Open City | Teju Cole

To read Teju Cole’s Open City is to experience an unnerving metamorphosis. I picked it up knowing that it comes highly rated in literary circles, and, as it is often the case, a cloud of expectation weighed upon me. Like many, I was captivated by the lyrical prose, easygoing and poetic, which often brought to mind Kazuo Ishiguro’s style—contemplative and inward. I loved the reference to the bird migrations at the beginning, which immediately puts one in a whimsical mood (contrast this however with the half-gothic ending, of birds losing their bearing and slamming into the Statue of Liberty). I found the writing quite relaxing and engaging at the start, just the sort of style that eases one into a story without too much of a fuss.

The detail with which Teju describes feelings, observations, or physical objects and environments is astonishing. Many instances abound in the book, and some are particularly magical:

I became aware of just how fleeting the sense of happiness was, and how flimsy its basis: a warm restaurant after having come in from the rain, the smell of food and wine, interesting conversation, daylight falling weakly on the polished cherrywood of the tables. It took so little to move the mood from one level to another, as one might push pieces on a chessboard. Even to be aware of this, in the midst of a happy moment, was to push one of those pieces, and to become slightly less happy.

Even the simple act of walking acquires a flourish that takes one’s breath away:

As she drifted to the entrance and out of sight, in her gracefulness she resembled nothing so much as a boat departing on a country lake early in the morning, which, to those still standing on the shore, appears not to sail but to dissolve into the substance of the fog.

Teju hides these lovely snippets in layers of Julius’ (the narrator) meditations, philosophical ramblings and seemingly interminable descriptions of physical spaces, mostly of New York and Brussels. And therein lie the highs and lows of Open City: the initial high dissolves into a predictable sequence of diary-like observations and records of Julius’ encounters and conversations covering a controversial topic after another—migration, identity, assimilation, history, war, politics. As one covers more than half the book and flips the pages towards the end, the initial high morphs into a sense of puzzlement. I discovered that there wasn’t a plot at all, and, on the surface, it appeared as if Teju has just used Julius as a mouthpiece to enunciate his views on certain themes. This is not an uncommon technique at all in literary fiction, but it is a well-beaten path, and I felt I was missing something that had caught the eye of all those raving about the book. Furthermore, if one follows politics and current affairs fairly closely, most views in the book surely have been encountered before.

However, just as soon as a sense of disappointment (and perhaps self-doubt in your discerning abilities as a reader) creeps in, Teju throws in a twist, which is an odd thing to say about a story without a plot. The narrator, Julius, psychiatrist-in-training, half-Nigerian and half-German, and living in New York, is told of a transgression he allegedly committed back in Nigeria as a fourteen-year old. The accuser is Moji, a sister of a friend of his in Nigeria, and apparently Julius, as he narrates to us, has completely forgotten about this transgression, or chooses not remember it, or in his mind, perhaps it never occurred at all. Some have criticized this twist as unnecessary, but, in my view, it brings to the fore the question whether the narrator is reliable at all. It forces the reader to revisit Julius’ encounters and voila, everything is not so banal after all.

And so from the high to the low, another high comes up. We discover that Teju’s trick, in creating a very unlikeable but seemingly benign character in Julius, who philosophizes a lot and comes off as a junkie for highbrow stuff—paintings, classical music—has blindsided us into believing every word Julius says to us. However, beneath Julius’ sophistication, he is actually a man troubled by many things. He has a few friends, but is beset by solitude. He was born in Nigeria but, being light skinned, doesn’t really feel that he belongs there. In New York, he is just part of the ‘black brotherhood’, something he tries to eschew. He has broken up with his girlfriend. He is estranged from his mother. In fact, his is a narrative of failed interpersonal relationships. He goes to Brussels ostensibly for a chance to meet his German maternal grandmother, but doesn’t really look for her. Even the enjoyment of his preferred tastes, such as classical music concerts, is tempered by his apartness.

