http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/07/a-visit-to-w-g-sebalds-grave.html

JULY 30, 2012

ALWAYS RETURNINGPOSTED BY TEJU COLE

8

One morning this past June, I played truant from a conference I was attending in Norwich,

England, and called a taxi to take me out to the countryside. But the taxi was late, and I had to

stand and wait a while. When it finally arrived, shortly after nine, there was some confusion.

Was this the taxi I had hired? Was I the person the driver had been sent to pick up? Had some

other passenger, not yet waiting there at the circular drive at the heart of campus, called the

dispatcher? We only had each other: I was going somewhere and he was prepared to take

someone somewhere. I entered the car.

It was a gray morning, and visibility was poor. The high latitude and the date—it happened to be

the summer solstice—meant the sun had been up since four-thirty, but fog persisted. I told the

driver where I was going, and we drove in silence for a while through mild traffic and quiet

streets, until the city began to thin out in the gray. And where exactly in Framingham Earl?, the

driver asked me. St. Andrew’s Church, I said, reciting what I had written down: near Poringland,

just off the Yelverton Road. He knew it.

I looked out the window, watching the landscape slip by, the houses, the hedges, the fields and

farms, the strange looking bales of hay bound in black plastic, the road signs with their

unfamiliar East Anglian names, the heavy, threatening trucks that barrelled down the busier

roads. The driver broke the silence and became talkative, flitting from one subject to another in a

laconic but unceasing way, not really caring much whether I was listening or interested.

I like the area and I like travelling in it, he said. There are many airfields around here, not just in

Norfolk but also Suffolk and many other parts of the country. It’s just something I do. I have a

spare bit of time, yeah, I go down to an airfield, see an air show, or just visit a disused field, go

down there, remember what it was like. Places like Greenham Common, down in Berkshire. You

know about that, yeah? I said I didn’t, but he could see now that I was making some notes, that

he had captured my interest. He forged ahead.

Greenham Common’s a major one. That’s where your C.N.D. camp was, yeah, the women’s

peace camp, all that. Used to be cruise missiles and all sorts there through the eighties, until the

nineties. I went down there, bit of runway left, but otherwise it’s all gone. And right around here,

in Norfolk, with all the airfields and bases and what have you, this was called Little America

during the war. Whole area was full of American air bases. During the war, the Second World

War, mind you, bomb groups were based here and they used to go out on flying missions from

here in the evenings. We are near the coast, and they’d take off from here to bomb the German

cities, from here and from Suffolk, too.

There is someone who would have loved to talk to you about this, I said, and as I said it, there

was a sudden catch in my throat. Only then did the driver introduce himself, turning back for a

moment with his hand on the wheel, his blue eyes a little bulbous, but the palest and most

guileless of blues, tending almost towards gray. My name’s Jason, he said. And, with the same

laconic urgency as before, he continued talking. Bentwaters was another big Cold War airbase,

he said. That closed down in 1993, thereabouts, but many of the men just stayed here, you see.

They’d been here so long, they were part of the life here, these American airmen. They married

local girls. There’s a museum down there in Bentwaters, that’s in Suffolk, they’ve got some of

the old airmen giving talks. Tell you what, I think the place belongs to a family now, they bought

the airfield, if I’ve got that right. The Kemble family, it’s theirs now. There’s just the one plane

flying from there now, a Spitfire, and it’s flown by a lady called Carolyn Grace. She’s nearing

sixty now, but she still takes the plane out. Only lady that flies a Spitfire in this country, to the

best of my knowledge. Strange to say, her Spitfire was flown in a mission over Normandy on the

morning of the D Day landings. And there was another base in Woodbridge, close to the coast,

and that one had an emergency landing field, with an airstrip three times your normal airstrip

length. That’s for your planes coming in from missions, maybe in distress or something.

Jason talked, and we drove on, through small country roads that were like a postcard idea of rural

England, winding, narrow, sedate roads that, at sudden intervals, became larger roads, fierce,

fast, and dangerous roads that seemed to have barely enough space for the heavy traffic that plied

them. On one of these larger roads, just as I noticed a sign for a village called Dunston, a large

trailer rumbled past us at speed, and whether from the shock of that overtaking vehicle, or

because I had eaten nothing that morning, or perhaps due to some uneasiness brought about by

Jason’s stories, I felt carsick for the first time in my life. And at that very moment, with a

flickering photographic recall, as though someone had just switched on a slide projector, I

remembered something S. had written. Looking it up now, I am surprised by how accurate my

memory of it was, save for a few of the statistical details:

His thoughts constantly revolved around the bombing raids then being launched on Germany from the sixty-seven airfields that were established in East Anglia after 1940. People nowadays hardly have any idea of the scale of the operation, said Hazel. In the course of one thousand and nine days, the eighth air fleet alone used a billion gallons of fuel, dropped seven hundred and thirty-two thousand tons of bombs, and lost almost nine thousand aircraft and fifty thousand men. Every evening I watched the bomber squadrons heading out over Somerleyton, and night after night, before I went to sleep, I pictured in my mind’s eye the German cities going up in flames, the firestorms setting the heavens alight and the survivors rooting about in the ruins.

Are you alright? Jason said, glancing at the rearview mirror. I had rested my forehead on the

window at the back and bunched myself up on the seat. I must have looked terrible. I feel ill, I

said. I think I’d like to get something to eat, is there a small shop nearby where we could stop?

Jason said there was a place right ahead, just past the Poringland Road, and within a few minutes

we pulled in near a busy intersection. I went into the shop to buy a banana and a bottle of apple

juice. It was about a mile away from where we were, in Framingham Pigot, in December, 2001,

that S. had had a heart attack while driving his Peugeot. The car crashed and S. had died

instantly. His daughter, in the passenger seat, had been badly injured. As I thought about how

close in space these events were, even though by now removed in time, I noticed from the back

seat of the taxi the headlines of theEastern Daily News, pasted in front of the shop: “MAN JAILED

FOR MURDER OF NORFOLK PENSIONER.” It was another set of lives, another set of fates rising to

the surface for a moment before falling into history.

Northwest of here is Swanton Morley, Jason said, when he saw that I had recovered somewhat,

eager to resume his storytelling. I’ve been to that as well, there is another airfield there, they’ve

got acrobatic displays. And just to tell you how a little bit of history opens things up, yeah, I

noticed a small memorial when I was there, didn’t recognize the name. But just from the name of

the airfield, I was able to go home and on the computer find out who that was, what happened to

him, why there’s a memorial. With just a little bit of information your computer can tell you so

much. Christopher Wilkins, that’s the name, he was flying in an airshow, in 1998, when his

engines stalled and he went down. And while Jason was telling me this, I remembered one of

S.’s micropoems in “Unrecounted”:

On 8 May 1927the pilots Nungesser & Colitook off from Le Bourget& after thatwere neverseen again.

Jason said, as though he were commenting directly on my own silent thoughts: These people are

worth remembering. It’s nice to think that people will want to remember the past, because it

shapes who we are, at the end of the day. I try to remember, you know. I’ve even been to some

airfields in Germany. Well—his tone changed, and he stopped the car, bringing me out of my

reverie—here we are. St. Andrew’s Church. I’ll just wait out here for you.

