Teju Cole: Open City, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Kurzbeschreibung

Ein junger Arzt, nigerianischer Herkunft läuft ziellos durch die Strassen New Yorks und rekapituliert sein bisheriges Leben. Und obwohl er durch belebte Gegenden streift, verstärken die verschiedenen Gesichter denen er begegnet, das Gefühl der Isolation und Heimatlosigkeit. Ein eindringlicher Roman über nationale Identität, Rasse, Freiheit, Verlust, Heimat und Hingabe.

Rezension

Winner of the Hemingway Foundation / PEN Award for a distinguished first book of fiction

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award

"Reminiscent of the works of W. G. Sebald, this dreamy, incantatory debut was the most beautiful novel I read this year - the kind of book that remains on your nightstand long after you finish so that you can continue dipping in occasionally as a nighttime consolation." –Ruth Franklin, The New Republic

"A psychological hand grenade." –Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic , Best Books I Read This Year

"A meditative and startlingly clear-eyed first novel." – Newsweek /Daily Beast Writers' Favorite Books 2011

"This year, literary discovery came, for me, in the form of Teju Cole's debut novel, Open City , a deceptively meandering first-person narrative about a Nigerian psychiatry resident in New York. The bonhomous flâneur who strolls Manhattan from top to bottom, reveals, in the course of his walking meditations, both more about the city and about himself than we – or indeed he – could possibly anticipate. Cole writes beautifully; his protagonist is unique; and his novel, utterly thrilling." –Clare Messud in the Globe and Mail

"On the surface, the story of a young, foreign psychiatry resident in post-9 / 11 New York City who searches for the soul of the city by losing himself in extended strolls around teeming Manhattan. But it's really a story about a lost nation struggling to regain a sense of direction after that shattering, disorienting day 10 years ago. A quiet, lyrical and profound piece of writing." – Seattle Times , 32 of the Year's Best Books

"[Open City is] lean and mean and bristles with intelligence. The multi-culti characters and streets of New York are sharply observed and feel just right...Toward the end, there's a poignant, unexpected scene in a tailor's shop that's an absolute knockout." –Jessica Hagedorn, author of Toxicology in Salon. com "Writers choose their favorite books of 2011"

"I couldn't stop reading Teju Cole's debut novel and was blown away by his ability to capture the human psyche with such beautiful yet subtle prose." –Slate. com, Best Books of 2011

"An unusual accomplishment, 'Open City' is a precise and poetic meditation on love, race, identity, friendship, memory, dislocation and Manhattan bird life." – The Economist , 2011 Books of the Year

"The most interesting new writer I encountered this year." – Books and Culture , Favorite Books of 2011

"A Sebaldesque wander through New York." – The Guardian , Best Books of the Year

"An indelible debut novel. Does precisely what literature should do: it brings together thoughts and beliefs, and blurs borders...A compassionate and masterly work." – The New York Times Book Review

"The cool, concise prose of Open City draws you in more quietly, then breaks your heart. Who knew that taking a long walk in Manhattan could be so profound?" –Jessica Hagedorn, author of Toxicology in New York Magazine

"[Teju Cole] has a phenomenal voice...prodigious talent, beautiful language." – WNYC's The Takeaway

"Beautiful, subtle, and finally, original...What moves the prose forward is the prose - the desire to write, to defeat solitude by writing. 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." – James Wood, The New Yorker

"Nothing escapes Julius, the narrator of Teju Cole's excellent debut novel...In Cole's intelligent, finely observed portrait, Julius drifts through cities on three continents, repeatedly drawn into conversation with solitary souls like him: people struggli

Klappentext

A New York Times Notable Book • One of the ten top novels of the year -Time and NPR

NAMED A BEST BOOK ON MORE THAN TWENTY END-OF-THE-YEAR LISTS, INCLUDING The New Yorker • The Atlantic • The Economist • Newsweek / The Daily Beast • The New Republic • New York Daily News • Los Angeles Times • The Boston Globe • The Seattle Times • Minneapolis Star Tribune • GQ • Salon • Slate • New York magazine • The Week • The Kansas City Star • Kirkus Reviews

A haunting novel about identity, dislocation, and history, Teju Cole's Open City is a profound work by an important new author who has much to say about our country and our world.