It becomes apparent that Julius, in his narration, is candid about some aspects of his life story, and less so about others. Memory, how we interpret it, and how we memorize certain events and suppress others, emerge as central elements that determine our self-assessment as individuals. Julius views himself as essentially a good person, but Moji’s accusation seems to torment him, and adds to the misery of his solitude. His narration henceforth becomes dark. In addition to his inordinate focus on classical musician Gustav Mahler’s death and Mahler’s ‘obsession with last things’, as well as the reference to birds dying off the Statue of Liberty, I sensed a fleeting allusion to suicide in the scene after the classical music concert as he looked down on the streets below and up at the stars:

My hands held metal, my eyes starlight, and it was as though I had come so close to something that it had fallen out of focus, or fallen so far away from it that it had faded away.

From a literary perspective, Open City is something of a masterpiece. Teju shows incredible skill in constructing a character so unlikeable that one is tempted to dislike the book itself. In the end, after some measure of exasperation at an unlikeable Julius, we nevertheless have to wonder, given the totality of his experience, what to feel for him. Sympathy? Disdain? Indifference? It is perhaps fitting that Julius is a psychiatrist, as his entire narration is probably a self-diagnosis. He is troubled by the fact that someone considers him a villain. This shows his innate desire to be a good person, even though in actual fact he may be different, or viewed differently. He is, after all, human.

From a subjective perspective however, Open City is a little less entertaining. There is quite a bit of subtle humour throughout the novel. Julius’ encounter with the taxi driver in New York who drops him way off his destination (whether deliberately or not is the matter of humorous conjecture) and the concern about bedbugs are some examples. To a large extent however, unless one lives in or is intimately familiar with New York and Brussels, and likes classical music and paintings, one is bound to experience some disaffection throughout the book.

In any case, one can tell, from the endless debates about Open City, and the fact that readers have had so much to say about it, that Teju Cole has written a pretty good book.

Picture Credit: Goodreads

Life Times: Stories 1952-2007 | Nadine Gordimer

Something disruptive always happens towards the end of a year. Should you venture to check my previous post, you may be astonished to discover the date—October 2014. Yes, that’s right. How is that even possible? And how does one return to a neglected blog with a straight face? Anyway, that’s a story for another day (thank God you can’t see my face right now, ha!).

Having last read Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People in October last year, and found her a very challenging writer to read, I decided to challenge myself even more. I picked up on her short story collection, Life Times: Stories 1952-2007. Well, good thing I play some chess and have perfected the art of returning again and again despite bad, ego-crushing defeats. It’s the same thing with the thirty-odd short stories in this collection: one has to have quite some resilience to start reading the next one.

July’s People is indeed a synopsis of Nadine Gordimer’s literary work. In my review, I found her writing esoteric and sometimes difficult to follow. This is reflected in the stories in Life Times. The writing is almost always detached and dispassionate; the prose-poetry is thick for long periods and is layered by complicated sentence constructions; and the stories are heavily theme and plot-based. Characters are almost always relegated in relation to theme and plot, and this renders many of the stories impersonal and therefore difficult to connect with. I thus found just a handful of characters memorable. In addition, there is heavy contextualization as a technique of building the plots. I have seen some reviews referring to the writing in this collection as ‘dry’, and it’s hard to disagree. It indeed acquires a pseudo-intellectual hue, and, as I noted in my review of July’s People, it tests the limits of normal fiction writing.

However, much of the writing is ethical and conscientious. Apartheid and related themes, such as interracial relations, feature prominently of course, as can be expected of a Nobel laureate from South Africa writing in that era. I was most impressed by Something Out There, which brings forth the raw fear among white people of black people, using parallel stories of a baboon on the loose in white suburbs and the constant threat of sabotage from Black freedom fighters. In Town and Country Lovers (Two), we see the distortion, by apartheid, of normal relations among humans on the basis of colour. It conveys the near totalitarianism of apartheid in all spheres of life from the get go:

The farm children play together when they are small; but once the white children go away to school they soon don’t play together anymore…so that by the time early adolescence is reached, the black children are making, along with bodily changes common to all, an easy transition to adult forms of address, beginning to call their old playmates missus and bassie—little master.