It was a quiet, shaded lane. The fog had lifted, but the day was not bright. There was not a soul

around. I raised the slim iron latch of the wooden gate, which was overgrown with creepers, and

went around the old Norman church with its characteristic East Anglian round tower. Round-

tower churches are rare in England now, except in Norfolk and Suffolk. St. Andrew’s is built of

honey-colored stone, its churchyard full of old stones, old graves, well-kept but arranged

somewhat haphazardly. Flowers were in bloom all over, and there was in particular a profusion

of foxgloves.

I searched. Finally, coming around the chancel, I saw S.’s gravestone: a slab of dark marble, a

slender marker shaded by a large green bush. There he is, I thought. The teacher I never knew,

the friend I met only posthumously. Some water had trickled down the face of the slab, making

the “S” of his name temporarily invisible, as well as the second “4” in 1944 and the “1” in 2001.

The erasures put him into a peculiar timelessness. Along the top of the gravestone was a row of

smooth small stones in different shades of brown and gray. There was a little space on the left. I

picked up a stone from the ground and added it to the row. Then I knelt down.

How long was I there?

When I returned to the car, I asked Jason to drive me back to Norwich, to the Church of St. Peter

Mancroft in the city center. Jason said: Just to satisfy my curiosity, this grave you came to see,

he’s a writer, yeah? What’s his name, maybe I can find out more about him. I told him the name.

He’d never heard it. He was a sort of local historian, I said, like you. Like you, he didn’t want the

past to be forgotten, especially the small and neglected stories. He lived in this area a long time,

taught literature up at the university. Jason turned around, and from under his glasses I could see

both a merriment and a melancholy. He was originally from Germany, I said. Germany? he said.

Well, that’s what you’d call ironic. And he wrote down the name.

At St. Peter Mancroft was the memorial to Sir Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-century

physician and antiquarian whose weird and digressive texts “Urn Burial” and “Religio Medici”

had meant much to me as a young would-be physician. I did not read S. until later, after I

abandoned my medical studies. Only later still did I find out that S. had been strongly influenced

by Browne. That connection with Browne, and with others, like Nabokov and certain obscure

historians of Northern Renaissance art, helped me to understand something of the uncanny

feeling I had when I first read S., and the feeling that I still have each time I read him: a feeling

of return rather than of arrival.

That afternoon, thinking of Jason’s eyes and the slight mischief in his serious mien, I was faintly

aware of others travelling the same circuits, pulled by an unidentifiable gravitational force into

certain habits of mind and psyche. In “The Rings of Saturn,” S. had written:

Across what distances in time do the elective affinities and correspondences connect? How is it that one perceives oneself in another human being, or, if not oneself, then one’s own precursor?

I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the University of East Anglia, where he had

taught for more than thirty years. A large magpie followed me around, disappearing for spells at

time, but always returning, a solitary bird, sharp black and white, bigger than I expected, and as

starkly devoid of color as a woodcut. I am not superstitious, and thought nothing of it. But the

bird was persistent. These things, as S. said in one of his last interviews, once you have seen

them, have a habit of returning, and they want attention. He said this with regards to the interred

past, but I think he possibly meant more.

Later, in the unending late afternoon of the longest day of the year, Sam, one of the conference

organizers whom I had gotten to know that week, and who had come to Norwich just a few

weeks before S. died, said—with no prompting from me—that he had noticed, on the few

occasions he had seen him, that S. always wore two watches, one on each wrist. Was it

something to do with the mystical properties of different metals? Was it some strange sense of

time that demanded simultaneous witness? Or was it simply S.’s dry sense of humor? And were

the watches even set to the same time zone, or was one testifying to past time, the way his

writing did? Sam didn’t know, but I found myself thinking again of the magpie, its talent for

collecting this and that, and its eye for the sudden shards of brightness that enliven the ordinary. I

said good night to Sam and, returning to my hotel in the last light, well past nine, saw the bird

again, going from bush to bush in the uphill path ahead of me, little more than a shadow now.

Teju Cole is a photographer and writer. His novel “Open City” was published last year.

Photograph by Teju Cole.

http://www.tejucole.com/praise/

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2011/02/28/110228crbo_books_wood?currentPage=all

BOOKS

THE ARRIVAL OF ENIGMASTeju Cole’s prismatic début novel, “Open City.”BY JAMES WOODFEBRUARY 28, 2011

Teju Cole has made his novel as close to a diary as a novel can get, and his narrator is both spectator and flâneur.RELATED LINKS

PRIMARY SOURCES: AN EXCERPT FROM TEJU COLE’S “OPEN CITY.”

KEYWORDS

TEJU COLE; 

“OPEN CITY” (RANDOM HOUSE; $25); 

DÉBUT NOVELS; 

W. G. SEBALD; 

J. M. COETZEE; 

JOSEPH O’NEILL; 

ZADIE SMITH

Publishers now pitch their books like Hollywood concepts, so Teju Cole’s first novel,

“Open City” (Random House; $25), is being offered as especially appealing to “readers

of Joseph O’Neill and Zadie Smith,” and written in a prose that “will remind you” of W.

G. Sebald and J. M. Coetzee. This is shorthand for “post-colonialism in New York”

(O’Neill), “lively multiracial themes” (Smith), “free-flowing form with no plot, narrated

by a scholarly solitary walker” (Sebald), “obviously serious” (Coetzee), and “finely

written” (all of the above). There is the additional comedy that Cole’s publishers,

determined to retain the baby with the bathwater, boldly conjoin Smith and O’Neill,

despite Smith’s hostility, advertised in an essay entitled “Two Paths for the Novel,” to

O’Neill’s expensive and upholstered “lyrical realism.”

This busy campaign for allies does a disfavor to Teju Cole’s beautiful, subtle, and,

finally, original novel. “Open City” is indeed largely set in a multiracial New York (the

open city of the title). Cole is a Nigerian American; he grew up in Lagos, came to

America in 1992, at the age of seventeen, and is a graduate student in art history at

Columbia University. The book’s half-Nigerian, half-German narrator walks around New

York (and, briefly, Brussels), and meets a range of people, several of them immigrants or

emigrants: a Liberian, imprisoned for more than two years in a detention facility in

Queens; a Haitian shoeshiner, at work in Penn Station; an angry Moroccan student,

manning an Internet café in Brussels. This narrator has a well-stocked mind: he thinks

about social and critical theory, about art (Chardin, Velázquez, John Brewster), and about

music (Mahler, Peter Maxwell Davies, Judith Weir), and he has interesting books within

easy reach—Roland Barthes’s “Camera Lucida,” Peter Altenberg’s “Telegrams of the

Soul,” Tahar Ben Jelloun’s “The Last Friend,” Kwame Anthony Appiah’s

“Cosmopolitanism.”

So the novel does move in the shadow of W. G. Sebald’s work. While “Open City” has

nominally separate chapters, it has the form and atmosphere of a text written in a single,

unbroken paragraph: though people speak and occasionally converse, this speech is not

marked by quotation marks, dashes, or paragraph breaks and is formally indistinguishable

from the narrator’s own language. As in Sebald, what moves the prose forward is not

event or contrivance but a steady, accidental inquiry, a firm pressurelessness (which is to

say, what moves the prose forward is the prose—the desire to write, to defeat solitude by

writing). The first few pages of “Open City” are intensely Sebaldian, with something of

his sly faux antiquarianism. On the first page, the narrator tells us that he started to go on

evening walks “last fall,” and found his neighborhood, Morningside Heights, “an easy

place from which to set out into the city”; indeed, these walks “steadily lengthened,

taking me farther and farther afield each time, so that I often found myself at quite a

distance from home late at night, and was compelled to return home by subway.”

