing the real story. In classifying the cripple and the vehemence they bear against their creator, Obatala, Julius' slide to it amuses me;

"…Obatala did well at the task (creation) until he started drinking… he became inebriated, and began to fashion damaged human beings… he made dwarfs, cripples people missing limbs, and those burdened with debilitating illness… They worship Obatala in accusation; it is he who made them as they are. They wear white, which is the color of the palm wine he got drunk on" {p25}

I love Julius for his ingenuity and dislike him for his egocentricity. He determines what becomes fleeting and what stays on with meaningfulness. Julius' personality is in a messy split. How could he have trodden on Terry's poeticity in that manner? Terry can't have known the burdening blow he suffers from Professor Saito's…? Julius can just be that inhuman at times. Sex is a beautiful thing – a stint of it can't cause permanent forgetfulness as is with Julius. Moji; how I so pity her in the web called Julius. This Julius is so puzzlingly enigmatic.

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A friend called me during my reading of this book and asked how I was doing with the book. I only had this clipped response for him; Open City is a piece of numerous lateral natures spiraling into the main meaning the reader takes away from it. Everything the book has to get across is at the proportion of the various readers' deep knowledge of the issues as sweepingly alluded to in the book. Yes, my opinion of the book was true then, even when I had just barely gotten farther the middle of its pages' length.

This is Open City. I, Julius, welcome you. Correction; I am Joseph Omotayo. I will never be him. I can't be that complex. Welcome to the review of Teju Cole's Open City.

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Bookerbay, a wall-less library is making gallant history in literature. They got this book to me. All I did was to nominate the book with a few friends who supported the nomination. This is a right step in a good direction. Now that I am through with the book, I really need to pass it on to another reader as the rules direct. Thank you Bookerbay, I appreciate the effort, Adebiyi Epistrophy Olusolape.

At CLR, we wish You a Happy, Happy 2012!