The relationship between Paulus (white) and Thebedi (black) however persists beyond this social construct, and they become lovers. Nevertheless, when Thebedi becomes pregnant with Paulus’ child, they cannot escape it anymore, and what happens is the stuff of heartbreak. Gordimer doesn’t present a one-dimensional story of apartheid however. In The Moment Before the Gun Went Off, a white farmer is genuinely distraught—and this puts off a white police officer—when he accidentally shoots dead one of his black farm ‘boys’ because he considers him a son. In Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black, a white professor decides to visit a town his great-grandfather lived in for five years in the hope he might meet relatives his great-grandfather might have sired with black women.

There are stories beyond the apartheid narrative. One that tugs at the heart is The Ultimate Safari, about a poor family escaping the civil war in Mozambique and seeking refuge in South Africa through the Kruger National Park in Mpumalanga. Some are personal, poignant and poetic, leaving a lasting impression. I very much liked the uplifiting The Soft Voice of the Serpent, about a man having to adjust to life after losing a leg. In an idyllic garden so poignantly portrayed, he notices a locust with a broken leg, facing a similar struggle.

In a week or two he did not have to read all the time; he could let himself put down the book and look about him, watching the firs part silkily as a child’s fine straight hair in the wind, watching the small birds tightroping the telephone wire, watching the old dove trotting after his refined patrician grey women, purring with lust…

Just lovely. Why Haven’t You Written is also inward, depicting a man in mid-life crisis who almost leaves his wife and children in a fit of discontent with his life. In short, the stories Gordimer has written span a wide spectrum of imagination beyond apartheid: an extramarital affair in Rain-Queen; a return to history in Livingstone’s Companions; post-struggle politics in A Soldier’s Embrace and At the Rendezvous of Victory; mild eroticism in The Diamond Mine; and even the life of a tapeworm in Tape Measure. Religion is also not spared—Second Coming imagines the second coming of Christ, who finds no life waiting for him (ouch). Curiously, Letter From his Father imagines a letter by Franz Kafka's father in response to Franz's real life open letter to him. It's pretty much a father's scorn at an unappreciative and wayward child. Franz's fans wouldn't be too happy reading or re-reading it.

I noticed too that Gordimer deftly applies biting irony in most of the stories. For instance, in A Soldier’s Embrace, a white couple has helped a liberation struggle in an African country, and as freedom dawns for the country, it doesn’t in the real sense for their manservant of 21 years, who they leave behind with nothing. Irony cuts through Which Era Would That Be?, in which a group of friends—black, white, coloured—interact.

It is impossible to discuss here all the stories, but they are all interesting in their own ways once one is able to overcome the somewhat difficult writing style that narrates them. If you haven’t read this collection, and are looking for a sturdier challenge than the usual easy reads, by all means, try it.

Picture Credit: Goodreads

July's People | Nadine Gordimer

Esoteric. The word came ringing in my head with every paragraph and page I weaved through in July’s People (1981) by 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature winner, the late Nadine Gordimer. As I paused to reflect on many a cryptic (I have seen some say ambiguous) sentence or paragraph, often delivered in a dispassionate and detached style, I thought of dynamites in small packages—the book is just 195 pages long, but carries with it enough intellectual heft to test the limits of normal fiction writing.

July’s People confronts inverted realities and the engendered ironies, contradictions, and conflicts. Set in apartheid South Africa, it imagines a violent uprising by black people against the apartheid government. The white and liberal Smales family—Bam, his wife Maureen, and children Victor, Royce and Gina—find themselves having to escape the violence in Johannesburg and take refuge in the rural village of their long-serving servant, July. Issues of race and class conflate as master-servant relations become obsolete.

Gordimer shows us that issues of race in apartheid South Africa were more complex than black and white. Bam and Maureen, white, liberal and against apartheid, still have to escape the black uprising, and yet find refuge among black people. The village chief is more worried about ‘those people from Soweto’—his fellow black people, albeit of different ethnicities—and is ready to receive help from the white government to fight them. While the adult couple struggles to fit in the village—Bam, for instance, avoids gumba-gumba (party) so he doesn’t have to drink the traditional beer that has ‘the same colour when drunk and when vomited’—their children appear to get along just fine with the black children, Gina with Anyiko particularly, whose friendship perhaps embodies the ideal anti-racism proposition. And even though July has served the Smales family for fifteen years, suspicions and misunderstandings still linger between them.

