Question 1

What happens in Open City? Is there a plot?

Accepted Answer

Open City is deliberately plotless in the conventional sense: Julius walks, thinks, reads, has conversations, visits places, and reflects on the histories embedded in the city around him. The novel accumulates meaning through these encounters rather than through a developing plot. In New York, Julius walks through neighborhoods thinking about their immigrant histories, visits an elderly Belgian professor who is dying, has conversations with a patient in the hospital and with a Moroccan man in an immigration detention center. In Brussels he wanders, visits a Malian musician, and thinks about the city's colonial history. Back in New York, he receives a piece of information from an old acquaintance about his own past that reframes everything we have read. This final disclosure is the novel's one dramatic moment, and its effect depends on the trust Cole has built with the reader through Julius's apparently unrestricted interiority.

Question 2

Is Open City a postcolonial novel?

Accepted Answer

Open City is a postcolonial novel in the sense that its narrator carries the history of the colonial relationship between Africa and Europe as part of his consciousness: walking through Brussels, Julius thinks about the Belgians in the Congo and the statues that still stand in their honor; in New York, he thinks about the African burial ground discovered in lower Manhattan and about the history of slavery that shaped the city he walks through. But the novel's engagement with these histories is meditative and associative rather than polemical: Julius absorbs history the way he absorbs everything else, through walking and thinking, and the novel is as much about his particular cast of mind — his combination of sympathy and detachment — as it is about the historical facts he encounters. Cole has been compared to W.G. Sebald in his method of weaving historical meditation into personal narrative.

Question 3

How does Open City use walking as a formal device?

Accepted Answer

Walking is the novel's primary formal device and its central metaphor. Julius walks as a way of thinking: the rhythm of walking corresponds to the rhythm of his prose, which moves associatively from one observation or memory to the next without the pressure of narrative progression. Walking also makes the city legible as a layered text: the streets Julius walks contain histories of immigration, displacement, violence, and forgetting that are not visible on the surface but that Julius's knowledge allows him to read. The novel belongs to a tradition of ambulatory literature — the flâneur tradition associated with Baudelaire and Benjamin, the Situationist dérive, the peripatetic novels of Sebald and Bernhard — while translating that tradition into a specifically African-diaspora experience of walking through European and American cities that were built partly on African labor and shaped by African presence.

Open City Reading Order

Complete Open City Book List

Open City

Every Day Is for the Thief

Known and Strange Things

Open City — Frequently Asked Questions

What happens in Open City? Is there a plot?

Is Open City a postcolonial novel?

How does Open City use walking as a formal device?

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