FROM THE ISSUE CARTOON BANK E-MAIL THIS

But I hope the prospective reader will turn that first page, because the novel soon begins

to throw off its obvious influences. The prose relaxes into a voice rather than an effect,

and it becomes apparent that Cole is attempting something different from Sebald’s

project. Eschewing the systematic rigor of Sebald’s work, as well as its atmosphere of

fatigued nervous tension, Cole has made his novel as close to a diary as a novel can get,

with room for reflection, autobiography, stasis, and repetition. This is extremely difficult,

and many accomplished novelists would botch it, since a sure hand is needed to make the

writer’s careful stitching look like a thread merely being followed for its own sake.

Mysteriously, wonderfully, Cole does not botch it: “When I turned around, I saw that I

was at the entryway of the American Folk Art Museum. Never having visited before, I

went in”; “In early December, I met a Haitian man in the underground catacombs of Penn

Station”; “The days went by slowly, and my sense of being entirely alone in the city

intensified”; “At the beginning of February, I went down to Wall Street to meet Parrish,

the accountant who was doing my taxes, but I forgot to bring my checkbook”; “Last

night, I attended the performance of the Ninth Symphony, which is the work Mahler

wrote after Das Lied von der Erde.”

The narrator of “Open City,” Julius, is in his final year of a psychiatry fellowship at

Columbia Presbyterian, and the book covers roughly a year, between the fall of 2006 and

the late summer of 2007. He is around thirty, and tells us that he came to America as a

university student. He is estranged from his German-born mother; his father died when he

was fourteen. But these personal details are withheld over many pages, and only very

gradually sifted into the narrative. They finally arrive at a curious angle, so that we

always feel, not unpleasantly, that the book began before we started it. We learn about

Julius’s being African, for instance, by following clues: first of all, he discusses Yoruba

cosmology; then he goes to see the film “The Last King of Scotland,” and mentions that

“I knew Idi Amin well, so to speak, because he’d been an indelible part of my childhood

mythology.” On the next page, he mentions that he was a medical student in Madison,

Wisconsin, and recalls an uncomfortable dinner experience there, when an Indian-

Ugandan doctor, forced to flee the country by Idi Amin, announced to his guests that

“when I think about Africans I want to spit”: “The bitterness was startling. It was an

anger that, I couldn’t help feeling, was partly directed at me, the only other African in the

room. The detail of my background, that I was Nigerian, made no difference, for Dr.

Gupta had spoken of Africans.” After thirty or so pages, we have discovered that Julius is

Nigerian, but only by indirection. There is an interesting combination of confession and

reticence about Julius, and about how he sees the world, and, insofar as the novel has a

story, this enigma of an illuminated shadow is it—which turns out to be all we need.

Well, not quite, because we also need a flâneur to see interesting things in the city, and to

notice them well, and Cole’s narrator has an acute, and sympathetic, eye. Sometimes he is

witty and paradoxical, in a way that recalls Roland Barthes. Watching a park full of

children: “The creak-creak of the swings was a signal, I thought, there to remind the

children that they were having fun; if there were no creak, they would be confused.”

More profoundly, he offers this paradox about Manhattan’s relation to its rivers:

This strangest of islands, I thought, as I looked out to sea, this island that turned in on itself, and from which water had been banished. The shore was a carapace, permeable only at certain selected points. Where in this riverine city could one fully sense a riverbank? Everything was built up, in concrete and stone, and the millions who lived on the tiny interior had scant sense about what flowed around them. The water was a kind of embarrassing secret, the unloved daughter, neglected, while the parks were doted on, fussed over, overused. 

Watching Simon Rattle conduct Mahler at Carnegie Hall, Julius is alive to the sorrow of

the composer’s “long but radiant elegy.” He thinks of the strange fact that a hundred

years ago, “just a short walk away from Carnegie Hall, at the Plaza Hotel, on the corner

of Fifty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue, Mahler had been at work on this very symphony,

aware of the heart condition that would soon take his life.” Then, before the music has

ended, an old woman rises from her front-row seat, and goes up the aisle: “It was as

though she had been summoned, and was leaving into death, drawn by a force invisible to

us. The old woman was frail, with a thin crown of white hair that, backlit by the stage,

became a halo, and she moved so slowly that she was like a mote suspended inside the

slow-moving music.” Cole prepares his effects so patiently and cumulatively, over many

pages of relatively “flat” description, that the image of the old woman leaving as if for

death, suspended like a mote in the music, seems not forced or ornamental but natural

and almost inevitable.

At these moments, and, indeed, throughout “Open City,” one has the sense of a

productive alienation, whereby Cole (or Julius) is able to see, with an outsider’s eyes, a

slightly different, or somewhat transfigured, city. It is a place of constant deposit and

erasure, like London in the work of Iain Sinclair (or in Sebald’s “Austerlitz”), and Julius

is often drawn to the layers of sedimented historical suffering on which the city rests.

There is, most obviously, the gaping void of Ground Zero: “The place had become a

metonym of its disaster: I remembered a tourist who once asked me how to get to 9/11:

not the site of the events of 9/11 but to 9/11 itself, the date petrified into broken stones.”

But there were streets before the towers went up, cleared to make way for the new

buildings, “and all were forgotten now. Gone, too, was the old Washington Market, the

active piers, the fishwives, the Christian Syrian enclave that was established here in the

late 1800s. . . . And, before that? What Lenape paths lay buried beneath the rubble?” The

area of Manhattan between Duane Street and City Hall Park, where Julius walks, was

once the Negro Burial Ground, where “the bodies of some fifteen to twenty thousand

blacks, most of them slaves,” had been interred.

The modern city as unacknowledged palimpsest might seem a familiar theme, were it not

renovated by Julius’s attention to the contemporary, in particular to those in danger of

becoming modern victims of prosperous urban forgetfulness or carelessness. He goes

with a church group to visit a detention center in Queens, and hears someone give a

harrowing but riveting account of escaping the civil war in Liberia, arriving in Spain, and

then, after two empty years in Lisbon, finally getting the chance to go to the States, on a

Cape Verdean passport. “He had the option of saving money by flying to La Guardia, and

he’d asked the ticketing agent if she was sure La Guardia was also in America,” Cole

writes. “She had stared at him, and he shook his head, and bought the JFK ticket

anyway.” It is at the more expensive airport that the émigré’s journey ends: for the past

twenty-six months, he has been “confined in this large metal box in Queens.”

Julius is not, really, a natural sympathizer, despite his tender eye. He went with the

church group because his girlfriend was going, and he can’t help noticing “that beatific,

slightly unfocused expression one finds in do-gooders.” This complexity adds friction to

his relationships with some of the people who, coming from the same continent as Julius,

want to assert a kinship with him. A cabdriver is irritated that Julius gets in without a

salutation, and upbraids him. “Not good, not good at all, you know, the way you came

into my car without saying hello, that was bad,” the driver says, and continues, “Hey, I’m

African just like you, why you do this?” But Julius feels “in no mood for people who

tried to lay claims on me.” A black postal worker tries to read his bad poetry to Julius,

and he makes a mental note to avoid that post office in the future.

