Open City
Teju Cole
A psychiatrist walks New York, and the walking becomes the story.
Cole's narrator, Julius, a half-Nigerian, half-German doctor, wanders Manhattan and later Brussels in loose, essayistic chapters that fold in migration, memory and the city's buried histories of violence. The plotless drift and an unsettling late revelation about the narrator drew comparisons to W. G. Sebald. It became a reference point for a cosmopolitan, diasporic strain of writing about Africa and elsewhere.
Its legacy. Cole went on to write widely on photography and the politics of the image.
- Author
- Teju Cole
- First published
- 2011
- Genre
- Novel
- Theme
- Contemporary Voices, Memoir and Testimony
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