I’d heard much of Nigerian-American author Teju Cole’s Open City almost exactly ten years ago when it was published. As a student in New York, who went for long walks every other day on Morningside, Manhattan, and Amsterdam avenues I could immediately relate to Julius – the protagonist of Nigerian and Belgian extraction in this seemingly plotless story – once I dug into the library copy from the university outside Delhi where I work in the liberal arts and humanities department, seven years after the book dropped into the world.
Open City has remained with me, and not only because of the words in it. The Faber & Faber British edition had a bird embossed on the cover; the title burnt in yellow against the thick black of the cover and jacket. The hefty pages demanded a hard hold of the book. As if harmonising with the contents of the story, its pages wore a look between brown and beige, giving off an oldish book smell. As an object, it seemed a visual and tactile…