The best, and longest, episode in the book is also Cole’s subtlest portrait of alienation and

affection. Around Christmas, Julius goes to Brussels, ostensibly to look for his

grandmother, who had been living there, but perhaps also to escape New York. At a local

Internet café, he starts talking to Farouq, a young Moroccan who works behind the

counter, and who surprises Julius with his reading material: a commentary, in English, on

Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History.” Julius is at first intimidated by Farouq’s

intellectual confidence and ideological certainty, but he is attracted by it, too. Farouq

“had the passion of youth, but his clarity was unfussy and seemed to belong (this was the

image that came to me) to someone who had undertaken long journeys.” Farouq reveres

Edward Said, is at ease with the work of Paul de Man and Benedict Anderson. He tells

Julius that he prefers Malcolm X to Martin Luther King, because King’s passive

resistance is too Christian: “This is not an idea I can accept. There’s always the

expectation that the victimized Other is the one that covers the distance, that has the

noble ideas; I disagree with this expectation.” To Julius, Farouq seems angry, “in the grip

of rage and rhetoric,” and yet his animation and need are also exciting: “The victimized

Other: how strange, I thought, that he used an expression like that in a casual

conversation. And yet, when he said it, it had a far deeper resonance than it would have in

any academic situation.” Farouq seems, to Julius, “as anonymous as Marx in London.”

A few days pass—Julius has a sexual encounter with an older Czech woman, spends a

day in his rented apartment reading Roland Barthes (the French aestheticism a telling

counterpoint to Farouq’s more ideological texts), and meets Farouq and a fellow-

Moroccan, Khalil, for a drink. The two Moroccans work each other up, and now Farouq

is more uninhibited, and perhaps more predictable. The conversation between the

Moroccans turns on the question of whether America really has a left wing; on Israel, and

how it has a reputation as a democratic state but is really a religious one; on how Saddam

Hussein was the least of the Middle East dictators. Saddam, Farouq says, should be

admired because he stood up for his country against imperialism. Julius protests, but is

argued down. “As we spoke,” he reflects, “it was hard to escape a feeling that we were

having a conversation before the twentieth century had begun or just as it had started to

run its cruel course. We were suddenly back in the age of pamphlets, solidarity, travel by

steamship, world congresses, and young men attending to the words of radicals.”

Soon, Farouq is telling Julius about his childhood, and his intellectual ambitions, how he

came seven years ago from Morocco to Brussels, to study for an M.A. in critical theory:

“I wanted to be the next Edward Said!” He wrote his thesis on Gaston Bachelard’s

“Poetics of Space”:

The department rejected my thesis. On what grounds? Plagiarism. They gave no reason. They just said I would have to submit another one in twelve months. I was crushed. I left the school. Plagiarism? This had nothing to do with me. The only possibilities are either that they refused to believe my command of English and theory or, and I think is even more likely, that they were punishing me for world events in which I had played no role. My thesis committee had met on September 20, 2001, and to them, with everything happening in the headlines, here was this Moroccan writing about difference and revelation. That was the year I lost all my illusions about Europe. 

Julius records this without obvious comment. The long scene ends with Julius still

impressed by Farouq’s “seething intelligence” but fatalistically sure that he will remain

“one of the thwarted ones.”

This is one of the very few scenes I have encountered in contemporary fiction in which

critical and literary theory is not satirized, or flourished to exhibit the author’s

credentials, but is simply and naturally part of the whole context of a person. And how

very subtle of Teju Cole to suggest, at the same time—but with barely an authorial

whisper—that perhaps Farouq leans too heavily on his theoretical texts, and that this was

the real cause of the plagiarism charge. (The 9/11 scapegoating seems unlikely, though

Julius doesn’t say so.) And how delicately Cole has Julius pulsate, in contradictory

directions, sometimes toward Farouq, in fellow feeling, and sometimes away from him,

never really settling in one position.

We learn a lot about Farouq’s anger, in these pages, but we also learn a lot about Julius’s

liberalism—about its secret desires, its dissatisfaction with itself, and its passivity. More

than anything, “Open City” seems a beautifully modulated description of a certain kind of

solitary liberalism common to thousands, if not millions, of bookish types. Julius’s

friends, for instance, are into various green and ecological causes; Julius stands to one

side, and it is clear that his political inactivity has to do with his ability to see things so

well. “It was a cause, and I was distrustful of causes,” he tells us, “but it was also a

choice, and I found my admiration for decisive choice increasing, because I was so

essentially indecisive myself.”

He is engaged but disengaged. He is curious about the lives of others, but that curiosity is

perhaps purchased at the expense of commonality. (This contradiction is even more

strongly felt in the work of V. S. Naipaul, whose influence is apparent in Cole’s book.)

The city is “open,” but perhaps only in a negative way: full of people bumping their hard

solitude off one another. One’s own small hardships—such as forgetting one’s A.T.M.

card number, as Julius does, and being consumed by anxiety about it—may dominate a

life as completely as someone else’s much larger hardships, because life is brutally one’s

own, and not someone else’s, and is, alas, brutally banal. In a sad and eloquent passage,

Julius suggests that perhaps it is sane to be solipsistic:

Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him. Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people’s stories, insofar as these stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic. 

This is a brave admission about the limits of sympathy, coming as it does near the end of

a book full of other people’s richly recorded stories. Julius is not heroic, but he is still the

(mild) hero of his book. He is central to himself, in ways that are sane, forgivable, and

familiar. And this selfish normality, this ordinary solipsism, this lucky, privileged

equilibrium of the soul is an obstacle to understanding other people, even as it enables

liberal journeys of comprehension. Julius sets out only to put people’s lives down on

paper, and not to change them, as Farouq, his secret sharer and alter ego, would want to

do. But then it is because Julius set out not to change Farouq’s life but to put it down on

paper that we know Farouq so well

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/books/review/Syjuco-t.html?pagewanted=all

These Crowded StreetsBy MIGUEL SYJUCO

Published: February 25, 2011

The very first words in “Open City,” an indelible debut novel by Teju Cole, imply an inevitability, connecting the narrator’s past with his present task, that of explaining his place in the world: “And so,” his narrator, Julius, says, “when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city.”

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Teju Cole

Teju Cole

OPEN CITYBy Teju Cole

259 pp. Random House. $25.Related

Excerpt: ‘Open City’ (February 27, 2011) Books of The Times: ‘Open City’ by Teju Cole  (May 19, 2011)

Julius’s peripatetic wanderings and their connections to personal histories — both his own and those of the people he meets — form the driving narrative, allowing him to reflect on his adopted New York, the Africa of his youth, the America of today and a Europe wary of its future. With every anecdote, with each overlap, Cole lucidly builds a compassionate and masterly work engaged more with questions than with answers regarding some of the biggest issues of our time: migration, moral accountability and our tenuous tolerance of one another’s differences.

It’s the autumn of 2006, and Julius is in his early 30s, absorbed with the humanistic intellectual life and a lover of classical music. Born in Lagos to a German mother and a Nigerian father, Julius has always felt like something of an outsider. While at the Nigerian Military School, he was mindful of not being sufficiently black. After moving to the United States to study medicine, he learned what it was to not be white. As the perpetual Other, Julius casts a disquisitive eye over the world he encounters, one where a diversity of identities and ideas is often overlooked as the norm.