The ending of the story pretty much sums it all: cryptic and open to different interpretations. It comes somewhat abruptly, and leaves one grappling with what exactly is happening. Some may find this a little annoying; others may relish the challenge of figuring it out.

This is a highly nuanced book, and Gordimer uses a writing style that alternates between cryptic prose-poetry and knotty conversations. Rarely is an event, scenario, or twist in the story stated in a straightforward way; Gordimer possessed a great ability to bring these out in a subtle manner, so that they are apparent without being stated. Often, this places demands upon the reader: one has to decipher an intended meaning, which may not always be clear. Reading July’s People, at least for me, became a pseudo-intellectual exercise—one that I somewhat enjoyed, although it felt as if I was in literature class. I would recommend it as a challenging but conscientious and fulfilling read. 

Picture Credit: Goodreads

The Famished Road | Ben Okri

Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991), winner of the Booker Prize, is a veritable treat for lovers of fantasy and magical realism. It reveals fantastic leaps of imagination, dazzles in its descriptions of a spirit world, and grounds itself firmly in the real world, all in epic proportions. It pleasantly put me in the mind of fireplace stories of yore told by enchanting grandmothers to enraptured and wide-eyed grandchildren.

The Famished Road tells the story of Azaro, a spirit child (abiku) who chooses to live in the world of humans in an African country, presumably Nigeria, which is on the verge of independence and modernization. His life is a series of encounters with his spirit companions who wish to bring him back to the spirit world, but who fail nonetheless. He chooses the human world despite the suffering of his human parents, who face biting poverty and hunger. He stays simply out of love for his parents and the love they have for him against all odds. The book can therefore be seen, at a basic level, as a triumph of love and familial ties.

Ben Okri’s vivid, brisk and riveting narration and wonderful descriptions are something to behold. He possesses an incredible ability in using words to bring out scenes, many of which are chaotic, in a picturesque and clear way. He manages quite the feat in narrating the story convincingly in the voice of a child, which is something the reader has to accept and understand early on; otherwise one may be put off by what may appear to be simplistic writing. Indeed, the writing reminded me of the way we used to write compositions back in Primary school: full of short sentences, dramatic, fast paced, and simple.

Azaro’s life, in which he comes and goes, alternating between the real world and the spirit world, is used in the story as a metaphor of life through both everyday and epic periods of time. The story is cyclic: events appear to be repeated over and over. Strange beings, such as seven-headed spirits and three-eyed midgets, keep trying to take Azaro back to his spirit companions. His father keeps hosting feasts even though he cannot really afford it, and keeps fighting in boxing matches even though he gets wounded badly. Hunger, poverty, greed, corruption, and political violence keep recurring as themes. Recurrence thus becomes an attempt to characterize life itself—that what has been will always be, that there really are no beginnings and no endings, and that choosing a difficult path in the face of easier ones may be the only way to discover one’s purpose in life.

Some may nevertheless find the cyclic nature of the story a little jading and exasperating, as I did, especially considering the length of the book (over 500 pages), and that the ‘method in the madness’ reveals itself only towards the end. The book’s firm grounding in African cultures and beliefs is a plus for Africanists. Polemics encompassed in the story against colonialism, poverty, inequality, and political violence make it covertly political.

A deeply conscientious story, The Famished Road reveals paradoxes as an essence of life—that easy decisions are not really easy when weighed against one’s conscience. It starkly presents the wish for a better life by characters who are nevertheless firmly stuck in a difficult cycle of existence.

I enjoyed reading this book, surrendering myself to a child’s voice and narration replete with photographic, dramatic and vivid descriptions as well as funny exaggerations that can only come from a child’s story.

Picture Credit: Goodreads