Open City

"It’s a very beautiful novel and very unusual in its construction. Open City is about a solitary narrator who for most of the story is just going on walks through New York. There’s no conventional plot. It’s filled with substance about the city and snapshots of characters he encounters along the way. It is almost like a musical variation, returning to the same themes and places over and over again in slightly different ways. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter On one walk the narrator ends up near the [Ground Zero] site. On another occasion, he goes to view the miniature model of the city at the Queens Museum of Art and notes the twin beams of light on the southern tip of Manhattan, which represent the World Trade Center. 9/11 keeps resurfacing, indirectly and almost allusively, in really interesting ways. Unlike some of the fiction that is explicitly about 9/11, Cole is grappling with issues related to 9/11 on a pretty profound level. I guess a 9/11 novel is one that grows out of the attacks in one way or another and uses literature to try to shed some new light. It seems to cover such a wide range of books – from ones that are trying to completely reinvent that day to ones where it’s only a plot device to reroute characters lives. And it includes one where 9/11 isn’t even mentioned – my novel, The Submission ."

"This is a wonderful novel which came out last year, written by a first time Nigerian writer who now lives in New York, and is a prolific tweeter . In many ways it is a similar type of book to the work of [the late German writer and academic] WG Sebald. It’s a series of walks around New York, and is one of those books in which nothing happens and everything happens. He observes and is also an actor in the life of the city. It is one of the most powerful books on living in a city that I’ve read in a long time. I’ve included it on this list because I feel that we need to read works of fiction to understand cities too. We need to dream about the city as much as we need to see it as a scientific project. Novels about cities are some of the best ways that we come to learn about the places in which we live or could live. We still have a Dickensian idea of what London is, because of the power of Dickens’s imagination. Instead we need an up-to-date, modern vision of what it’s like to be not quite an outsider and not quite an insider either in a modern, globalised city. It is a search for belonging as well as a desire to remain an individual. There is a tug and a draw; but also a wish that one doesn’t get drowned in the city, that one maintains one’s own personality. Especially for immigrants and new arrivals, this has been a constant debate. Teju Cole’s book is also good on the people you bump into and the situations you cannot control as you wander around a city. So the city is not a lonely place, but it’s also a place of fear because you don’t know what’s around the corner."

"One of the most important influences is W G Sebald. Sebald was born in Germany, lived in Britain, and died in a car crash in 2001, just after the publication of his novel Austerlitz . Sebald has had a huge, almost subterranean influence on literature. His first three or four books are hard to categorise. I think his best one is called The Rings Of Saturn , in which the narrator goes on a walking tour around East Anglia. The walking tour results in him having a nervous breakdown. Everything he sees is connected to destruction. He sees a beautiful stately home, and it’s tied up with the bombing of the Second World War, and the failure of the sugar-beet crop. Or he sees a small-gauge railway, and he discovers that the train was originally built for the emperor of China, although it was never sent due to the Boxer Rebellion, in which tens of thousands of people were killed. Sebald has influenced writers such as Robert MacFarlane , who intellectualises walking and experiencing in his environmental writing. Teju Cole’s novel is similarly less plot-driven and more world-driven. Yes, Cole’s narrator is a half-American, half-Nigerian man living in New York, although he travels extensively. You learn about the people he meets while travelling. For example, he meets an extremely well-educated Muslim migrant in a phone shop in Brussels, and they talk about left-wing politics. Simultaneously, you learn scraps about the narrator, as it were from his reflections in other people. Many of the stories in this novel are about migrants, and the movement of people getting into America, or failing to get into America. Although I want to avoid spoilers, as the novel develops, you uncover something very unsettling about the narrating main character. Indeed, there are different levels of blindness. The most obvious blindness is that of the populations of New York or Brussels to migrants and the effects of migration. There is another sort of blindness, in which the narrator is escaping from something, and is blind to his own behaviours in all sorts of interesting ways."