From Morningside Heights, his peregrinations liberate him from the stresses of both his work as a psychiatric fellow at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital and his recent breakup with his girlfriend. His feet lead him widely, to Tower Records and Central Park, to diners, movies and the subway, to the financial district with its gaping wound at ground zero. Julius visits friends, goes to museums and concerts, vacations in

Europe. He attends a poetry reading at the 92nd Street Y. Everyday activities, all.

The significant travels occur, however, via the interactions of the quotidian and his mind, an intellect at once solid in its urbanity and restless in its isolation. Julius summons a palimpsest of connecting and conflicting histories. Some of these concern the oppressed, like the slaves interred in the African burial ground near Wall Street, or the Moroccan clerk at an Internet cafe who gives his perspective as a Muslim intellectual. Others involve the forgotten: a statue in Chinatown, erected in honor of a 19th-century antidrug activist, now collecting pigeon droppings; a Liberian refugee, sitting in limbo in a detention center in Queens. Most of the histories, however, are of the often memorialized — Mahler, Nietzsche, Alexander Hamilton, New York City police officers killed in the line of duty — who live on either in the work bequeathed to us or in the myths constructed around them after their deaths.

Cole’s writing is assured, his ideas are well developed, and his imagery is delicious: a bus is “like a resting beast,” public chess tables are “oases of order and invitations to a twinned solitude,” and in an ailing friend’s room Death hovers “with its cheap suit and bad manners.” In places Cole’s prose recalls W. G. Sebald’s, or the young James Joyce’s in “The Dead.” And his talent for juxtaposing the past and the present turns this book into a symphonic experience: a disabled person on the subway sets Julius thinking about a Yoruba creation myth; this connects with a book his patient wrote about Cornelis Van Tienhoven, the brutal settler of New Amsterdam, and the horrors inflicted on the Native Americans in subsequent centuries; this segues into thoughts on skepticism about global warming, then partisan politics, then Idi Amin, then racial representation in the film “The Last King of Scotland” and other media, until finally Julius considers his own place among it all. Thus he decides to visit Brussels, with the vague notion

of finding his aging German grandmother, his remaining link to his maternal past.

Plot developments like this one can at times seem perfunctory. When Julius gives up on finding his grandmother, we’re left with the impression that his trip was mostly an excuse to meditate on the differences between Europe and America. Other times, metaphors may seem too capacious, or references too ponderous. (The connection between a bust of the Vichy-supporting poet Paul Claudel and Auden’s odes to Yeats and the Bruegel painting in a museum nearby may not immediately bring to mind, as it’s meant to, the responsibilities of the intellectual during troubled times.) And while this book will disappoint some who require plot twists or a character’s epiphanic transformation, Cole need not worry. His readers will be those who understand that all stories are interconnected, that literature is not mere entertainment, and that art is nothing if not an extended conversation spanning eras, nations and languages.

The novel’s importance lies in its honesty. Characters make declarations that may seem untenable to some readers, though these characters are not zealots. One genteel European who spent her life practicing medicine in the United States describes America as a “terrible, hypocritical, . . . sanctimonious country.” The Native American author who wrote about Van Tienhoven finds it “a difficult thing to live in a country that has erased your past.” An Ivy League academic wonders whether choosing the circumstances of one’s death is not only more dignified, but also simply right. In a cafe, a young philosopher with a taste for egalitarianism believes that Israel has no title to its territory in Palestine, reasoning that its claim is only as strong as his is, as a Moroccan, to Spain: “Now how would it be if we invade the Spanish peninsula and say, Our forefathers used to rule here in the Middle Ages, so it is our land. . . . It makes no sense, does it?”

And yet Cole, who is in his mid-30s and moved to the United States from Nigeria in 1992, is neither radical pinko nor reckless provocateur. One realizes from his novel that the promises of America are so great that they often can’t help but lead to disillusionment. Through his characters he shows how the world is seen by those who are forced or unafraid to consider the possibilities beyond the status quo; he shakes the familiar comforts and urges us to confront viewpoints usually dismissed as inflammatory.

I did have one larger objection, to a discomfiting turn the novel takes toward its end. A woman from Lagos whom Julius knew in his youth shares an ostensibly shocking revelation about a transgression in his past. To this forgotten or repressed or secreted memory he responds ambiguously. In any other story, such a twist would send tremors across the pages, yet here, set against the novel’s grand scope, it feels unnecessary, either a misstep by a young author or an overstep by a persuasive editor. Could the denouement not simply have comprised the undramatic culmination of the book’s ideas?

“A book suggests conversation,” Julius explains early on. “One person is speaking to another.” In “Open City,” this dialogue does precisely what literature should do: it brings together thoughts and beliefs, and blurs borders. Cole suggests that we re-examine, as perhaps limited and parochial, the idea of the Great Fill-in-the-Nation Novel. Instead, we can look again at the notion of what Goethe called Weltliteratur. This book may not be the Great World Novel, but it points to such a work’s possibility and importance. Judging from his performance here, Cole may eventually be the one to write it.

Miguel Syjuco is the author of “Ilustrado,” winner of the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize.A version of this review appeared in print on February 27, 2011, on page BR12 of the Sunday

Book Review with the headline: These Crowded Streets.

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http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/17/open-city-teju-cole-review

Open City by Teju Cole – reviewA novel about spatial relations, it is also effective at dramatising the relationship between objective and subjective experience

o Giles Fodeno The Guardian, Wednesday 17 August 2011 05.00 EDTo Jump to comments (2)

Illustration by Clifford Harper

Julius is an American psychiatrist training in Manhattan. Of German and Nigerian extraction, he is rootless in New York. Entranced by the city, he is anxious not to fetishise his outsider status. He is also on the rebound from a relationship. These states of mind connect with walks that he makes across the urban grid, now for a purpose, now aimlessly.

Along with seemingly profound reflections on cultural forms, descriptions of these walks constitute most of Open City, the first full-length novel by Teju Cole, which has been much praised in the United States for its prose style

and for its take on the city as a site of power, desire and community. It is akin to one of those "spatial stories" identified by the philosopher Michel de Certeau in his book The Practice of Everyday Life.Breaking through the anonymity of the crowd, Julius has encounters with strangers, acquaintances and friends. These include Moji, a woman he knew as a girl in Nigeria, but had forgotten, or chosen to forget. He remembers his time in the Nigerian Military School, goes to Brussels, has sex with a middle-aged Czech woman there, comes back, has a picnic, gets mugged.

Saving a climactic invasion from Julius's past, that's about it so far as action goes. But action is the wrong spoor by which to pursue this book. What comes strongest off it, instead, is a cosmopolitan range of reference. Moments of genuine narrative are most often the springboard for a jump into book chat, music trivia or historical disquisition.

