Open City

ISBN-13: 9780812980097 / Angielski / Miękka / 2012 / 272 str.

Teju Cole

Opis

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

Recenzje

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. The New Republic
 
A psychological hand grenade. The Atlantic

A meditative and startlingly clear-eyed first novel. Newsweek

Magnificent . . . a remarkably resonant feat of prose. Seattle Times

A precise and poetic meditation on love, race, identity, friendship, memory, [and] dislocation. The Economist
 
[Teju] Cole writes beautifully; his protagonist is unique; and his novel, utterly thrilling. The Globe and Mail
 
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. Salon

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
 
An indelible debut novel . . . [It] 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? New York
 
Beautiful, subtle, and finally, original . . . 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. The New Yorker
 
In Cole s intelligent, finely observed portrait, Julius drifts through cities on three continents, repeatedly drawn into conversation with solitary souls like him: people struggling with the emotional rift of having multiple homelands but no home. GQ
 
[A] complicated portrait of a narrator whose silences speak as loudly as his words all articulated in an effortlessly elegant prose . . . Teju Cole has achieved, in this book, a rare balance. He captures life s urgent banality, and he captures, too, the ways in which the greater subjects . . . glimmer darkly in the interstices. The New York Review of Books
 
Open City is not a loud novel, nor a thriller, nor a nail-biter. What it is is a gorgeous, crystalline, and cumulative investigation of memory, identity, and erasure. It gathers its power inexorably, page by page, and ultimately reveals itself as nothing less than a searing tour de force. Teju Cole might just be a W. G. Sebald for the twenty-first century. Anthony Doerr, Pulitzer Prize winning author of All the Light We Cannot See

O autorze

Teju Cole was born in the United States in 1975 and raised in Nigeria. He is the author of Every Day Is for the Thief and Open City,which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the New York City Book Award, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His photography has been exhibited in India and the United States. He is Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College