Along the streets of Manhattan, a young Nigerian doctor named Julius wanders, reflecting on his relationships, his recent breakup with his girlfriend, his present, his past. He encounters people from different cultures and classes who will provide insight on his journey-which takes him to Brussels, to the Nigeria of his youth, and into the most unrecognizable facets of his own soul.

"[A] prismatic debut . . . beautiful, subtle, [and] original."-The New Yorker

"A psychological hand grenade."-The Atlantic

"Magnificent . . . a remarkably resonant feat of prose."-The Seattle Times

"A precise and poetic meditation on love, race, identity, friendship, memory, [and] dislocation."-The Economist

Auszüge aus dem Buch

9781400068098 excerpt

Cole: OPEN CITY

PART 1

Death is a perfection of the eye

ONE

And so 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. The path that drops down from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and crosses Morningside Park is only fifteen minutes from Central Park. In the other direction, going west, it is some ten minutes to Sakura Park, and walking northward from there brings you toward Harlem, along the Hudson, though traffic makes the river on the other side of the trees inaudible. These walks, a counterpoint to my busy days at the hospital, 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. In this way, at the beginning of the final year of my psychiatry fellowship, New York City worked itself into my life at walking pace.

Not long before this aimless wandering began, I had fallen into the habit of watching bird migrations from my apartment, and I wonder now if the two are connected. On the days when I was home early enough from the hospital, I used to look out the window like someone taking auspices, hoping to see the miracle of natural immigration. Each time I caught sight of geese swooping in formation across the sky, I wondered how our life below might look from their perspective, and imagined that, were they ever to indulge in such speculation, the high-rises might seem to them like firs massed in a grove. Often, as I searched the sky, all I saw was rain, or the faint contrail of an airplane bisecting the window, and I doubted in some part of myself whether these birds, with their dark wings and throats, their pale bodies and tireless little hearts, really did exist. So amazed was I by them that I couldn't trust my memory when they weren't there.

Pigeons flew by from time to time, as did sparrows, wrens, orioles, tanagers, and swifts, though it was almost impossible to identify the birds from the tiny, solitary, and mostly colorless specks I saw fizzing across the sky. While I waited for the rare squadrons of geese, I would sometimes listen to the radio. I generally avoided American stations, which had too many commercials for my taste - Beethoven followed by ski jackets, Wagner after artisanal cheese - instead tuning to Internet stations from Canada, Germany, or the Netherlands. And though I often couldn't understand the announcers, my comprehension of their languages being poor, the programming always met my evening mood with great exactness. Much of the music was familiar, as I had by this point been an avid listener to classical radio for more than fourteen years, but some of it was new. There were also rare moments of astonishment, like the first time I heard, on a station broadcasting from Hamburg, a bewitching piece for orchestra and alto solo by Shchedrin (or perhaps it was Ysaÿe) which, to this day, I have been unable to identify.

I liked the murmur of the announcers, the sounds of those voices speaking calmly from thousands of miles away. I turned the computer's speakers low and looked outside, nestled in the comfort provided by those voices, and it wasn't at all difficult to draw the comparison between myself, in my sparse apartment, and the radio host in his or her booth, during what must have been the middle of the night somewhere in Europe. Those disembodied voices remain connected in my mind, even now, with the apparition of migrating geese. Not that I actually saw the migrations more than three or four times in all: most days all I saw was the colors of the sky at dusk, its powder blues, dirty blushes, and russets, all of which gradually gave way to deep shadow. When it became dark, I would pick up a book and read by the light of an old desk lamp I had rescued from one of the dumpster