This dangerous gamble pays off. The environment of which Open City is mostly mimetic is the hall of semiotic mirrors inside our heads, and the proliferating data now so easily accessed by our fingertips: twin arenas of information which, at once dazed and delighted, we struggle to connect both to everyday life and an overall interpretative code.Dramatising this, Cole recommences a process of synthesis between two aspects of the novel which have long consorted and contested with each other: between (as Malcolm Bradbury once put it) "on the one hand, the novel's propensity toward realism, social documentation and interrelation with historical events and movements, and on the other … its propensity toward form, fictionality, and reflexive self-examination".Cole further calls on at least three city walkers out of literary history: the "strolling spectator" type which has informed the novel from its earliest days; the Baudelairean flâneur which transferred into fictional prose with tales such as André Breton's Nadja (Julius's ex is called Nadège); and the roving "I" of European romantic modernism, which has found its most eloquent recent exponent in the work of WG Sebald.Open City is also effective at dramatising the relationship between objective and subjective experience. In one fabulous scene, Julius is stranded on a fire escape, high on the edge of Carnegie Hall. It's night-time. He finds himself lost in relativity, plunged between the wailing of an ambulance "reaching me from seven floors below" and "starlight that was unreachable because my entire being was in a blind spot".These are the limits of being open. The book's title comes from the declaration by defenders, in the event of imminent capture, that a city is

"open" and the enemy can march in. Reading Open City, it is important to bear the title in mind, and not become impaled on fixed ideas about what kind of person Julius is. Otherwise one might assume that his contemplations should be taken at face value.For as well as being an excellent novel about spatial relations (compare Tom McCarthy's equally satisfying Men in Space) and layers of urban history and immigrant experience, Open City is a novel about an intellectual show-off. And if what Moji says is true, he is something much worse.Negative space (the space between forms or around utterances) is key. We are disposed to read Julius's reflections for their so-called content, whereas we do better to read them in relief, for what they say about him. This is the real juice. We have to work hard to get it, searching in the gaps for what Julius calls "a double story". At the same time, it's in the nature of language and experience that the totality will elude us.

Part of the delight of Cole's book is how it exploits refinement until Julius reveals himself as a poseur through intellectual over-reaching, disclosing an irony for which readers may not be prepared. One instance of this comes when Chinese musicians in a park remind him "of Li Po and Wang Wei, of Harry Partch's pitch-bending songs, and of Judith Weir's opera The Consolations of Scholarship".How to read Open City is obliquely signalled by these pretentious pratfalls. In the notes of the trumpet of another Chinese band, Julius hears the "spiritual cousins of the offstage clarion in Mahler's Second Symphony". I'm not a musician, but I suspect that's twaddle. But when he hears, in the same tune, the "simple sincerity of songs I had last sung in the school yard of the Nigerian Military School", and is returned, trembling, to a state of childhood innocence, the observation has the force of something genuine. The little emotional space to which no one else in the city is likely to have access is much more important than the public-facing attitudes of the cultural dandy.Giles Foden's Turbulence is published by Faber.

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http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/imperfect-strollers-teju-cole-ben-lerner-w-g-sebald-and-the-alienated-cosmopolitan/

Imperfect Strollers: Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, W.G. Sebald, and the Alienated Cosmopolitan byMichelle Kuo & Albert WuThe evolution of the flâneur

February 2nd, 2013RESET - +

Still from Grant Gee's documentary Patience (After Sebald)

IN HIS 1863 ESSAY “The Painter of Modern Life,” Charles Baudelaire introduces his audience to Monsieur Constantin Guys, the “perfect stroller (flâneur).” This cosmopolitan gentleman is driven by curiosity, joy, and a desire for new experiences. A “passionate spectator,” he strolls about urban spaces, observing the crowd. Even though the flâneur is alone, he is at ease. His wandering gives him inspiration. He is “away from home” yet feels “everywhere at home.” He is at once an artist, a man of the world, and a “spiritual citizen of the universe.” Baudelaire’s perfect flâneur is gifted with the ability to both understand and penetrate the world: “Few men are gifted with the capacity of seeing; there are fewer still who possess the power of expression.” Not only does the flâneur capture our world, his art transforms it. “The external world is reborn upon his paper,” Baudelaire writes, “natural and more than natural, beautiful and more than beautiful, strange and endowed with an impulsive life like the soul of its creator.”Two recent debut novels, Teju Cole’s Open City and Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, question such optimism in the transformative potential of the flâneur’s wandering gaze. The 21st century flâneurs at the center of these novels are dislocated and wayward. Adam Gordon, the narrator of Lerner’s novel, is white, born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, living in Madrid on a prestigious arts fellowship. Julius, Cole’s protagonist — a half-Nigerian, half-German immigrant living in New York City — is also completing a fellowship, in psychiatry. Both are well traveled and erudite, steeped in their knowledge of the Western arts and humanities. And both, like Constantin Guys, wander about their respective cities, going nowhere in particular. They become increasingly thoughtful, yet also remain alone inside their thoughts. They are liberal, yet doubt the efficacy of political action; they are erudite, yet question the use of erudition. Knowledge, they realize, is neither a refuge nor a means to liberation. Both are fundamentally alienated from the society in which they have chosen to live. Both narrate their lives in similar form — the plot of each novel is as desultory as the narrators themselves, and unapologetically interior. 

This obsession with interior life prevents the narrators from making a connection with others. Julius cannot feel kinship with Africans who try to connect with him on the grounds of racial solidarity. Exiting a museum and encountering a rainstorm, he hops in a cab and fails to greet his driver. The driver, an African, takes offense: “Hey, I’m African just like you, why you do this?” Julius apologizes, but thinks to himself, “I wasn’t sorry at all. I was in no mood for people who tried to lay claims on me.” Nor can he feel at home in America. Refusing to listen to American radio because of its endless commercials — “Beethoven followed by ski jackets, Wagner after artisanal cheese” — he instead tunes into stations from Canada, Germany, or the Netherlands. 

Like Julius, Adam is an outsider. He is driven by a self-conscious fear that he is a fraud. Unable to express his emotions in Spanish, he uses his linguistic ineptitude to his advantage when he dates a Spanish woman named Isabel. “Our relationship,” he writes, “largely depended upon my never becoming fluent, on my having an excuse to speak in enigmatic fragments or koans.” But Adam, too, takes no consolation in the company of his fellow expats, who he finds insufferable: whenever he encounters another American, he “shower[s] him or her with silent contempt.” 

This disconnection from other humans contradicts the political and philosophical ideal of cosmopolitanism, as outlined by Kwame Anthony Appiah, the British-Ghanaian Princeton professor and philosopher: “[T]he idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kin, or even the more formal ties of shared citizenship.” For Appiah, cosmopolitan thinking guides ethical and moral responsibility, and is inherently political. Above all, conversation is at the heart of the cosmopolitan project. Appiah’s optimism undergirds a belief that crosscultural conversation can foster both a mutual respect for difference as well as an unveiling of commonly held beliefs and ideas. He aspires to the ideal of a “rooted cosmopolitan,” or the “cosmopolitan patriot,” a person who can be simultaneously loyal to a particular place, and to universal ideals.

