Reading Order
Open City Reading Order
Open City (2011) by Teju Cole is a debut novel of great formal intelligence and emotional distance — a meditation on belonging, loss, history, and the sediment of suffering that lies beneath the surfaces of modern cities, narrated by Julius, a Nigerian-German psychiatry resident in New York who spends his free time walking through the city (and, in a central section, through Brussels) and reflecting on what he sees, remembers, reads, and thinks. The novel has almost no plot in the conventional sense: Julius walks, thinks, and has conversations; the novel accumulates texture rather than building toward a climax. Cole has described W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn as the primary formal model for Open City, and the resemblance is clear: the same association of walking with memory and history, the same melancholy attention to the layers of the past that underlie the present, the same essayistic prose style that mingles description, reflection, and narrative without clear boundaries between them. But Cole brings to this form a specifically African diasporic consciousness: Julius is half-Nigerian, half-German, and his experience of New York is inflected by this double marginality — he is Black in a city that treats Blackness as a mark, and he is an African in a city that has forgotten (or never knew) the deep history of African presence in America (the novel spends time in lower Manhattan, where one of the largest African burial grounds in America was discovered in 1991). Open City is less accessible than Adichie's fiction but more formally innovative, and it has been compared to Philip Roth, W.G. Sebald, and V.S. Naipaul as well as to the African literary tradition.
Where to start
Open City — read it slowly; this is a novel of texture rather than plot. The Sebald comparison is useful: if you have read The Rings of Saturn or Austerlitz, the mode will be familiar.
Complete Open City Book List
- 1Buy
Open City
Teju Cole·2011·The novel — Julius walking through New York and Brussels, accumulating history and memory; the Sebaldian form applied to the African diasporic consciousness in America. - 2Buy
Every Day Is for the Thief
Teju Cole·2007·Cole's earlier novella — a narrator returns to Lagos after years in New York; the companion to Open City in its account of the diasporic consciousness encountering its country of origin. - 3Buy
Americanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie·2013·Adichie's diaspora novel — the Nigerian-American experience in a more accessible narrative register; the companion to Open City in contemporary Nigerian-American fiction. - 4Buy
The Rings of Saturn
W.G. Sebald·1995·Sebald's walking meditation through Suffolk — the formal model for Open City; the same association of walking, memory, history, and the sediment of past suffering in contemporary landscapes. - 5Buy
Austerlitz
W.G. Sebald·2001·Sebald's novel of architectural memory and the Holocaust — the second major Sebald formal influence on Open City; the trauma that is embedded in buildings and cities and gradually uncovered. - 6Buy
The Stranger
Albert Camus·1942·Camus's existentialist novel of emotional detachment — the emotional register of Julius's narration; a first-person narrator who observes the world with an unsettling flatness. - 7Buy
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison·1952·Ellison's Black American classic — the American racial consciousness that Julius is navigating as an African; the canonical American text that Cole's African perspective is in dialogue with. - 8Buy
Netherland
Joseph O'Neill·2008·O'Neill's post-9/11 New York novel of a Dutch financier — the contemporary literary New York walking novel that Open City is in conversation with; similar themes of belonging and dislocation in the same city.
Open City — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Open City about?
Open City is narrated by Julius, a half-Nigerian, half-German psychiatry resident at Columbia University in New York who spends his free hours walking through the city. The novel has almost no conventional plot: Julius walks, thinks, remembers, reads, and has conversations. He visits a dying Nigerian professor who was important to his childhood; he goes to Brussels for several weeks (ostensibly to look for his German grandmother), where he wanders through the city and has encounters with Moroccan immigrants and African diasporic communities; he returns to New York and continues walking. The novel is more interested in consciousness, history, and the sediment of suffering beneath urban surfaces than in story: Julius notices the African burial ground in lower Manhattan, thinks about the history of the Dutch in New York, reflects on his Nigerian-German mixed heritage and what it means to be Black in America.
Why is Open City compared to W.G. Sebald?
Cole has openly acknowledged W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn as the primary formal model for Open City, and the resemblance is immediately recognizable: the walking narrator whose movement through space triggers historical and literary reflection, the essayistic prose that mingles observation and meditation, the melancholy attention to the layers of the past embedded in the present, and the lack of conventional plot in favor of accumulated texture. But Cole brings something different to the Sebaldian form: where Sebald's narrator is typically a white European reflecting on European history (primarily the Holocaust), Julius is a Black African diasporic man reflecting on the history of slavery, the African diaspora, and race in America — subjects that the European walking-and-reflecting mode tends to avoid or cannot easily access.
What is the novel's treatment of New York?
Julius experiences New York as a city of layers — the contemporary city of psychiatry residents and coffee shops overlying centuries of other histories, including African history that is usually suppressed. The African burial ground in lower Manhattan (discovered in 1991 when construction workers uncovered the remains of hundreds of enslaved Africans) is a recurring reference point: beneath the financial district lies the physical evidence of the slavery that built it. Julius's walking is a form of urban archaeology — reading the city's surfaces for what they conceal. Cole is also interested in New York as an open city in the political sense: a city that is open to immigrants, that contains multitudes, that belongs to everyone and to no one. Julius's particular position as a Nigerian-German in America — not quite Black in the American sense, not quite immigrant, not quite at home — is the lens through which Cole examines this openness and its limits.
What is the novel's most controversial element?
Open City's most discussed and controversial element is a revelation near the novel's end: a woman from Julius's past appears and reveals that he sexually assaulted her years earlier. Julius's narration has never mentioned this; he has been narrating himself as a sensitive, melancholy, thoughtful observer, and this revelation retroactively calls everything he has narrated into question. The assault is not dramatized and is recounted only in the woman's brief, confrontational speech; Julius's response is a flat denial that the reader has no way to evaluate. Critics have debated what Cole intends with this revelation: whether it is a critique of the narrative unreliability of the sensitive male observer, a deliberate undermining of the Sebaldian walking-and-reflecting mode, or something else. It remains one of the most discussed structural choices in contemporary literary fiction.
What should I read after Open City?
After Open City, Teju Cole's Every Day Is for the Thief (2007) is the essential companion — a shorter novella about a narrator returning to Lagos. Cole's essays in Known and Strange Things (2016) continue the prose-essay mode of Open City. For Sebald, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz are the essential formal predecessors. For contemporary African literary fiction in different modes, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah is the most direct companion. For the tradition of the walking-and-reflecting novel, Joseph O'Neill's Netherland and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty are important. For the African-American literary tradition Julius is in conversation with, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time are foundational.
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