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Books Like Open City
Meditative Walking Novels Like Open City
Teju Cole's Open City is one of the great contemporary novels of urban wandering and historical consciousness — Julius drifting through New York and Brussels, reading the buried histories in the streets around him. These 8 novels share its essayistic interiority, its preoccupation with memory and loss embedded in cities, and its willingness to let thought replace plot.
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The Rings of Saturn
by W.G. Sebald
A walking tour of the Suffolk coast that spirals outward into European colonial history, natural history, and the ruins of civilization — Sebald's novel is the most direct predecessor to Open City in its method: a narrator who walks and thinks, whose observations open into meditations on historical catastrophe, and whose prose moves between the personal and the historical without transition or explanation
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Austerlitz
by W.G. Sebald
Jacques Austerlitz's gradual discovery of his identity as a Jewish child rescued from Czechoslovakia before the war — Sebald's final novel shares Open City's portrait of a consciousness moving through European cities reading their historical layers, its preoccupation with the way that individual lives carry the unacknowledged weight of historical catastrophe, and its meditative prose that makes no distinction between the personal and the historical
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Americanah
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Ifemelu discovering race in America — Adichie's novel shares Open City's portrait of an educated African intellectual in Western cities who sees those cities through eyes formed by a different history; both Julius and Ifemelu are perceptive observers of the racial landscape around them, and both novels are interested in what it means to be Black in a city that was built partly on Black labor and is now characterized by Black absence
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The Unconsoled
by Kazuo Ishiguro
A famous pianist arrives in a European city he cannot quite recognize and is drawn into an endless series of obligations he cannot complete — Ishiguro's most experimental novel shares Open City's dreamlike movement through an unnamed European city, its narrator who is present in every scene but fundamentally inaccessible, and its sense that the city itself is a projection of the narrator's psychological state
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Mrs Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
A June day in London, Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith moving through the same city — Woolf's stream-of-consciousness novel is one of the foundational texts behind Open City's method of using a walk through the city as a structure for interior consciousness; both novels make the city legible as a text to be read by a specific kind of walking, thinking mind
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Saturday
by Ian McEwan
A London neurosurgeon's Saturday unfolding through one day in February 2003 — McEwan's novel shares Open City's single-city structure, its interested, observational narrator moving through a great city, and its concern with the way that political events (the Iraq War protests; 9/11's aftermath) impinge on the private consciousness of a person who is only partly available to history
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Portrait of a Lady on Fire
by Teju Cole
Cole's essay collection Known and Strange Things — meditations on photography, music, and global travel; recommended alongside Open City for readers who want to understand the intellectual world from which the novel emerges, and who want more of Cole's meditative prose outside the novel form
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In the Skin of a Lion
by Michael Ondaatje
Patrick Lewis building early twentieth-century Toronto — Ondaatje's novel shares Open City's interest in the buried labor and history of a great city, its portrait of immigrant workers whose presence shaped the city but who are absent from its official history, and its lyrical prose that makes visible what the city's surfaces conceal
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