In Cole’s Open City we encounter a whole host of Appiah’s “rooted cosmopolitans.” One of the emotional centerpieces of the book occurs when Julius meets Farouq, a Moroccan who mans the cash register at an Internet and telephone café in Brussels. Farouq is thoroughly

cosmopolitan, able to greet his customers in French, Arabic, English, and Spanish. He is also learned, quoting from Edward Said and Gilles Deleuze, engaging Julius in a conversation about Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History.” Farouq marvels at his job, showing Julius the log of calls on a computer that monitors all of the Internet and phone traffic. Colombia, Egypt, Senegal, Brazil, France, Germany — the list “looked like fiction,” Julius says, “that such a small group of people really could be making calls to such a wide spectrum of places.” And Farouq utters a sentence that might have come straight from the mouth of Appiah when he calls the Internet café “a test case of what I believe; people can live together but still keep their own values intact.”But Julius is skeptical of Farouq’s cosmopolitan ideals. Returning to the Internet café, Julius spots Farouq engaged in a conversation with an older Moroccan man. Farouq “was in the grip of rage and rhetoric […] A cancerous violence had eaten into every political idea, had taken over the ideas themselves, and for so many, all that mattered was the willingness to do something.” Recoiling, Julius leaves the cafe. Julius suggests that the cosmopolitan ideal may be illusory, slipping easily into a politics of injury: “It seemed as if the only way this lure of violence could be avoided was by having no causes, by being magnificently isolated from all loyalties.” Yet even as he casts judgment on others’ wrathful politics of injury, Julius recognizes that his own political abstinence — he is the man “magnificently isolated from all loyalties,” the man with no cause — is equally damning. His own lack of loyalties, he thinks, may very well be “an ethical lapse graver than rage itself.”A similar political abstinence characterizes Lerner’s protagonist. When asked to comment on the relationship between poetry and politics, Adam reverts to his standard refrains: “I don’t know” and “Poems aren’t about anything.” On March 11, 2004, coordinated bombings go off in Madrid, killing hundreds. The morning of the bombings, Adam awakes at the Ritz, where he has just engaged in a failed attempt to woo Isabel. (He has charged the hotel expenses to his parents’ credit card, which he has been warned to use only in an “emergency.”) In the aftermath of the bombings, Adam’s Spanish friends are swept up in the political fervor and demonstrations, but Adam, for the most part, does not participate, choosing instead to sleep and watch from the sidelines. Teresa — another woman he wants to sleep with — asks him how he is going to “participate in this historic moment.” Adam responds, “It’s not my country.” Later, he

remarks, “When history came alive, I was sleeping in the Ritz.” Adam’s tone here is typical: offhand, self-deprecating, and never claiming to take part in that which has political stakes or historical meaning.

For Adam and Julius, it appears that all available ideological and political options are unappealing, or have failed: right-wing fascism, left-wing modernism, cosmopolitan patriotism, the belief in the West and in the arts as a source of progress. Instead of committing themselves to an ideological position, they wander. Wandering may be a very literal way to avoid staking out a position. To wander is to avoid belief.

¤

This habit of avoidance leads to a series of prevarications for both protagonists — most disturbingly, in their relations with women. Adam lies, repeatedly, in order to bed women. He lies, first, to Teresa, claiming that his mother is dead, as a way to evoke sympathy at his tragic situation, and later repeats this lie to Isabel. Julius, on the other hand, lies to himself. A startling revelation occurs in Open City’s final pages when Moji, the sister of a childhood friend from Nigeria, invites Julius to a party. She speaks to him “in a low and even voice, emotional in its total lack of inflection” and tells him that, when she was 15, he forced himself on her. She has thought about that day for the rest of her life. But, she charges, Julius behaves as if he “knew nothing about it, had even forgotten her, to the point of not recognizing her.”The shock of the idea that Julius might be a rapist requires us to circle back to the beginning of the novel, searching for clues, hoping that we can know for certain what took place. Suddenly the genre of the work has shifted. We are in the world of detective stories and mystery. Did Julius do it? We find no clues in the scene at the supermarket, where he and Moji meet: “It was clear she expected me to remember her. I didn’t.” Later, at a picnic, he signals to the reader his attraction to her: “She leaned forward to pluck a grape from its stem on the plate. She was wearing a tank top, and I caught sight of the dark curve of her breast.” Though sinister in retrospect, even here there is no hint of whether he indeed forced himself violently on her. (There are other clues, even more attenuated, to which we might point. When Julius hears the sounds of women activists protesting, holding a vigil, he closes the window. Does his disinterest in their political cause, his absence of any investment in it,

suggest that he could have been callous to Moji in the past? When his mother tried to tell Julius that he himself was a product of rape, he didn’t listen — this, he tells us, is a long-suppressed regret of his.)

Thus, at novel’s end, and even after rereading the text in its entirety, we cannot be sure whether the rape occurred. This is likely Cole’s intention: were we certain, we could too easily cast judgment on Julius, leaving us — the readers — unimplicated. Cole suggests that Julius’s crime is not physical but mental: not an outrageous, externally identifiable act of violence, but the repressions of his self-rationalizing internal life. A woman, after all, has told him he raped her, and Julius declines to reflect upon it, speaking about it only briefly and abstractly: “we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people’s stories, insofar as those stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic.”

What is most striking about the potential rape is how Julius speaks of it in the same, remote manner as he speaks of the strangers he has previously encountered. Julius folds his accuser’s narrative into the rest of the stories, refusing to accord primacy to her beliefs. His distance from her sorrow, his capacity to hide from it — whatever else occurred, here is a crime of which we can be certain. In constructing an unreliable narrator, Cole may be suggesting that the reader must now rise to the task of judging him. How we read Julius implicates us. We ought not to forgive a poet, Cole tells us elsewhere, for “writing well.” 

“I adore imaginary monsters, but I am terrified of real ones,” says Julius’s mentor, an old Japanese professor. The monster, Cole suggests, is Julius himself. The way we narrate ourselves lies at the heart of evil. Of what do we neglect to speak? To which people, and to what acts, do we accord primacy? We are not heroes, and our narration does not make us such.

“You’ll say nothing,” says Moji, the potential rape victim, to Julius, her potential rapist. “You’ll say nothing.”

And indeed Julius doesn’t, least of all to his readers.

¤

This false, slippery narration, which the reader is called upon to interpret as self-deception, damns the 21st century flâneur. The erudite wanderer, it turns out, is not a “spiritual citizen of the universe” but a fraud; far from

wanderers like Adam and Julius being “gifted with the capacity for seeing,” the reader is commanded to see through their lies. Lerner and Cole’s alienated cosmopolitans reflect a radical break from the 19th-century vision of the flâneur that inspired Baudelaire, the wanderer “everywhere at home.” For Adam and Julius, there is nowhere they might call home.

It’s not surprising that these 21st-century flâneurs are different creatures from their 19th-century predecessors. It is evident that Lerner and Cole have been influenced by a multitude of contemporary factors, from the insights of postmodernism and postcolonialism and the ease of travel, to the dislocation of living in a globalized age and the instant gratifications of technology. But there are 20th century literary antecedents to Adam and Julius, too. Standing between Baudelaire’s flâneur and the one found in these recent books is the figure of W.G. Sebald, a German writer to whom both Cole and Lerner have been frequently compared. (Both borrow trademark Sebald devices: Lerner inserts cryptic photographs into his text; Cole tells self-contained, seemingly disparate stories of the people and places he encounters; all three writers structure their novels as a series of first-person essays.) Sebald was a product of the cataclysmic 20th century: his father had served in the Wehrmacht, the Nazi army, and helped to invade Poland. A prisoner of war in France until 1947, he never talked to Sebald about his wartime experience. It is perhaps not surprising that Sebald’s characters — most of whom are travelers or flâneurs of one kind or another — write as if steeped in melancholy.The unnamed narrator of Sebald’s 1995 novel The Rings of Saturn, for instance, wanders throughout the county of Suffolk, England. In the book’s final chapter, he traces the journey of a silkworm moth. The domesticated silkworm, Bombyx mori, is one and a half inches across and one inch lengthways. Its wings are ashen white. The creature has extraordinary, natural gifts. Within the span of six or seven weeks, it “reel[s] out an uninterrupted thread almost a thousand yards long.” According to legend (Sebald’s narrator recounts), the silkworm was first cultivated by the ancient Chinese emperor Huang-ti. These techniques traveled from China to the Western world — to Greece and the Aegean Sea, and then to early modern Italy, France, England. The early industrial revolution, coupled with an increasingly administrative state, extracted prolific amounts of silk from these tiny, yet resilient, worms.

The tale of the silkworm ends with the Nazis, who, “with that peculiar thoroughness,” assume totalizing control over its powers of production. Sebald’s narrator is surprised when he comes across a Nazi propaganda film that promises that silk production will bring “the best and cleanest of all worlds.” The film of “truly dazzling brightness” shows men and women in white coats, in white rooms, at snow-white spinning frames:

We see the hatching, the feeding of the ravenous caterpillars, the cleaning out of the frames, the spinning of the silken thread, and finally the killing, accomplished in this case not by putting the cocoons out in the sun or in a hot oven, as was often the practice in the past, but by suspending them over a boiling cauldron. The cocoons, spread out on shallow baskets, have to be kept in the rising steam for upwards of three hours, and when a batch is done, it is the next one’s turn, and so on until the entire killing business is completed.

Sebald is too delicate, too oblique to explicitly link the silkworm to terms such as capitalism, globalization, modernity, totalitarianism, historical trauma,or, finally, genocide. But one gathers, by story’s end, that the story of the silkworm is valuable to him less as a matter of historical fact than as a parable: a lens that brings history into focus.           Sebald’s melancholy flâneur, then, already disinherits Baudelaire’s 19th-century optimism. In Sebald’s world, Baudelaire’s giddy intoxication with worldly knowledge takes a darker turn; the quest for knowledge only leads to a never-ending void. “The greater the distance, the clearer the view,” he writes in The Rings of Saturn:[O]ne sees the tiniest of details with the utmost clarity. It is as if one were looking through a reversed opera glass and through a microscope at the same time. And yet, says [Thomas] Browne, all knowledge is enveloped in darkness. What we perceive are no more than isolated lights in the abyss of ignorance, in the shadow-filled edifice of the world.

The silkworm is like that isolated light in the abyss of history. It guides us imperfectly, to see where we have arrived.

Crucially, the narrator of The Rings of Saturn does not tell us personal details of himself, so that his grief appears to have little to do with his own life and everything to do with the silkworm. Whatever trauma he may have experienced — perhaps exile from Germany, loss of family members in the war, or something else entirely — is relevant only insofar as it

explains an acute sensitivity to all forms of death. Indeed, his cryptic withholding of personal details about his life feels remarkably natural to his being and his tone. His grief absorbs the grief of others, and his melancholy merges with the decaying landscape.If Sebald’s world is a house of grief that invites the reader in, then the house Cole constructs in Open City appears locked, his pain exclusive to himself. Observing other people’s pain, Julius repeatedly deplores his incapacity to imagine it, whether from this century or the previous ones. Coming upon mass graves of black people, he reflects: “How difficult it was, from the point of view of the twenty-first century, to fully believe that these people, with the difficult lives they were forced to live, were truly people, complex in all their dimensions as we are, fond of pleasures, shy of suffering, attached to their families.” Later, witnessing a group of Rwandans dancing, he asks himself, “Who, among those present […] had killed, or witnessed killing? The quiet faces surely masked some pain I couldn’t see." Cole’s narrator suggests there is a cyclical nature of trauma — arguably, this is an ahistorical view of suffering. What propels his grief is not a view of history’s trajectory, but his own incapacity to assimilate into its all-encompassing present or past. Nor does he tell us what appears to be the origin of this incapacity: we never find what provoked the estrangement between Julius and his mother, a key to the puzzle. Cole’s personal withholding of crucial details further isolates him from us, the readers. Indeed, this is how both Julius and Adam strive for, and establish, their authentic voices: they alienate readers on purpose. They are too self-conscious to risk appearing ideological, and too paralyzed to speak of where their generation stands vis-à-vis history. In contrast, Sebald’s withholding draws in readers, who view it as evidence of his trauma. Doubting their own empathy, Julius and Adam do not expect that we mourn alongside them; Sebald is sure that we will.

Herein lies Cole and Lerner’s essential difference from Sebald. Though Sebald is silent about politics, his silence does not originate from ambivalence and doubt — doubt of others’ sincerity, doubt in his own capacity to feel fully, and, finally, doubt in his own position to speak. Rather, his silence comes from certainty. Through his story of the silkworm, as with his other worlds — of the dying herring, of cities destroyed by carpet-bombing — he tells us what is worth grieving: the

20th century’s extraordinary and permanent breakage from the past. This trajectory is unrecognizable from previous paths we have taken.

Sebald’s view of suffering, then, is deeply historical. With clarity and momentum, he builds the case for his melancholy, which — by virtue of being born into this historical trajectory — we each have been bequeathed.

¤

From where do postmodern cosmopolitans like Adam and Julius find hope and relief from melancholy? There is light to be found in Open City, its main sources art and music. In Leaving the Atocha Station the light is at first humor, of which self-deprecation and compulsive lying are the materials. The plot eventually offers some relief too: in the final pages, Adam develops some confidence in his Spanish and builds a genuine connection with a woman. Lerner suggests that hope lies in the excision of self-consciousness, a less partial view of oneself.For Sebald, hope is the same as wonder. This wonder is the current that propels his narrator, and that pulls him ashore. In spite of the cataclysms of the 20th century, Sebald retains some of the passionate and joyful curiosity of the 19th-century flâneur, as he wanders not only in space but through time. The mere length of his enumerations signals his delight. He describes Sir Thomas Browne’s compendium of real and imaginary creatures: the chameleon, the salamander, the ostrich, the gryphon and the phoenix, the basilisk, the unicorn, and the amphisbaena, the serpent with two heads. Investigating further, Sebald’s narrator discusses another creature he finds in this compendium: Baldanders, a sixth-century Germanic myth in which the creature “changes into a scribe […] and then into a mighty oak, a sow, a sausage, a piece of excrement, a field of clover, a white flower, a mulberry tree, and a silk carpet.”

Why collect and delight in these fabled creatures? The perpetually metamorphosing Baldanders, the silkworm unspoiled by human use, the unicorn and basilisk and gryphon — each of these spell out human desire. Though the object is fantasy or whim, our desire for it finally is something that we might call universal. In these myths, beings can endure forever, even though “nothing endures […] [o]n every new thing there lies already the shadow of annihilation.” Sebald suggests that these imaginary and real creatures grant the possibility that “our world [is] no more than a

shadow image of another one far beyond.” Elsewhere, he speaks of the afterlife: he does not mean a Christian or even religious concept, but rather an alternate world, and in particular, an alternate history.

What ultimately drives Sebald’s narrator is not doubt, but desire: to believe in a shadow world; to find evidence of it in the wondrous impossibilities of the natural world; to tell stories of metamorphosis, and therefore to imagine the indestructibility of soul, being, or spirit. Through these desires, we escape the mourning that we each have equally inherited. Thus, unlike Cole and Lerner, Sebald does choose a position from where his narrator speaks. In grief yet also in wonder, he invites us to observe alongside him. What certainties arise from his observations? The history of our world, for Sebald, is like a thread of a thousand yards woven by silkworm. Our recent past has broken it irrevocably.